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Fascism is a dirty word in US politics, so when former President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, says Trump fits the definition of “fascist,” it’s news.

It places Trump’s name in the same ideological space as the most infamous fascists, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Trump has rejected the idea and called Kelly a “degenerate.”

Asked at a CNN town hall in the battleground state of Pennsylvania if she agrees with Kelly that Trump is a fascist, the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, did not hesitate.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” she said.

Kelly pointed The New York Times to a definition of fascism: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.”

“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Kelly said.

Kelly added that Trump is in the “far-right area,” and “admires people who are dictators,” which in Kelly’s view places Trump in “the general definition of fascist.”

Using the military to quiet dissent

There are topical arguments to back Kelly up. Trump’s suggestion he could use the military against an “enemy from within,” which he said includes Democrats like Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff from California, certainly sounds fascist. His Republican defenders argue it’s just hyperbole.

Trump wanted to use the military to disrupt domestic protests when he was in office, something that his top general at the time, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, rejected, according to reporting in 2021. Milley also privately compared Trump’s election denialism to Hitler’s “big lie.”

Even if he doesn’t intend to use the military on Democrats, he has a history of trying to use the military to put down protests in the US, making the threat to quiet dissent.

Sidelining dissent

Trump recently said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” if he wins the election, which seems obvious since Smith has indicted Trump in cases involving election interference and mishandling classified documents.

The election interference case is delayed until after the election, and a different judge dismissed the classified documents case, although Smith has appealed.

Trump has a history of firing officials who question him. He fired James Comey, the FBI director, when he was president. He fired his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, after never forgiving Sessions for appointing a special counsel to investigate potential collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

The resulting report from special counsel Robert Mueller has been referred to as the “Russia hoax” so many times by Trump and his allies that most Americans probably don’t remember that Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice in the report. Mueller identified multiple contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russians in 2016, a time when Russians were actively trying to help Trump’s campaign. Mueller concluded the contacts did not rise to the level of conspiracy.

Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, slow-walked release of Mueller’s report to dilute its impact. Barr would later leave Trump’s administration after the 2020 election after refusing to support Trump’s unsupported election interference conspiracy theories.

Democrats wonder who would be left to temper Trump’s urges if he’s reelected.

Purging the government

If he wins the election, Trump has promised to do more to go to war with what he perceives as a “deep state” of bureaucrats at the Justice Department, the FBI and the Pentagon.

He has also suggested he would use the justice system to prosecute election officials.

All of this points in favor of at least a thematic alignment with some elements of fascism, built around a strong leader and where dissent in the government is dismissed. But there can also be more to fascism, such as complete control of the German economy and society. Trump has not suggested anything like that.

While Harris is just now coming around to labeling Trump a fascist, he’s been calling her Marxist for the entire presidential campaign, referring to her as “Comrade Kamala.” That’s clearly not true since Harris supports private ownership.

Trump has used the term too

In June, Trump said the US was a “fascist state” as he pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden was behind his prosecution in New York for falsifying business records related to hush money payments paid on Trump’s behalf to a porn star in 2016.

I delved into the definition of fascism and how it applied to Trump back in June, when he was using the term.

There are experts who view Trump as fascist. Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University who has written widely on fascism in Europe, had rejected the label for Trump until January 6, 2021, when the historian argued that the image of Trump supporters storming the US Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.”

Trump has also repeatedly used language that can be tied back to Nazis, such as when he said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

‘I don’t care what you call this’

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance in May about Trump’s claim the US is a “fascist state,” Vance would not reject the idea, suggesting at least a tolerance for the term.

“I don’t care what you call this, but this is not the America that I know and love,” Vance, who was not yet Trump’s running mate, said in a tense exchange.

Concepts don’t have timeless essences

Back in June, I also talked to Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University and editor of the book, “Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America,” which includes the writing of Paxton, among many others.

“That model of historical comparison where we look to what happened to Germany in the 1930s and then use it as kind of a navigational device or a map for understanding what’s happened today is quite common,” he said, although there are arguments it is a flawed comparison.

“Concepts don’t have timeless essences that we can just map on to any phenomena, but they change given political context, given power structures in society,” he said.

Today, he said, the term “fascism” is used “to mobilize people in order to get over their divides, to defeat an enemy that’s far greater than their own long-standing disputes.”

Steinmetz-Jenkins argued there is a long history, going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Americans on both sides of the political aisle trying to label their opponents as “fascist,” and there are also examples of American lawmakers threatening their opponents with investigation.

There are arguments in favor of the fascism comparison, but also arguments against it – particularly since there are echoes of Trump’s rise in populist and White nationalist movements closer to home in American history.

I went back to Steinmetz-Jenkins to ask if the comparisons have changed in the intervening months, and he noted that the fascism debate had simmered over the summer, with Harris replacing Biden – and he noted that for most of Harris’ campaign, a message of the politics of joy had replaced fear of fascism.

Now, as Democrats get anxious about losing to Trump, the threat of fascism has returned to the fore.

“What is needed is a plan to inspire people to vote for the Democrats, not fear tactics that might lead to a sense of fatalism that the world is being engulfed by fascism,” he said.

Enough American voters have heard the term “fascism” in the same breath as Trump that if he wins in November, it will be clear that they are at least willing to tolerate it or don’t believe he will carry through with what he says.