"Increasingly unhinged and unstable": Harris blasts Trump for alleged Hitler praise
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 23. Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris called former President Trump "increasingly unhinged and unstable" on Wednesday, warning voters two weeks before the election of his desire for "unchecked power."
The big picture: Harris' comments come after the New York Times published a report a day earlier with John Kelly's allegation that the former president on multiple occasions praised Adolf Hitler and said the Nazi leader "did some good things."
- Kelly, Trump's longest-serving White House chief of staff, also raised concerns that Trump would rule like a dictator if elected and said he believes the GOP presidential nominee meets the definition of a fascist.
What she's saying: "This is a window into who Donald Trump really is from the people who know him best," Harris said at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., in response to Kelly's comments.
- She called it "deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler."
- She also addressed Trump's recent comments labeling political opponents as the "enemy from within."
- "Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his mind as the enemy within, like judges, like journalists, like nonpartisan election officials," she said.
For the record: Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an emailed statement Tuesday evening that Kelly "has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated."
Zoom in: Harris also addressed allegations from a separate interview published Tuesday in The Atlantic that reported Trump allegedly said he wanted loyal generals like the ones Hitler had.
- "He does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution," Harris said. "He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States."
Kelly told the NYT that in his first days as Trump's chief of staff in 2017, he had to explain to the then-president that government officials had taken an oath to the Constitution and that weighed more than personal loyalty.
- Kelly said it was "a big surprise for him" that "those of us who were former generals and certainly people still on active duty — that the commitment, the loyalty was to the Constitution, without question, without second thought."
The bottom line: "We know what Donald Trump wants," the vice president said. "He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be what do the American people want."
Go deeper: John Kelly tells NYT Trump said: "Hitler did some good things"
