Fox & Friends insists former president Donald Trump is not a fascist.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade was so incensed by erstwhile Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s assertion that the former president “meets the general definition” of the word that he read out its meaning on air Thursday and denied it applied to Trump.
He then said the Republican nominee for president has merely “spent the last four years trying to find out who is trying to undermine him.”
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Kilmeade also rejected the idea that Trump—who has called for jailing critics, executing drug dealers, and shutting down news broadcasters he doesn’t like, in addition to attacking migrants as “animals”—is “far right.”
“Look at the definition of fascism,” said Kilmeade on Fox News’ flagship morning chat show Thursday. “Is Donald Trump a far right authoritarian? Does anyone think that Donald Trump is far right? He pushed the far right over to the middle.”
First of all, yes. Trump’s former chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general Kelly, alleges Trump is a “fascist” who praised Adolf Hitler—in the scheme of what is and what is not far right, Hitler sort of takes the cake. Another former Trump administration official, former deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, agrees.
Second, it’s certainly true that Trump has a history of linking up with far right figures, like dining with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, but there’s not much evidence he has pushed his fringe supporters to the middle.
Only last month, he invited far right Islamophobe and 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer to travel with him to a 9/11 memorial mere days after Loomer tweeted a bigoted broadside about Vice President Kamala Harris’ South Asian heritage.
That was a step so far gone that even hardline MAGA Republicans like U.S. Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-FL) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) revolted, leading Trump and his campaign to quietly back away from his far right pal.
Trump himself hasn’t toned down, either, in recent weeks calling for broadcaster CBS to be shut down because he objected to how a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited and suggesting Haitian migrants—who he falsely accused of eating people’s pets in Ohio—are “savage criminal aliens.” (Scholars tend to agree that migrant exclusionary nationalist rhetoric is a hallmark staple of far right fascism).
Kilmeade then noted that Trump’s well-known slogan, Make America Great Again, originated with the 1980 campaign of the late former president Ronald Reagan, who used “Let’s Make America Great Again,” using it to question whether Trump has an “ultra-nationalist political ideology.”
“I don’t think Ronald Reagan was considered a fascist,” he said. That is very much true, as is the fact that Reagan was never called a fascist by any one of his four chiefs of staff. Reagan also never called immigrants “savage aliens” or “animals”—he dedicated part of his final speech in office to celebrating immigration.
“It’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond,” Reagan said.
“Is the movement characterized by a dictatorial leader?” asked Kilmeade, continuing to reading of the definition of fascist. “I thought he spent the last four years trying to find out who was trying to undermine him.”
He then accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey—who Trump fired in 2017—of trying to undermine the Republican nominee for president. Trying to weed out political opponents, of course, is definitely not at all authoritarian.
