Donald Trump is closing crazy. Does it matter? For the historical record, let it be noted that, with less than two weeks until his third and likely final Presidential election, Trump in recent days has talked about Arnold Palmer’s penis size and how Joe Biden actually likes him better than Kamala Harris. He has made digressions on the history of paper clips and why teleprompters are stupid and possibly dangerous. He has suggested that Harris is drinking or on drugs, that she “choked like a dog” on “The View,” and that she is a “shit Vice-President.” He has complained that wind power is killing birds and stopping people from watching television. Of his own much-critiqued ramblings, he has insisted, “People say it’s total genius.”
When, on Tuesday, his longest-serving White House chief of staff John Kelly went public with the statement that Trump meets the definition of a “fascist” and confirmed reports that Trump had openly admired Adolf Hitler, Trump complained that Kelly, a retired four-star general, was a tough guy who had “morphed into weakness.” “He became JELLO with time,” Trump fumed in a social-media post—which hardly seems like the thing that might make one most angry about being called out for praising Hitler. (He did add that Kelly is a “LOWLIFE” who had “made up a story.”)
If all this had happened over the summer, perhaps Harris would have responded by making fun of Trump’s weird stylings and palpable insecurity about his manhood. She might have laughed that famous laugh of hers and gone on to remind voters that the ex-President was out there slinging recycled insults from the same old playbook that he used back in 2016 and 2020, too. But with the candidates, according to polls, still locked in a dead heat so close to the election, the Vice-President is in a different mode altogether—“the house is burning down and somebody better sound the alarm” mode. On Wednesday, Harris warned, in impromptu comments outside her official residence, that Trump is “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and quoted Kelly’s words about Trump being a fascist. That night, in a CNN town hall that would have been their second debate had Trump not ducked out of it, Harris described Kelly’s words as a “911 call” to the country. When the host, Anderson Cooper, asked directly if she considered Trump a fascist, Harris replied, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”
For years, something held Harris and Biden back from embracing the F-word for Trump. Perhaps they considered it too inflammatory or merely ineffective at making the case against Trump. Or maybe they feared exactly the moment we are now in, in which credible, on-the-record reports about Trump’s admiration for Hitler and his plans to dismantle key democratic institutions have apparently done little to dissuade Republicans from voting for him. Now that the fascist label is out there, a significant part of the G.O.P. has predictably gone ahead and normalized it, as they have with all Trump’s previous outrages. Watch the clip of New Hampshire’s formerly moderate Republican governor, Chris Sununu, smirking on CNN as he rationalized Trump’s admiration for Hitler and Nazi generals as something “baked in” with the voters. If Trump wins, we will surely see many repetitions of that scene: when he starts carrying out the policies that led to Kelly and others to call him a “fascist,” his defenders will shrug and say, Well, it’s old news.
Only one candidate on this year’s ballot is known to have directly compared Trump to the leader of Nazi Germany: his own running mate, J. D. Vance, who once wrote in a private text message that Trump was either “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” That was back in 2016, when Vance was just another Trump-hating Yale Law School graduate. Back when American politicians worried about using the word “fascist” recklessly and Hillary Clinton seemed like a shoo-in anyway—because who could possibly imagine that Trump would actually win.
For years, we’ve all heard backbiting about Clinton’s closing message in that 2016 campaign—that she was too focussed on Trump’s threats to democracy and not enough on his threats to steal away working-class voters in the Midwest. The other day, with Harris’s democracy-is-on-fire closing message on my mind, I went back and watched a Clinton rally from this same week in 2016. One key difference was that it was in Ohio, which back then was still considered competitive for Democrats and now is a bastion of Trump’s MAGA nation. Aside from that, the script could have been from one of Harris’s speeches today, with lines about stopping the epidemic of gun violence, complaints about Trump’s plan to give tax cuts to wealthy Americans, and a pledge to be a President for everyone, “whether you vote for me or against me.” The news in Clinton’s speech in Cleveland that day was a warning, about Trump and what made him different from any previous Presidential nominee: his refusal to confirm that he would accept any outcome other than winning. “Make no mistake,” she said, “by doing that he is threatening our democracy.” If he lost, she said, Trump would threaten the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in U.S. history. She was right of course, four years too early.
Watching Clinton, it was hard not to ask the question: What would you have wanted to know that October that you did not? The answer is not about Trump, unfortunately, but about America. I remember my own line that I used in the jittery weeks before that election, when the received wisdom was that she would win because a Trump victory was unthinkable, even as the data suggested that it was possible. I would say, Well, if she wins, it will be the biggest upset in the history of modern polling, at least since Harry Truman. I wasn’t technically wrong. But, in hindsight, I could not have been more off.
Not everyone failed to see what was coming. Read Robert Kagan’s piece from May 18, 2016, in the Washington Post—a piece that broke the F-word barrier with regards to Trump long before Kelly and Harris. It tells you that, eight years ago, we already knew everything we needed to know about Trump well before he was elected President. My friend Douglas Rediker, who advises companies on geopolitical risk, recently turned up the note he wrote to clients shortly before that election. He argued that a “close election skews toward Trump,” and that, by all indicators, the race was close. His theory was that “if Trump’s abject lack of qualifications for the presidency is not disqualifying by election day, there could be enough anger and frustration that a lot of people vote for him and against her/status quo.” He warned, “A Trump victory cannot be ruled out at all.” As with Clinton’s speech, he could repurpose the note and send it out today.
Then again, I’m not sure that foreknowledge of this American tragedy would have been anything other than depressing. Would you really have wanted to believe, in the lovely fall days in the twilight of Barack Obama’s Presidency, that nearly half of the country would spend the next eight years falling deeper and deeper under the sway of a professional huckster who would profess his love for the world’s worst tyrants and dictators, botch the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic, and cheer on a violent mob of his followers as they sacked the U.S. Capitol in a vain effort to overturn the results of an election he lost? It was bad enough living through it.
The urgency today is altogether different, now that Trump’s threat to attack the institutions of American democracy proved not rhetorical but real. In Clinton’s speech, there was one line in particular that stuck with me: “We know in our country the difference between leadership and dictatorship, right?” How striking that, even back then, she felt compelled to pose this as a question. At least, in the fall of 2016, the answer still seemed self-evident. The audience cheered as if to say, Yes, absolutely, how could it be otherwise? But here we are, eight years later, and the tragedy is that no one could possibly be so sure. ♦
