The Democratic nominee for vice president, Kamala Harris, has charged that former president Donald Trump is “unhinged and unstable” and pursuing “unchecked power.”
She made the charges against the former president during her brief speech on Wednesday, citing statements made by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, in interviews with The Atlantic and The New York Times.
Kelly was “dumb” and “unable to do a good job, it was too much for him, and I couldn’t stand the guy, so I fired him like a ‘dog,’” according to Trump’s earlier explanation in a Truth Social post.
Kelly, who was Trump’s employee from 2017 to 2019, told left-leaning publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic that Trump is a fascist and said that Adolf Hitler “did some good things” while he was in office.
Harris asserted, “John Kelly’s remarks make it abundantly evident that Donald Trump is somebody who, I quote, ‘certainly falls within the general definition of fascists,’ who promised to be a dictator on day one and to use the military as his own militia to carry out his vendettas. People such as John Kelly would not be there to act as checkpoints against Donald Trump’s tendencies and his actions in a second term, and he is becoming more and more unstable and deranged.”
However, Mark Esper, a strong opponent of the former Republican president who was the 27th Secretary of Defense and the 23rd Secretary of the Army, acknowledged to CNN that he had never heard Trump use any pro-Hitler or pro-fascist language. Esper was another official who was fired by Trump during his administration.
Harris said, “Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the US Constitution. He desires a military that will serve him faithfully. He desires a military that will serve him personally and follow his instructions, even if he instructs them to disobey the law or violate the US Constitution.”
Trump “would invoke Adolf Hitler, a man responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and many hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Harris added, calling it “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous.”
