"Don’t Vote For the Fascist"

Kamala Harris has begun to make her closing argument against Donald Trump. I’m not convinced she’s taking the right approach

Various protests gathered in and around Manhattan and eventually marched through the streets, wending their way to Trump Tower, on November 9, 2016, in response to Donald Trump’s victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

For years now, I’ve been a somewhat peripheral participant in the Fascism Debate about Donald Trump. Though I’ve only occasionally come down very strongly on the positive side of the dispute—usually in a half-serious headline written to draw attention and inspire clicks—I have expressed considerable sympathy for John Ganz’s position affirming the proposition, and signaled my own somewhat more ambivalent stance by deploying the semi-ironic term “fasc-ish” to describe the 45th president (and would-be 47th).

In these final weeks before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris and her campaign’s surrogates are not showing any hesitation in invoking the F-word. As the New York Times noted a week ago, the term, which had until recently been “avoided by top members of the Democratic Party,” is “suddenly everywhere.” Thanks to interviews four-star general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly has given to the Times’ Michael S. Schmidt and The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the claim that Trump aspires to rule as a fascist dictator has now entered into wide circulation during the final two weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.

I’m not convinced that’s a good thing—even if the evaluation of Trump and his MAGA movement is largely correct.