President Biden thinks his predecessor, former President Trump, is a fascist, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday.
Jean-Pierre was asked during a press briefing if Biden believes Trump is a fascist, an issue that came up after Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said he met the definition of one.
“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre said.
“The former president has said he’s going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that. We cannot. And we cannot ignore or forget what happened on Jan. 6, 2021,” Jean-Pierre added, referring to the attack on the Capitol to try to stop the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Jean-Pierre told reporters Biden was aware of Kelly’s comments and that he was not surprised by them.
Kelly, a retired four-star general, served as Trump’s chief of staff for roughly 16 months and has been quoted previously in stories about Trump disparaging military veterans. The New York Times on Tuesday published an interview in which Kelly said Trump met the definition of a fascist and recalled the former president expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly told the Times.
Biden himself has not explicitly referred to Trump as a fascist. The closest he has come was at an August 2022 fundraiser in which he described the former president’s philosophy as “semi-fascism.”
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden told Democratic donors in Maryland. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”
Vice President Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, earlier Wednesday spoke about Kelly’s remarks to warn of the dangers of electing Trump. She quoted him calling Trump a fascist but did not use the descriptor herself. Earlier this month, she agreed with radio host Charlamagne tha God when he said the term applied to Trump.
The Trump campaign has dismissed Kelly’s comments as “debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff and currently suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”