Former Trump official agrees: Trump ‘does not operate by the rule of law’

A former senior Homeland Security official in the Trump administration said Wednesday that the former president has “authoritarian tendencies” and “does not operate by the rule of law” — echoing a denunciation by his former chief of staff and other senior figures.

Elizabeth Neumann, who served as deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security and assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy, said she agreed with former Marine Gen. John Kelly’s explosive assessment that Donald Trump is not fit for the office.

“Does he have authoritarian tendencies? Yes,” Neumann, who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, said in a brief interview with POLITICO. “Is he kind of leaning towards that ultra-nationalism component? Absolutely. That is kind of his brand, right? He’s made nationalism the new definition of the Republican Party.”

Her remarks, coupled with Kelly’s bombshell warnings that Trump meets the “definition of a fascist” and would govern as a dictator if reelected, injected new urgency into the closing argument Harris and her allies have been pushing in recent days: that Trump is not just “unfit” to serve a second term but is increasingly power hungry and “unhinged.”

The vice president called it “deeply troubling” and “incredibly dangerous” that Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, “who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable,” Harris said in brief remarks she delivered outside her residence Wednesday. “And in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions.”

Harris and her team were already building her campaign’s closing argument around the dangers of a second Trump term, returning to a theme that had been a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s now-defunct campaign as a response to the former president’s ramp-up of his own authoritarian messaging.

Trump, long prone to violent and inflammatory rhetoric, has become more extreme in his third presidential bid. In the primary, the former president echoed Hitler in casting his political opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In recent weeks, he has framed those who oppose him as the “enemy from within” and threatened to weaponize both the military and judicial system against them. He has claimed he did “nothing wrong” on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol with the intent of overturning the election. He spoke this week of wielding “extreme power” as president. And he has described migrants in increasingly dehumanizing and racist terms, an escalation in language that experts in political rhetoric, fascism and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.

Harris has seized on Trump’s remarks in recent days to argue the former president is a threat to democracy. Last week, Harris’ campaign launched a TV ad across battleground states that argues Trump would “ignore all checks that rein in a president’s power.” Her campaign on Monday sent Harris through the Rust Belt states with Republican former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney for a series of events in which the two women warned about the dangers of a second Trump term.

Harris’ campaign launched an ad Wednesday in English and Spanish highlighting Trump’s recent remark in a town hall with Latino voters that the Jan. 6 riot was a “day of love.” She’s also expected to again lean into Trump’s Jan. 6 comments during a Wednesday night CNN town hall with undecided voters. And Harris is planning to deliver a speech Tuesday at the Ellipse, the site where Trump rallied his supporters before the Capitol riot, in which she intends to lay out what she says are the risks of granting him a second term, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to discuss campaign plans.

Harris and her top aides believe that Trump’s rhetoric — and the increasing number of Republicans, former Trump administration officials and military leaders speaking out against him — could hurt him with independents and disaffected Republican voters.

Nearly two thirds of respondents to a national NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released earlier this month said preserving democracy would be a “deciding factor” when selecting a candidate, including 72 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans.

The campaign’s internal research has also shown that painting Trump as unstable in contrast to the vice president as a steady leader who would strengthen U.S. security is among the most effective messages for targeting the fence-sitting voters she is trying to capture in her final days on the trail, said a Harris campaign official, granted anonymity to describe strategy.

Harris and her campaign pounced on Kelly’s revelations highlighting the latest dark assessment of Trump’s mindset — this time by his longest-serving chief of staff, who had a front-row seat to the then-president’s thinking as his top aide for nearly 17 months — to upbraid him in the closing days of an extremely close presidential contest.

Harris, in her remarks from her residence before departing for battleground Pennsylvania, bluntly asked Americans to consider whether they want to give Trump “unchecked power.” Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, told reporters on Wednesday that Trump does not “respect the rule of law” and that his rhetoric had crossed a “red line.”

Meanwhile, Republican former national security officials, on a press call organized by the Harris campaign, urged Americans to listen to those who knew Trump best over his four years in office.

“People that know him best are most opposed to him, his presidency,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson.

Kelly has not endorsed in the presidential race. But retired Army Reserve Col. Kevin Carroll, a former senior counselor to Kelly in the Trump White House who joined Anderson on the call, said Kelly would “rather chew broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”

Trump blasted Kelly in a social media post Wednesday evening, saying his former aide “made up a story” out of “hatred” and casting him as a “bad” general “whose advice in the White House I no longer sought.”

Trump’s campaign fired back at Harris and Kelly in a pair of statements that accused both of peddling “falsehoods” about the former president and slammed the vice president for using “dangerous rhetoric” that is “directly to blame” for the two assassination attempts against the Republican nominee.

Harris “continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics” and is “wholly unfit for office,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. And Kelly, he said, has “totally beclowned himself.”

Democratic strategists and some of the party’s prominent elected officials believed even before Kelly’s revelations that it was essential for Harris to reframe the presidential race as both a question of Trump’s fitness to serve and a referendum on his years of lies and distortions.

“You’re seeing her respond because his rhetoric and his disinformation is getting more and more harmful,” Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, said when asked about Harris’ messaging at a campaign event last week in New Hampshire. “At the end of the day, I hope people will step back and say an angry, dishonest president is something that we absolutely cannot have in this country.”

Republicans question that tactic. Voters, they say, have long been aware of Trump’s affinity for authoritarian figures, and Kelly has raised similar concerns about the former president before, potentially lessening the “shock value.” Plus, some of Democrats’ most prominent Senate candidates are muddling the top of the ticket’s general anti-Trump messaging by running ads promoting their ties to the former president on policy.

For Kelly to “level such personal criticism” against Trump is “not something that falls lightly,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee. “Yet it is not something that is new.”

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican who is supporting Trump after initially backing one of his primary rivals, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, downplayed the potential effect of Trump’s Hitler comparisons even as he disavowed them.

“We’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump, from Donald Trump, 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,” Sununu said Wednesday on CNN. “Those last swing voters are just going to kind of push towards ‘what’s going to get a little ease on my family?’”