Top Republicans on Friday condemned Vice President Kamala Harris for calling Donald Trump a “fascist” — even though Trump has recently used the same word to describe Harris.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) claimed in a joint statement that using the F-word against Trump could inspire another assassination attempt on the former president.
“Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day,” Johnson and McConnell said.
In their statement, Johnson and McConnell chose to ignore Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, such as his frequent statements that Harris is destroying the country, that his political opponents are an internal enemy to the United States, and that recent immigrants have “bad genes” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Just last week, Trump even called Harris a fascist. And he has used the word repeatedly to describe his political opponents in general.
“Kamala destroyed our border. She destroyed our economy,” Trump said last week at an Oct. 18 rally in Detroit, Michigan, before going on to claim Harris helped create the “defund the police” movement.
“Anybody that wants to defund the police even for one day we don’t want, we don’t want them. They’re not worthy of being the president of the United States,” Trump said. “If you have that ideology — and she does, she’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, anything you want.”
Two days earlier, Trump called his political opponents “the enemy from within” during a Fox News interview.
“They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick,” he said.
Trump also referred to his opponents as fascists at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Oct. 15.
“We will put our country first. We will put communists, Marxists and fascists last and they will always stay last,” he said.
This week Harris said “yes” when she was asked if she agreed with Trump’s former chief of staff that Trump meets the dictionary definition of a fascist.
“It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” John Kelly, a former Marine general who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff longer than anyone else, told The New York Times this week.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Kelly said.
Another retired general, Mark Milley, who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
Harris pointed to Trump suggesting the “termination of the Constitution” in 2022 and his description of political opponents as internal enemies.
“We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power,” she said this week.
After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden, he incited a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers certified the election result. Dozens of police were injured and more than 1,500 people have been charged with crimes for the attack.
But Republicans have claimed certain Democratic criticism of Trump could incite violence after a gunman grazed Trump’s ear in an assassination attempt in July. Speaker Johnson suggested, without evidence, that Biden’s description of Trump as a “threat to democracy” led to the attack; the shooter was immediately killed and investigators have not discerned a political motive.
Johnson and McConnell on Friday claimed a note left by a second would-be assassin, who was caught lurking with an assault rifle on Trump’s golf course, suggested he had been inspired by Democratic rhetoric.
“The man who was caught waiting in ambush in Florida left others with a chilling call to arms: ‘It is up to you now to finish the job,’” they wrote. “Vice President Harris may want the American people to entrust her with the sacred duty of executive authority. But first, she must abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric that endangers both American lives and institutions.”
