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Donald Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff has said the former president is a fascist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and would seek to govern as a dictator, according to new reports.
John Kelly, a retired four-star general who was Trump’s homeland security chief and later ran his White House, made the comments in interviews published by The New York Times late on Tuesday.
In a rare intervention just two weeks ahead of the US presidential election, Kelly told the newspaper the former president fit the dictionary definition of “fascism”.
“It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” Kelly said.
“Certainly the former president 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.”
The comments from Kelly, who served as chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, came as the election entered its final stretch ahead of the November 5 vote.
Trump is now level in many polls with his rival, Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who has repeatedly argued that the Republican is “unfit” to serve another four years as president.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign, told the New York Times Kelly’s stories of his time in the White House — which include accounts of Trump disparaging military veterans and war dead — had been “debunked” and Kelly had “beclowned himself”.
Kelly, who also said Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government”, has criticised the former president publicly before. But he said in the new interviews that he wanted to speak out now after the ex-president’s comments that he would use the US military to go after the “enemy within”.
Kelly said Trump had several times praised Hitler in his presence. “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too’,” Kelly told The New York Times.
Citing two anonymous sources, The Atlantic magazine separately reported on Tuesday that Trump had in a private conversation at the White House once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had . . . People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
The reports came as President Joe Biden said on Tuesday during a campaign stop in New Hampshire that Trump was a threat to democracy who should be “locked up”.
“This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant, every single one; thinks he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able if need be, if it was the case, to actually eliminate — physically eliminate, shoot, kill — someone who is, he believes would be a threat to him,” Biden said. “I mean, so, I know this sounds bizarre . . . We gotta lock him up.”
Several seconds later, Biden added, “politically lock him up”.
Biden and Harris have abstained from weighing in on Trump’s legal troubles, including his felony conviction earlier this year, to avoid giving him an opportunity to repeat his claims that he is the victim of persecution by the government.
Harris did not immediately respond to Biden’s comments on Tuesday.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, on Tuesday said Biden had “admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square”.
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