Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D) says former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2024, “lost the plot” when she called President Trump a “fascist.”
Fetterman made his comments during an interview with Fox News’s “Hannity”.
Asked by the show’s host, Sean Hannity, why Democrats are comparing Trump to authoritarian leaders of history, Fetterman said some of his fellow Democrats have gone too far in their rhetoric and criticized Harris.
“I don’t know why, and I have always refused to say that,” Fetterman said. “When Vice President Harris referred to President Trump as a ‘fascist,’ and I knew, absolutely, we lost the plot at that point.”
Fetterman warned that calling Trump a fascist or comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler risked impugning the millions of Americans who voted for him.
“If you call the president or someone like a fascist, you are effectively calling the people who are going to vote for him [the same thing], and then they must be fascist too … or they support fascism and those things. And that is just not true,” Fetterman explained.
Harris called Trump a “fascist” and “dangerous” in late October 2024, as her campaign appeared to be flagging.
Asked by host Anderson Cooper at a CNN town hall whether she thought Trump is a fascist, Harris replied: “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”
“I believe that Donald Trump is dangerous,” she said.
“As the president of the United States, the commander in chief, he’s saying to his generals, in essence, ‘Why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?’” she added, referring to a claim made by former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly.
Fetterman warned Wednesday that extreme rhetoric could lead to violent actions, such as last month’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University.
“That kind of extreme kinds of rhetoric makes it easier for those … extreme kinds of actions, even like what happened to poor Charlie Kirk,” he said.
“We’re forgetting that we need each other here,” he said. “I refuse to be a part of it and comparing people to Hitler and those things.
“If that’s required to win, then I refuse to,” he said.
