Democrats seize on new suggestions of Trump’s extremism in the campaign’s final stretch
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
(CNN) — Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz accused Donald Trump of descending into “madness” on Tuesday, following a report that the former president pined for the loyalty of the “kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate seized on the report in The Atlantic as top party figures warned of dark days ahead if Trump wins the presidency in 13 days given his often-expressed autocratic instincts.
A tense atmosphere around a neck-and-neck election ratcheted up significantly following the article by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg that said Trump had noted in a private conversation while president: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The report was substantiated in the article by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Trump’s alleged fixation with Hitler was also supported by material in several books, including one by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Kelly said Trump fit the definition of a fascist.
During a rally in Wisconsin, Walz capitalized on new suggestions of Trump’s extremism on a day when other senior Democratic figures raised what they see as the dire specter of an unchained Trump second term as they try to rally support for Harris.
“Don’t be the frog in the boiling water and think this is okay,” the Minnesota governor, who served in the Army National Guard, said, referring to the revelations in The Atlantic. “As a 24-year veteran of our military, that makes me sick as hell, and it should make you sick.”
“Folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had. Think about it,” he added.
Walz noted the recent ruling by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that granted presidents substantial immunity for official acts committed in office as he tried to ignite public concern about the nature of a second term for an ex-president who has already tried to overturn the result of a democratic election.
Trump’s campaign denied the exchange about Trump and Hitler reported in The Atlantic. “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this,” campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said. And responding to Kelly’s comments to The Times, campaign communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement that the retired Marine general had “totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff.”
But even as the furor grew over the Atlantic report, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, played into Democratic warnings that they’d take the country down a dark road.
After musing about turning the military or the National Guard on “enemies from within” in recent interviews (even specifying he was referring to top Democrats) and warning that TV networks like CBS should lose their licenses to broadcast, Trump launched a searing attack on Harris during a rally in North Carolina.
“Does she drink? Is she on drugs? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I have no idea,” he said. Earlier in the day he called her “lazy” – a racist trope often used against Black Americans.
Trump also said he’d ask Congress to pass a law that says anyone who burns the American flag should spend a year in prison. “We’re going to ask Congress to – they say it’s unconstitutional, I disagree – to give a one-year prison sentence for anybody burning the American flag.”
Vance, meanwhile, said that a future Trump administration might consider deporting DACA recipients – children who were brought to the United States illegally but who have built lives here – as part of its hardline immigration policies. “When you’ve got 25 million illegal aliens in this country, you’ve got to deport people or you don’t have a border anymore. It’s just that simple,” the Ohio senator said in Arizona.
Democrats highlight Trump’s extremism
With the race still deadlocked and Harris potentially needing a perfect run through blue wall swing states to win, leading Democrats on Tuesday conjured what they see as the extreme possibilities of Trump’s possible return to the Oval Office. The strategy looked a lot like a bid to put a frisson of fear through the party base to drive up turnout.
Yet there is a potential flaw to playing the fear card. The history of Trump’s riotous presidency is no secret, even if memories may have begun to fade. As he exploits voter anxiety over the high cost of living and immigration, attempts to remind the electorate of what his White House years were like have not yet been decisive. And while Trump’s wildness might alienate some critical moderate voters, his strongman act has delivered him to the threshold of the White House again. That’s partly because, for many like-minded Americans, his antics come across as strength.
President Joe Biden delivered a dire warning about what may lie ahead while in New Hampshire on Tuesday.
“If Trump wins, this nation changes,” said Biden, who hoped he’d ended the MAGA movement’s grip on power when he dispatched Trump in 2020. “There’s only two things we can do: guarantee that he doesn’t, or if he does, make sure we have (the) strongest Democratic majority we can get,” he added.
Former President Barack Obama, in between lacerating Trump with savage mockery, also suggested there are existential stakes for American values and democratic rights in November’s election. During a campaign stop in Wisconsin, Obama warned Trump would dismantle the Affordable Care Act, crush basic US values, and replicate his chaotic negligence of the Covid-19 pandemic if he makes it back to the Oval Office. And the 44th president reinforced Democratic warnings about Trump’s age and cognition — turning his successor’s former strategy against Biden on him. “We don’t need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails,” Obama warned.
Harris: ‘A very, very serious decision’
The vice president, meanwhile, pressed home her closing argument that Trump represents a fundamental danger to America’s character in an interview with NBC, while vowing to combat the high grocery and housing prices on which her rival has seized to lay out his own nightmare vision of a nation in crisis.
“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country, and it includes whether we are a country that values a president who respects their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States,” she said in the interview.
Harris, who will appear in a CNN town hall event on Wednesday evening, warned: “The choice before the American people is the choice to choose to turn the page on the division and the hate and to bring our country together.”
Harris and Trump courts Hispanics
Harris earlier unveiled a new program to court crucial Latino voters – promising to improve access to good jobs, professional training and housing – as she vies for a regular Democratic constituency into which Trump has made inroads.
But at a roundtable with Latino business executives in Miami, Trump, as he often does, didn’t stick to the ostensible theme of the event, digressing into falsehoods and vitriol. His blasting of Harris as “lazy” was a characteristic case of the ex-president branding an opponent with the transgression with which he’s been accused since he didn’t go out of his way to hold the event — it was at his Doral golf club. And Trump has cancelled a string of interviews in recent days. His comparatively light schedule has raised questions about the 78-year-old’s capacity to stand up to the rigors of the frantic final days of a presidential election campaign.
The former president also indulged in his unique version of fear mongering that he typically uses to fire up his base. He warned that if Harris wins on November 5, there may never be another election again. “People don’t know who the hell Harris is, but now they are finding out that she’s a radical left lunatic,” Trump said. “We can’t take a chance on losing this election because if we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore.”
Trump’s words evoked the inflammatory language that he used ahead of the riot of his supporters on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol that was an attempt to halt the certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory. And if there’s one candidate in this race that has shown disrespect for democratic elections, it’s him.
Tuesday’s increasingly dire invocations of the future underscored the deep divides in American politics that make the 2024 election an almost existential proposition for both sides.
US elections were once seen as a regular exercise in salving the country’s political wounds — even for a limited period. There’s no way that’s happening this year.
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