Vice President Kamala Harris called former President Donald Trump a “fascist” at a CNN town hall Wednesday in Pennsylvania — echoing the Republican’s one-time chief of staff’s criticism as she makes a more vocal pitch to voters that he is unfit for office.
John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, came forward this week to warn that his former boss meets “the general definition of a fascist.” And he said that in private conversations, Trump admired dictators and said he wished he had military generals as loyal as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s.
Harris said Kelly’s comments, coming just two weeks before the election, are “a 911 call to the American people.”
“We must take very seriously those folks who knew him best,” she continued, referring to the numerous former Trump advisers who have broken with him and warned the public that the former president should not be trusted with power again.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked Harris.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she replied.
Later, she used the word herself to refer to Trump for the first time in public, saying voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
“I believe that Donald Trump is dangerous,” she continued. “As the president of the United States, the commander in chief, he’s saying to his generals, in essence, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals? Come on!”
Harris has more forcefully been arguing in recent days that Trump is unfit for office. On Wednesday, after Kelly’s remarks became public she gave remarks to emphasis them and criticize Trump.
Harris noted she has the support of Republicans concerned about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, such as former Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been campaigning for her this week. And Harris vowed that, unlike Trump, she would be a “president for all Americans.”
Trump posted to X and Truth Social moments after the townhall ended, arguing that Harris “sees that she is losing,” so she “is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind.”
Harris did not call Trump “Hitler,” but rather said the American people “deserve to have a president who encourages healthy debate, works across the aisle, [is] not afraid of good ideas, wherever they come from, but also maintains certain standards about how we think about the role and the responsibility and certainly not comparing oneself in a clearly admiring way to Hitler” in reference to Trump’s reported comments about Hitler.
In his social media post, Trump did not directly respond to Harris calling him a “fascist.”
After the townhall concluded, Harris spoke directly with one townhall attendee who asked her about abortion — saying to him that she wasn’t trying to convert him to her way of thinking, but that her abortion position wasn’t about disagreeing with anyone’s religious views but instead about keeping the government out of the decision.
With less than two weeks until Election Day, polls show a deadlocked race between Trump and Harris with analysts saying the race is essentially a coin-flip, with each battleground state able to flip either way.
Later in the town hall, Harris opened up about her personal religious faith in a way she rarely does.
“I do pray every day. Sometimes twice a day,” she said, before recounting her childhood church in Oakland, California. “I was raised to believe in a loving God. To believe that your faith is a verb. You live your faith and that the way that one should do that is your work and your life’s work is to think about ways you can serve that is uplifting other people.”
Meanwhile, halfway across the country in Traverse City, Michigan, Trump used a 90-minute speech to continue personal insults, calling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “a sick guy,” referring to Harris as “a low IQ individual” and adding, “This woman is crazy.”
Trump also repeatedly criticized Detroit, the biggest city in the crucial swing state of Michigan, saying that “it’s been decimated by stupid politicians.”
“For 40 years, I’ve been hearing about Detroit’s coming back. Never came back,” he said later.
Trump’s speech, often meandering, hit many of his usual talking points, demonizing migrants as coming from prisons and insane asylums, highlighting cases of crimes allegedly committed by migrants, and spending much of his speech discussing the southern border.
“I will rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious, blood thirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell out of the country,” Trump said about migrants.
During a portion of his remarks discussing Hurricane Helene’s flood damage, he referred to the disaster as “a water hurricane,” a comment that the Harris campaign quickly highlighted on social media.
Trump also called Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to the stage to address his supporters. Trump has frequently touted their support, arguing that it shows his supporters come from left-leaning backgrounds too.
