Lowry: No, Trump is not a fascist

Kamala Harris has officially ended the "joy" phase of her campaign, and has instead entered the "Trump is a fascist" stage.

Asked at a CNN townhall whether she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, Harris said, "Yes, I do."

The F-word is one of the Left's favorite swear words, and applying it to Trump must be emotionally satisfying, whether it makes sense on the merits or politically.

Until now, Harris has tended to make a case against Trump as a standard Republican who caters to the needs of the wealthy. Now, she's portraying him as an American Mussolini.

The occasion for Harris' new attack is former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly telling The New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist, and his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley maintaining, according to Bob Woodward, that Trump is "fascist to the core."

These are serious men who once held positions of serious responsibility, but that doesn't mean that their ideological taxonomy should be accepted.

As I wrote in my book, "The Case for Nationalism," 20th century fascists hated parliamentary democracy. They believed in an all-consuming state and had contempt for bourgeois life. Fundamentally, fascism celebrated violence in a nihilistic rejection of rationality and elevation of military struggle.

As for Hitler, he believed in an existential fight between the species, a conflict that the German race would wage in a war of annihilation against inferior peoples.

Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election, but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.

Obviously, Trump isn't deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.

Rather than pursuing the classic fascist objective of territorial aggrandizement through conquest, he inveighs against his party's own military hawks.

In his first term, he appointed constitutionalist judges, reduced the power of the federal government, extolled free enterprise and proved a profound friend of the Jewish state.

Instead of pursuing a politics of racial purity, he is now trying to build a more multiracial political coalition.

The indictment against Trump as a budding fascist often relies on distortions. He said in an interview that he wouldn't be a dictator, except for Day One – a joke referring to executive actions he'd undertake the first day. This has become Trump supposedly pledging to become a dictator beginning on Day One.

He has said the National Guard or military could be deployed to quell election-related unrest in the streets if he wins. This has become Trump threatening to use troops to go after his political enemies, as if he's talking about the 101st Airborne arresting Democratic senators.

Fascism is not an indigenous American phenomenon, whereas Trump, to use Milley's phrase, is American to his core. For better or worse, he is a Jacksonian figure, with the same populist appeal, emphasis on strength, combativeness, opposition to the elite, insistence on loyalty and willfulness.

As an Andrew Jackson biographer noted, Old Hickory believed "the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside." He reflexively resorted to "the language of combat," and engendered a fierce resistance to his rule among those who dubbed him King Andrew.

Placing Trump within this tradition doesn't make for a fevered closing argument, though.

It's not clear that Harris' message will appeal to its intended audience of fence-sitting Republicans disaffected with Trump. By this point, Republicans are very used to their standard-bearers being called "fascists"; George W. Bush, a Bible-believing Christian who was committed to spreading democracy around the world and saved countless lives in Africa, was called a fascist, too.

In the campaign's final days, whatever joy is produced by the Harris campaign will have to be derived from the revival and elevation of this tiresome charge.

Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry.