Nearly half of the Cabinet-level officials who served in Donald Trump’s first term have refused to endorse his reelection. Many have spoken out against him, at deep personal and political risk. Their descriptions all revolve around familiar themes: Trump is unfit to lead a democratic government; he either cannot understand or simply refuses to accept distinctions between his personal interests and those of the state; he admires dictators and wishes to emulate their methods.
Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and almost every president in history, has had zero high-level officials from her Cabinet describe her as fascistic or otherwise fundamentally unfit for high office. The number of Trump officials who have made this claim about him is extraordinary.
Conservatives have largely ignored or dismissed these warnings. The recent flare-up over revelations by former chief of staff John Kelly that Trump repeatedly expressed a desire for his generals to display the level of fealty that Trump believed was given by Adolf Hitler’s forced them to acknowledge the issue. The responses they’ve offered have been revealing.
The reactions I’m collecting here are representative of the conservative movement’s impulse to dismiss or deflect from the overwhelming evidence that Trump is considered dangerous by many officials he appointed to office.
Conservative talk-radio personality Erick Erickson waves away warnings about Trump on the grounds that some liberals have made claims about other figures that Erickson disagrees with:
Of course, what makes the new claims about Trump distinctive is that they come from Republicans who have not made similar statements about Reagan or systemic racism. But this is a useful way to categorize criticism of Trump as coming from the opposing side and therefore not requiring substantive rebuttal.
Daniel McCarthy, a columnist at The Spectator, argues that fascism is not refusing to accept the legitimacy of election defeat or defining political opposition as inherently criminal but is defined by “war” (which must refer to aiding Ukraine, as the United States is not at war), affirmative action, and the activities of left-wing demonstrators in 2020 that were not connected to Harris or the Democratic Party:
This is close to endorsing Trump’s view that “fascism” is a major force in American politics, and it definitionally excludes any activities by Trump or his allies, such as a violent attempt to seize power, and includes all positions he opposes.
Ben Shapiro responds by recounting at length a recent mugging attempt against a friend of his, from which he concludes, “This is why people increasingly don’t give a shit about the media’s latest horror story about Trump Saying Bad Things™.”
While Shapiro’s anecdote is lengthier than the justifications supplied by other conservatives, it has resemblance to an actual argument about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. He appears to be suggesting that the continued existence of street crime (which not only existed under Trump but was at far higher levels) is a thing conservatives can focus on to avoid the mental work of formulating any justification for Trump’s unfitness for office.
David Harsanyi, writing in the Washington Examiner, argues that Kelly is unreliable and likely to lie because he believes Trump is authoritarian:
“Anyway, journalistically, it doesn’t really matter if Kelly said he was an anonymous source in Goldberg’s story. No other person has verified his claims. Kelly detests Trump. He said the man is an authoritarian sociopath. He may well rationalize lying as a means of saving the country, which is standard behavior.”
James Antle, another Examiner columnist, similarly argues that the existence of Republicans who consider Trump a dangerous authoritarian is evidence that they are plotting to steal the election. “A bipartisan establishment full-court press, with Harris enlisting everyone from Kelly to Liz Cheney, against Trump appears to confirm what many of his supporters already believe. Why, they ask, wouldn’t the deep state rig the election against the second coming of Hitler?”
The reasoning here is that anybody who believes Trump is authoritarian has a sufficient motive to lie about him to prevent his election, which makes any testimony they offer about his authoritarianism inherently suspect. This syllogism does offer a useful way to discard massive amounts of damning testimony against Trump. It does, however, elide the rather obvious question of why Kelly and so many other Trump veterans arrived at their belief that he is a dangerous authoritarian in the first place.
John David Danielson, writing in the Federalist, calls Kelly’s comments a “smear” without offering a substantive defense. He argues that the existence of articles reporting on the concerns of former Trump officials like Kelly is itself evidence for the danger posed by liberals. “This is why, after the first assassination attempt back in July, many of us called for a cooling of the rhetoric coming from the left,” he writes. (Note that Danielson does not advocate cooling of rhetoric on all sides. The right is very much welcome to indulge in the most heated kind of rhetoric.) This is in keeping a favored mantra by his Federalist colleague Mollie Hemingway that any discussion of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies is “assassination prep.”
Danielson predicts that Harris will encourage “resistance” in “coded terms” disguised as endorsements of peaceful protest:
She’s going to call for resistance. “Patriotic resistance,” she might call it, but it will be coded as a call for street violence or worse. After all, you don’t just accept a Hitler-like, fascist regime. You fight it any way you can.
This argument lays the groundwork for defining criticism of Trump, even the kind that explicitly calls for peaceful action, as violent and dangerous. This runs close to Trump’s own view, which was a source of his conflicts with Kelly and other staff, centering on Trump’s desire to use military force against a wide array of domestic opposition.
Most conservatives do not directly advocate these iron-fisted measures. Instead, they deflect. But when they deflect, they are revealing in advance that they have no intention of objecting seriously to any authoritarian moves Trump might make. They have decided he is on their team. The justifications they offer in reaction to undeniable evidence of his authoritarian ambitions is a preview of how they will act if and when the real thing occurs.
