This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 23 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
With less than two weeks until the most consequential election of our lifetimes, Donald Trump’s campaign is battling more accusations from former top officials from his first administration.
In multiple interviews this week, Trump’s ex-chief of staff John Kelly has alleged the former president would govern like a dictator if allowed, has no understanding of the Constitution or of the rule of law, and has made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler, including telling Kelly he wished he had “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Try to think of some former Trump Cabinet members and close White House aides who have endorsed his run for president. There aren’t a lot.
The response from Vice President Kamala Harris was swift. During a CNN town hall on Wednesday, the vice president called Trump, “increasingly unhinged and unstable.”
“In a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions,” Harris warned.
If you’re curious how conservatives are handling this, the answer is: badly.
On Wednesday, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade tried to excuse Trump’s alleged comments. “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever,” Kilmeade said.
Yes, who could expect Trump to know that “German generals who are Nazis or whatever” might be the third rail of American politics?
Now, the Trump campaign says Kelly is lying and accuses him of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Kelly is a deeply conservative retired Marine general who served both as Trump’s first secretary of homeland security and his longest-serving chief of staff. So saying he has “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is only true insofar as he worked for Trump and he now suggests Trump is deranged.
Nevertheless, die-hard Trump supporters are discounting Kelly as just one disgruntled ex-employee. Like billionaire businessman Bill Ackman, who dismissed the report, telling CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin it was just “one person stating a series of things.”
But, as Sorkin pointed out, many people who have worked with the former president have also come out with similar stories about him.
And that is a hugely important point. Try to think of some former Trump Cabinet members and close White House aides who have endorsed his run for president this year. There aren’t a lot.
Now, how many can you think of who have called Trump a fascist? A threat to democracy? Dangerously ignorant? And say that he shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again? There are a lot of those.
Back in June, Zeteo columnist John Harwood detailed a dozen former Trump officials who have sounded the alarm against their former boss. Their numbers have just kept growing since then. It’s a who’s who of conservatives, civil servants and career soldiers all saying Trump is a menace.
There’s retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense. He told Bob Woodward in a new book that he was so worried Trump would order a nuclear strike that he slept in gym clothes in case of an emergency overnight call. In that same book, retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Trump, called the former president “fascist to the core.” And another former defense secretary, Mark Esper, said Trump is a security threat who wanted U.S. troops to shoot American protesters.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, has called him a menace and just the other day said that Trump is too dumb to be a fascist. Rex Tillerson, who briefly served as Trump’s secretary of state, said Trump was totally ignorant of American history and world events. Olivia Troye, who served as homeland security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence before resigning in disgust, said Trump didn’t want to give aid to disaster victims in California because he didn’t think they had voted for him.
That barely scratches the surface of how many former Trump officials tell horror stories about Trump’s mental and moral capacities as president. And then, of course, there’s Pence, who was nearly killed by a mob of Trump’s supporters during the insurrection. Pence announced in March that he couldn’t endorse his former boss, saying Trump was “walking away” from the Constitution. That is just completely unprecedented in American politics. That barely scratches the surface of how many former Trump officials tell horror stories about his mental and moral capacities as president. So, Kelly now joins this incredibly large group of people who served Trump at the highest levels, in the most intimate and closest settings, and have come out, often reluctantly — and with some personal risk — to say the man is unfit and a danger and a threat in the most profound way. We have never seen anything like it. They know who Trump is, but the thing is, so do a lot of people who are working to get Trump elected again. That includes his current co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita. On Wednesday, CNN reported that in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, LaCivita shared comments on social media calling Jan. 6 an “insurrection” that was fueled by Trump’s baseless election lies. Some of those posts have since been deleted from LaCivita’s feed. Even Trump’s current running mate, Sen. JD Vance, privately called the former president “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He also mused about whether Trump was “America’s Hitler.” Then there’s New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. For years, the lifelong Republican politician was deeply critical of Trump, calling him a “loser,” “crazy” and “not a real Republican.” Now, Sununu is a Trump campaign surrogate. When he was asked, point blank, whether Kelly’s allegations that Trump praised Hitler would cause him to reconsider his support for the former president, the governor said he was standing behind Trump. “We’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump from Donald Trump,” Sununu told CNN. “It’s kind of par for the course. It’s really unfortunately, with a guy like that, it’s kind of baked into the vote, at this point.” Trump’s ignorance, his authoritarian tendencies, even his praise for Hitler and fascism, they’re all just baked into the vote now — that’s a Trump supporter saying that. Meanwhile, there’s a growing list of people who worked for Trump, who witnessed his worst impulses in office and who tried to check them with limited success, like on Jan. 6. They watched as Trump attempted to overthrow the election and strike a blow to American democracy. Trump’s ignorance, his authoritarian tendencies, even his praise for Hitler and fascism, they’re all just baked into the vote now. Right now, the people who were around Trump last time are warning us that he could do it again. Except this time, they won’t be there to try to stop it. But we the people still do get to decide whether he’ll have a second whack at it. And I continue to hold a fierce hope that a majority of Americans want no such thing.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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