What happened
John Kelly became the latest retired four-star general who served in Donald Trump’s first administration to warn of the dangers of a second Trump term, in articles and audio recordings published Tuesday in The New York Times and The Atlantic. Kelly, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary and then White House chief of staff, said in his view, “Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law,” the Times paraphrased. Trump told Latino supporters in Florida Tuesday that “as president, you have tremendous … you have extreme power.”
Who said what
Trump “is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly told the Times. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly also said Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'” and affirmed that he heard Trump call fallen or captured U.S. soldiers “suckers and losers” on multiple occasions.
Kelly told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that Trump said he wanted his military leaders to be like “Hitler’s generals.” Kelly’s comments, two weeks before the election, echoed former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley’s recent remarks to Bob Woodward that Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country” and “a fascist to the core.” Retired Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s defense secretary, emailed Woodward to agree with Milley, Woodward told The Bulwark last week.
Asked why his former vice president and other Cabinet officials do not support his reelection, Trump told a Univision town hall last week that “about 97% of the people in the administration support me.” He told Fox News on Sunday that Milley and Mattis were “not great generals,” adding, “I don’t respect them as soldiers. I never did.”
What next?
Trump’s “disinhibition” is both his “great strength” and “terrible flaw,” Ezra Klein argued in The New York Times. In his first term there was a “constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy” around him, but this time his team is working hard to “remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises.”