It would be hard to think of a starker contrast than that between the two candidates on foreign policy. One refers to America as a “garbage can for the world.” The other says that “the American dream belongs to all of us.” One is calling for a massive increase in tariffs, while the other dismisses them as “a sales tax on the American people.” One declares that Russia should be allowed to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that aren’t meeting spending guidelines on defense, while the other insists that it’s imperative to support NATO and Ukraine.
On the eve of the election day, however, foreign affairs has been subsumed into a larger debate about the future of American democracy. Each side is accusing the other of endangering democracy. Each side is portraying the other as a potential dictator. And each is warning that unless he or she is elected, America will fall into an abyss.
On October 29, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a campaign rally at the Ellipse near the White House, described in the media as her closing argument. She did not talk about foreign policy. There was no mention of North Korea sending thousands of troops to Russia to battle Ukraine. There was no mention of America’s relations with NATO. There was no mention of Israel and the Middle East. There was no mention of China and its attempt to gain suzerainty over East Asia.
Instead, Harris focused entirely on fortifying her case that Donald Trump represents a threat to American democracy and that she, and she alone, can restore the American economy and social compact. She had already agreed on CNN that she believed that he is indeed a fascist—“Yes, I do.” Now she referred to him, among other things, as a “petty tyrant” who is “obsessed with revenge” and “out for unchecked power.” She added, “It is time to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms.” The location of her speech was an implicit rebuke to Trump who held his January 6, 2020 speech at the very same location, exhorting his assembled followers to march on Congress. “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Since then, Trump has himself been fighting to regain the presidency. But does he represent a fascist threat as his detractors assert? Or is the charge overblown?
Coming down on the side of the former charge are not simply Harris and Co., but a bevy of his former advisers, including White House chief of staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Kelly told the Atlantic magazine that Trump admires Hitler and told the New York Times that he meets the definition of a “fascist.” For his part, Milley was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book deeming Trump “fascist to the core.”
Others agree. Writing in the Nation, Sasha Abramsky asked why it took so long for Americans to recognize Trump’s basic instinct: “We all fall prey to normalcy bias, which in this case leads to an assumption that the basic values and political parameters that define American democracy will always hold—that even a man of Trump’s manifest coarseness and brutality will, when push comes to shove, play by the rules. But of course, that’s not true. Just as it wasn’t true in a collapsing Weimar Republic in 1932.”
Trump has provided more than enough fodder for his critics. He has consistently targeted Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and a host of other political adversaries as “the enemy from within” and “more dangerous” than Russia and China. He is also expounding upon his conviction that the American military should be deployed to quash domestic “radical left lunatics.” He has stated that special counsel Jack Smith should not only be fired but also “thrown out of the country.”
Nor is this all. He is already casting doubt on the election results, claiming voter fraud is already taking place in two Pennsylvania counties.
Trump’s former lawyer Ty Cobb has stated that “the founders could not have conceived of the possibility a crippled Trump, a court-determined rapist with dozens of criminal felony convictions, serious pending charges, some involving functional insurrection, and civil fraud liability in the hundreds of millions, could possibly be a serious presidential candidate, much less elected.”
With his usual brio, Trump has hurled the fascist charge back at his political foes, declaring that “I’m the opposite of a fascist.” Of course this could mean that he is a communist, presumably a sobriquet that he would not wish to adopt.
A host of other writers agree that the “fascist” charge obscures more than it reveals. In the Washington Post, the political scientist Ed Merritt noted that the term is sloppy and inadvertently helps buttress the belief among his MAGA base that he is being unfairly targeted. In addition, it antagonizes swing voters. “What we know with confidence,” wrote Merritt, “is that the ex-president is a demagogue par excellence, and in light of the history of demagogues transforming into tyrants, it’s indisputably ill-advised to restore him to the presidency.”
Perhaps the best explication of Trump has come from the scholar Jan-Werner Muller who also disputes that he is a fascist. He describes Trump as an authoritarian but notes that Trump is anything but a warmonger, a staple of fascism in both Italy and Nazi Germany. By contrast, he writes, Trump is “both product and promoter of a consumer capitalism that seeks to demobilize people politically. It’s hard to see that young people today would find the idea of marching around in uniforms the essence of the good life; Trump’s promise to his `real people’ – from the rural folks of the supposed `heartland’ to lily-white suburbs – is precisely that they don’t need to make sacrifices.”
Even as the relevance of “fascist” to Trump is subjected to forensic scrutiny, he is trying to turn the tables. He is seizing upon President Joe Biden’s foolish description of Trump voters as “garbage” which Biden invoked after being asked about a comedian who had depicted Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.
Trump promptly sent out a fundraising message: “FIRST Hillary called you a DEPLORABLE! THEN they called a FASCIST! And moments ago Kamala’s boss Biden called you GARBAGE!” Harris rushed to perform damage control, declaring “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” But as the election heads into its final days, it is becoming more, not less, vitriolic in tone and substance.
