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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Let's talk about the F-word. No, not that F-word. The one that many people don't like to say out loud in the election context, though some people do. Listen to how it came up yesterday in Kamala Harris' interview with radio and tv host Charlamagne.

Kamala Harris: One mind that is about taking us forward and progress and investing in the American people, investing in their ambitions, dealing with their challenges, and the other, Donald Trump is about taking us backward.

Charlamagne: The other is about fascism. Why can't we just say it?

Kamala Harris: Yes, we can say that.

Brian Lehrer: He brought it up, she agreed. As it happens, just a day earlier, Tom Nichols from The Atlantic had a piece called Donald Trump's Fascist Romp. It's a word that not many people actually understand. It can sound like a smear used too casually when we think of what the most famous fascists from history, like Mussolini actually did, but it's a concern that keeps coming up in a word. Let's talk about the F-word, why it matters or not, in the context of this election. With me now is Atlantic magazine staff writer Tom Nichols, who is also the author of books including Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy and The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. He also has The Atlantic print editions November Cover Story, cover story for the month of the election, called The Moment of Truth. It argues that a Trump re-election would gut George Washington's vision of the presidency. Tom, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC today.

Tom Nichols: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Why Trump's fascist romp? What do you mean by the word? You do acknowledge in the article that the word is overused as a denunciation that many have understandably tuned out for that reason.

Tom Nichols: Before I became a writer only a few years ago, I was a professor and I taught political science for 30-something years. I always caution people about being casual about this in conversation. "Oh, you voted for Bush, you're a fascist." It's a word that people threw around too easily. It's the way that people on the right now throw around the word "communist". There are very few real communists left in the world, and people probably shouldn't be throwing around that incendiary word.

When the time finally came, I think where Trump had crossed the line about a year, year and a half ago, where he started to refer to other citizens as vermin and scum, and poisoning the blood of the nation and glorifying the use of military power against the enemy within. These are all pretty classic fascist tropes.

When historians and political scientists talk about fascism, the touchstone is always the 1930s, so there's a mass party with a very well articulated ideology. This is one of the reasons I pushed back for so long, because Donald Trump's just one guy, and he says a lot of kooky things and offensive and terrible things over the course of his time in politics, but a fascist movement takes time to build. I would still argue, and I think we should be grateful that we really don't have a disciplined mass party in the United States.

One of the great things about Donald Trump is that he's lazy. The imagery, the call to action, the reliance on political violence, the identification of other people as subhumans, this is all straight up fascism, and we might as well just call it what it is. I don't think we should wait until he, again, has all the levers of government to see just how effective he can be at implementing any of that.

Brian Lehrer: Here are two clips that you refer to specifically in your article of Trump on Fox on Sunday. Here's the first one.

Donald Trump: We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. The enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries, because if you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily. I got along great with all. I handled them. The thing that's tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff, Adam "Shifty" Schiff. I think this guy's going to be a senator.

Brian Lehrer: Worse than China and Russia. Bigger enemies than China and Russia. Why did that grab your attention?

Tom Nichols: Because it's insane. The idea that you would identify your fellow citizens who disagree with you, people who simply-- Remember, Donald Trump thinks that anyone who criticizes him or won't vote for him is, by definition, a radical left lunatic.

When you're talking about millions of your fellow citizens, including a sitting member of Congress, as more dangerous than two countries who have hundreds of nuclear warheads pointed at American cities, you really are either completely unstable and disordered human being, or you are, really, knowingly making an appeal to scare-- In Trump's case, I think it's both, but you're knowingly making an appeal to scare the people in your own coalition so that every day they walk out of their homes and look around and say, "I am surrounded by enemies, enemies who are more dangerous than Putin's army or the Chinese Navy and its nuclear submarines." That's insane, and it's fascist.

Brian Lehrer: Separately, he didn't exactly say Schiff's name in this sentence, but he used the same reference in general to enemies within being "lunatics". He said this.

Donald Trump: I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. It should be very easily handled, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary, by the military.

Brian Lehrer: How do you understand that? Is there a danger in taking Trump too literally there when sometimes he's just trying to "own the libs," as they say, or stretching it? Is he really saying, "Use the military on Adam Schiff," or is he really saying if people get violent on Election Day- that question was in the context of something on Election Day, if people really get violent on the anti Trump side?

Tom Nichols: Well, we don't have to guess. He already has tried to use the military against protesters to crush dissent. During the George Floyd riots, he said, "Beat the f out of him. Get out there and shoot him." I think I've spent a lot of time studying Trump's relationship with the military. I taught for 25 years at the Naval War College. I taught military officers. I've spent a lot of time thinking about civil military affairs. Trump really thinks the army is his praetorian guard. He thinks it's like this palace police force that should just salute and do whatever he tells it. This is a guy who said to John Kelly, "Why can't my generals be more like Hitler's generals?"

Of course, Trump, being the ignoramus he is, didn't realize that Hitler's generals also tried to kill him. What he meant was, "Why can't my generals just be my muscle? Why can't the army of the United States just be this intimidating force that I can put into the streets at will?"

Brian Lehrer: That's fascism.

Tom Nichols: Absolutely. This is a guy who talked about maybe on Election Day, if he were put back in office in 2021 and on Inauguration Day, using the Insurrection Act to squash dissent. This is not somebody who worries about public order. This is somebody who wants to use violence against people he doesn't like.

Brian Lehrer: You cited that quote that's been making some news from Bob Woodward's new book, of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, who served during Trump, who said that he sees Trump as "fascist to his core." It's not just you as an academic or a journalist or a former professor at the Naval War College, talking about fascism. It's the recent former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.

Tom Nichols: Look, when a four-star general and a pretty level headed guy starts talking about the former president as fascist to the bone, people really need to hear that. They need to listen to that because the United States military has a cherished and honored tradition of political non involvement. For Milley, even to breathe that to somebody like Bob Woodward tells you that the things that we've heard about are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump. I think that there are others who have already spoken up. John Kelly has confirmed some of the stories about Trump in the military. Mark Esper has been the former Secretary of Defense and himself a former military officer.

Brian Lehrer: John Kelly is a general former chief of staff to Donald Trump when Trump was President.

Tom Nichols: Four-star Marine general. In the case of Esper and Kelly, these are guys Trump picked. These aren't California Democrats who are coming out of hiding. These are Trump's own appointees. Esper is certain that guys like he and Milley and others could be prosecuted and even jailed when Trump gets back in because that's who Trump is. I think we need to get our heads around how dangerous Trump really is, and we have to stop waving it away and saying, "Well, that's just how he talks, and he does that for effect." He means this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you use the word "fascist"? When should it apply, or who has a question for our guest? Tom Nichols, Atlantic magazine staff writer, author of the article that came out this week called Trump's Fascist Rant and the COVID story in the November Atlantic that says that if Trump is reelected, it threatens the very core of the presidency as it was established way back from president number one, George Washington. 212433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. Give us a call, or if you're a Trump supporter and you think this is all either wrong or overblown, give us a call too, 212433 WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

It does seem, Tom, like this concern divides along party lines. I don't think you're trying to be partisan, but when you look at concern for democracy as it polls as an issue in this presidential campaign, it's largely on the Democrat side. Republicans aren't citing it that much.

Tom Nichols: Well, there's a couple of dynamics to note here. First of all, at this point, it seems like a clean partisan break, because really, all that's left among identified Republicans are people in the Trump movement.

Brian Lehrer: It's half the voting country.

Tom Nichols: I would say it's more like 40% of the voting country, but it's a lot of people. I'm a former Republican. I was a Republican for 30 odd years from the time I was 19 growing up in Massachusetts. John Kelly is a Republican. Mark Esper is a Republican. I don't know what Mark Milley's party is.

Brian Lehrer: Why in your case? Why? Why were you a Republican for much of your adult life?

Tom Nichols: Of course, I was a New England Republican, which was a different animal in those days. When I was 19 and I joined the party in 1979, Ed Brooke was one of my senators, a moderate Black Republican was one of the senators from Massachusetts. To me, the Republicans were the party of boring, wonky policy guys. I spent a year working in the Senate for the late John Heinz of Pennsylvania, a very hardworking, very moderate Republican who was beloved in Pennsylvania and who probably, in 2024, would have been run out of the party by now.

When you say it breaks along partisan lines, not quite. I don't think anybody's going to accuse Dick Cheney of being a closet Democrat. There are a lot of Republicans who have voiced their opposition to what Donald Trump wants to do, but the party itself has now shaken out to be basically, "Get on board with Trump or get out of the party." I think there are a lot of disaffected Republicans involved here. I think a different coalition is forming which really doesn't neatly align with Democrats or Republicans, but with people who are concerned about democracy and people who support Donald Trump. I think that's where we're headed here.

Brian Lehrer: A listener texts, "Why don't you talk about how callously Trump asked if anyone else was going to faint after two people fainted?" I didn't pull that clip, but that was from one of his rallies the other day. The video has been widely shown on tv. There were two people who had medical emergencies, I guess, fainted during his rally, and during the time that he paused his speech so they could be attended to, they were playing music. He was dancing a little bit. He was passing the time. He had to do something. Fair enough. At one point he asked, "Hey, this is fun. We're dancing to the music. Is anybody else going to faint?" Making a joke out of it.

Another one that we could point out, because I'm going to ask you if you think this goes along with fascism or if it's in a different category, another one that you cited in your article was-- Let's see. Where's this? He amped up his usual rants at his rallies in Colorado and California and added what you called a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should "get the hell knocked out of her," by her mother after she gets back home. Talk about either of those things, which are not saying exactly, "We're going to bring the military after a Democratic senator from California." Are they in the same bucket in some way?

Tom Nichols: I think a lot of Trump's behavior in public is that he's pathologically narcissistic. I'm not a doctor, but I've been alive on this planet for 63 years. I think I know a really messed up, narcissistic human being when I see one. He seems incapable of understanding other people as real human beings. I think the overlap with fascism is that that makes it really easy for him to have no empathy whatsoever, none, for other human beings. To be able to talk about, "She should get the hell knocked out of her," or, "We ought to shoot him and beat the f out of him out there," or, "Deport 23 million people."

Donald Trump is the walking example of main character syndrome. Everybody else is just a bit player around him. Everybody else is just part of a stage that's all about Donald Trump, and you see it. One of my colleagues wrote about his very weird thumbs-up gesture, where he goes to Arlington and he smiles and he gives that thumbs-up, or he meets a child that's been orphaned by violence and he gives that kooky thumbs-up.

The bottom line is that that's his gesture all the time because he can't really process situations. He assumes that an orphan or people in a cemetery or anybody else, they're there to meet him. It's about him. Therefore he gives the thumbs-up and the big smile. It's just weird. The guy is just pathological in so many ways. That narcissism is really dangerous because narcissism is what enables you to suggest horrible, terrible things, because you don't think of other people as human beings. You think of them as just disposable players in your own private drama.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener text, "I would absolutely agree that Trump is a fascist. As a trans person, a Trump re-election could be a matter of life or death for me and the people I love." The listener also writes, "I'm a college student, and I can't call in now because I'm in class," which is hilarious if we think that what college students are doing in class that distracts them is going on TikTok. No, some of them are listening to The Brian Lehrer Show and conversations about fascism while they're in class.

Tom Nichols: Brian, as a former professor, I am required to say, thank you for your question, but get back to paying attention. You're paying for those classes. You can listen to the show later. Go back to taking notes. Look, Trump's behavior has already been a matter of life and death for a lot of people. What happened on January 6th at the Capitol, Trump, he supported an insurrection and people got killed. What happened in Washington on January 6th was one of the worst single days of casualties for American law enforcement since 9/11.

I can tell you, and anybody else can tell you that's written about Donald Trump, Death threats are just a normal part now of being a critic of Donald Trump, of writing about Trump and getting threats. When I was working at the Naval War College, I was practically on a first-name basis with the NCIS because people would send threats. Trump has normalized that. Again, that is part of fascism, to normalize the threat of violence in our daily politics.

I find that particularly heartbreaking because I grew up in an America-- I came of age during Vietnam. I was too young to be drafted. I was born in 1960, but I came of age when people were having pitched arguments about whether their children should be drafted and fight overseas, and people did not treat each other as terribly as we're seeing the MAGA movement do now to anybody they perceive as an enemy. That is very much the core of a kind of fascist approach to politics, that all people who disagree are not only your enemy, but they have to be silenced, they have to be attacked, they have to be bullied into submission.

Brian Lehrer: Alan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Tom Nichols from The Atlantic. Hi, Alan. Alan, are you there?

Alan: [unintelligible 00:20:53] does it matter to academics whether the motivation for fascist activity is something that accords with the schoolbook definition of fascist ideology, or whether it simply is using means that are necessary to some people to protect their financial interests? It seems to me that much of what's going on now between climate denial, underlying obfuscation of basic facts, Trump's readiness to use force where it has not been before, trying to take control of the courts, seems to be motivated by his major donors in the fossil fuel industry to avoid massive tort judgments or settlements along the lines of the tobacco settlements of the late '90s.

If that's the main motivation, are any academics going to say, "Well, this is really not textbook fascism because the motivation is personal finances rather than ideology"?

Brian Lehrer: Alan, thank you. That's a really interesting question, but it also goes to what some people see as historical fascism, even in the case of Mussolini's Italy, where if communism of that era was totalitarianism in defense of socialist economics, that fascism was a response that was totalitarianism in defense of capitalist economics. Enter this wherever you want.

Tom Nichols: That's a little too neat of a division. We don't want to overthink that, but there is a truth to it that a lot of people, a lot of captains of industry, I guess we want to use that expression, support Trump simply because it's going to be better for their bottom line. It doesn't necessarily have to be fossil fuels. It can be a lot of folks who just think they're going to get what they got the last time, which is that Trump is going to slash their taxes and they're going to get richer.

I think the important thing to understand about this, and this is always the problem when elites make deals with fascists, is that they think that no one's ever going to come for them, that they're safe, nothing's ever going to blow back on them. In this case with Trump, they're probably right. They can probably support him and help destroy the country cost free and make a buck out of it.

I want to point out, too, that there are other people, and I think of Elon Musk in particular. Trump has a real appeal to people-- I always think of them as the guys that are getting back at the world for having been stuffed in a locker. There's this grievance and resentment, a kind of a revenge of the nerds anger with people like Musk and Sachs and others who are supporting Trump because they think of him as social revenge.

That's something a guy like Elon Musk has in common with, say, a restaurant owner in Indiana or Alabama or New Hampshire who's going to vote for Trump, to say, "My life's not going to get better or worse. I'm just going to have to keep going to work every day, but I'm going to stick it to the people that I think are looking down on me, the people that are living good lives who shouldn't be living good lives. Why should they--" It's always "they." "Why should they be living good lives? They're not me. They're brown, they're Black, they're foreigners. They're people that didn't work as hard as I did." Don't underestimate how much grievance and a kind of generalized resentment drive a lot of this.

I take Alan's point that there are just wealthy guys who are like, "look, I'm going to support Trump because my taxes just stay low and none of this political stuff. I'm just too powerful and too rich. I live in a gated community and I fly to work in a helicopter. Nothing Trump does to anybody else is really going to touch me." I'm not sure that's going to be true forever, but I think it probably explains a lot.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Tom Nichols from The Atlantic. We'll get to your Atlantic Magazine print edition cover story, which is related, The Moment of Truth, which says the re-election of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington's vision for the presidency, and you say the United States. Very interesting particulars about the history of George Washington in that, and I think it'll relate back, as you do in the article, to why some people are actually attracted, more people than a lot of other Americans might like to believe, are actually attracted to this kind of style of a president. We'll play another clip, this time of a Republican congressman who was here reacting to me citing your article to him as we continue with Tom Nichols in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Atlantic Magazine staff writer, former political science professor at the Naval War College and elsewhere, Tom Nichols, also author of books including The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, and Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy. He had an Atlantic story this week called Donald Trump's Fascist Romp. We're talking about the word "fascist" and when it might actually apply and why it might actually matter if it applies right now.

He's got The Atlantic's print edition November cover story called The Moment of Truth, which argues that a Trump re-election would gut George Washington's vision of the presidency. Why go back to George Washington, Tom?

Tom Nichols: Good question. When our editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, said, "We really ought to use Washington as a touchstone," I said the same thing, I said, "Washington?" because I grew up in New England, where our heroes are John Adams, and, of course, growing up in the home of abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln. We got talking about it, and we thought about how much Washington had defined the presidency for every of the 44 men who came after him, every single one of them, and even Nixon, even Buchanan, even the people we think of as presidents who ended their time in ignominy.

The more that I returned to Washington, the more heartbreaking it became to think about the distance involved and how much we were risking. I went to Mount Vernon and spent time with Washington's writings again, because I think for a lot of Americans, we think of Washington, he's this very stodgy character. He's not alive to us in the way that Lincoln is. We don't have a Daniel Day Lewis portrayal of Washington.

He really did take Article 2 of the Constitution and make it mean something that wasn't dangerous, turned it into something that could help govern the country rather than what Trump-- and now with compliance of the Supreme Court, trying to turn it into some kind of monarchical locus of power within the federal government. At the magazine, we just thought it was important to go back to the fountain, to go back to the original source.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things that you note about George Washington is that he feared that amid constant political warfare, not actual warfare, but political warfare, some citizens would come to "seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual." That's in quotes in the article. Is that a Washington quote, that some people would come to "seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual"?

Tom Nichols: That's from the farewell address, yes. He said that that would lead to one person elevating himself above all others, and another Washington quote, "on the ruins of public liberty," which I think is exactly what's happening now.

Brian Lehrer: We see it in other countries that people bring up when they talk about the authoritarians who trump identifies with, and we could become that kind of country. Some of these people have a lot of popularity in their country. The current leader of Hungary, the current leader of El Salvador, maybe Putin himself. Talk more about that. People are genuinely attracted to this and are genuinely voting for this, though they wouldn't say they're voting to end democracy. They're voting to solve problems as they see it, with a government that's strong enough to do it, be it illegal immigration or whatever it is.

Tom Nichols: Well, I disagreed with you right at the end there, Brian. They claim that what they want is to solve problems. What they really want to do is to, as one Trump voter said some years ago, hurt the people he's supposed to hurt. Trump was president for four years, solved nothing, and left us far worse off. They just don't care. When you have an authoritarian leader like this, the appeal is always, "I'm on your side, I'm going to protect you, and I'm going to hurt those other people and I'm going to make them suffer."

I think this is something people don't understand about Trump's appeal. Every time Trump does something completely bonkers or offensive or terrible, in a way, his base likes that because then they think, "Good. When he's elected, that's going to be owning the libs even harder. It's going to be more liberal tears because he's so offensive." They're not really thinking about what's best for the country. They're thinking about what's going to make them feel vindicated.

The other thing I think you can't really understand about Trumpism in 2024, it's different from what happened in 2016. You had people that were willing to take a chance, and, "Maybe it's just an act," and, "I can't vote for Hillary Clinton," and on and on. These are people now that have doubled and tripled and quadrupled and quintupled down to the point where now, I think some of them are genuinely burning with a humiliation about how often they've had to do this and they just have to defend him to the end now, because they got on this train and it's moving too fast and they can't get off of it, no.

I hope that if and when he's defeated, that a lot of these folks will be able to come down off their cross and just let go. I think this notion that they're looking at him as a problem solver, and he's going to fix things, that may have been true in 2016. I don't think that's true now. The popularity issue, you can generate a reasonably sized authoritarian coalition in almost any democratic nation. Putin has a core of people who think he's great. Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, but that doesn't last.

The one thing we know about authoritarianism is that eventually it peters out, even some of the other less authoritarian moments in the past ten years where we had what I would call and what I think political scientists would call illiberal populism, illiberal democracy, where large groups of people vote for nutty things.

Look at Brexit. Brexit was brought in with all this fanfare, and now every poll in Britain indicates that, something like 60 to 40, the Brits wish they hadn't done it. That's a pretty big margin. I think you'll see that over time. Poland had a populist wannabe authoritarian government. They were turned out. The president of Brazil not only was turned out, he's probably going to go to jail. The lifespan of authoritarians, unless they have a really effective party and a lot of repression around them, tends not to be as long as perhaps they'd like. Even the Soviet Union only made it 70 years.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Tom Nichols from The Atlantic. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. I agree with everything you've been saying, and thank you for the article, but don't forget the people behind Trump who are manipulating him and who have been building this movement for decades now. Leonard Leo, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, all the other people working with them makes this so much more dangerous. What are we going to do about that? I've come to think of Trump as a wind-up toy. These people are all turning the key in his back.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa, thank you. I'm sure the Cato Institute libertarian think tank, which advocates small government, would disagree that they're in the same camp. We could say, we've talked about this on the show, Tom, and I wonder your take, as Lisa brings it up, this predates Trump. Trump won. Trump is popular as he is because he's channeling something that is there in certain portions of the American population.

John McCain didn't have enough of it to beat Obama. Mitt Romney didn't have enough of it to galvanize enough Republican vote to beat Obama. Similarly, maybe it lets George W. Bush off the hook too much. Maybe it lets Ronald Reagan off the hook too much to say they weren't also appealing to some of the same things. Now those impulses that are ever present in America really have a champion.

Tom Nichols: I always push back on this notion that conservatism since Eisenhower has been gathering into this dark storm, I think particularly if you've ever worked with any of these institutions. As you pointed out, Brian, the Cato Institute has a lot of people that are riding against Trump. The notion that this was all predestined I think is wrong. A lot of these people and institutions are appalled by Trump.

Now, your caller identifies Leonard Leo and the federalists. They're obviously very happy because they don't really care who appoints right wing judges as long as somebody does. I think that's a really good point, that Trump, for a lot of these organizations, they don't much care for him. Many of them think he's an idiot, but he'll do the things they want done, and that's good enough for them.

The Heritage Foundation is an interesting case because I knew a lot of those folks back in the '80s and early '90s. The Heritage Foundation of today, they were always on the bleeding edge of the right, but not like this, not with this kind of populist mania. They were on the edge of the right when we were talking about things like arms control. I used to fight with guys at The Heritage Foundation about nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union, kind of stuff. They have had a purge there.

That's something that I think people should understand, is that a lot of these organizations have had these inside purges that basically say, "Get on board or get out," because their donors want Trump, they want this kind of exciting, "Let's wreck the liberals, let's make it all burn down." You have stodgy old institutions and magazines, for example, National Review, which seven years ago had a cover story called Against Trump. You look at the number of people who contributed to it who said, "Well, I guess I better get on board now. He's going to win."

To come back to this issue of fascism, the cowardice of so many people on the right who decided that they either had to bend the knee or go into opposition or risk being out of the mix, as they say in DC, is really astonishing. The thing I wrote about Trump's fascist romp was actually about Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was just on television two days ago, absolutely disgracing himself by defending Trump and trying to wave away the comments of the military, "Well, he didn't really say that. He didn't really mean that. This isn't about that." If you really want to know who empowers fascism, it's the people who make those deals. It's the people who bend those knees.

Brian Lehrer: Well, to that point, I had candidates who won the local congressional seats on the show yesterday, and the Republican incumbent Mike Lawler, who has a reputation as one of the biggest moderates in Congress from the lower Hudson Valley, north of New York City. I asked him if he's supporting Trump, and he said yes. I asked him why he's not as moderate as he is, if he's really as moderate as he is, a Liz Cheney Republican who says, "I disagree with Kamala Harris about lots of things, but Trump is just a bridge too far because he's a threat to democracy." He said he disagrees with the Democrats fundamentally on so many issues. This is a choice election.

Then I cited your article, Trump's Fascist Romp, to him. The thing you were talking about at the beginning of this segment where Trump said on Fox on Sunday that Senator Adam Schiff is a bigger enemy of America than China or Russia. I asked him this. Do you think Adam Schiff is more dangerous than Russia and China? Are you comfortable with your party's nominee campaigning that way? It sounds fascist to that Atlantic writer.

Mike Lawler: Well, respectfully, what we've heard over the last few years is that Republicans are fascists, that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.We've heard that over and over and over from members of the press and from a leading Democrat. We've heard from Democrats saying that he--

Brian Lehrer: Then, unfortunately, Congressman Lawler's mic dropped out. When we got him re-hooked up, he continued the answer, and he went back into the various issues on which he disagrees with Kamala Harris, and that's enough for him to vote for Trump. You heard how he started that answer. He was dismissing or minimizing the concern about Trump being a potential fascist or authoritarian. Is that what you were writing about regarding Virginia Governor Youngkin?

Tom Nichols: Youngkin was worse, but first, let me say, about all of these guys when they start that little cha-cha that they do about, "Yes, well, I've heard Democrats say that." Look, they know. Trump supporters know. in their hearts, they know they're defending something terrible. Now, the rank and file Trump supporters do it because it's a way to scratch that itch of grievance and resentment for Republican candidates.

JD Vance was the one who said it best. He doesn't like Donald Trump, but if he wants to run for Senate in Ohio, he's got to get on board. He, three years ago, just came right out and said it, like, "Okay, I get it, I said all these bad things about Trump, but if I want to represent the people of Ohio, I just have to do this."

I think this constant waving away of the threat is opportunism. I can understand opportunism. What Youngkin did was far worse. He didn't just walk away. He didn't say, "Oh, I can't talk about that, yes, I know Democrats say that." As I said in the article, you have to respect the guys who cross the street against the light to get away from a reporter, to just run away from that question. Youngkin stood there and lied, "Oh, he didn't mean that." He dissembled, let us not say lie, since there was no fact here. I suppose you could say he spun mercilessly to say that Donald Trump didn't mean what Donald Trump meant.

Apparently, just before we came on, I saw a news article that said Trump has now thrown the Pelosi's, the Pelosi family, into an example of the enemy within. It's not just Adam Schiff. Youngkin knows better, Youngkin and Vance. I don't know Mr. Lawler, but I assume Mr. Lawler's an intelligent man. They know better. They know exactly what they're doing, and that's what makes it worse than cowardice. At least with cowardice, you run away and say, "I don't want to talk about this." This is actively serving this kind of an agenda.

Hemingway had a great line about bankruptcy, and democracy fails the same way. How do you go broke gradually and then all at once? It's the same thing with democracy. It starts to chip away and chip away, and then it fails much more rapidly.

Brian Lehrer: Although we have a text message that pushes back against some of the things you've been saying, I think, on exactly that point. This puts it pretty interestingly. Listener writes, "As someone who grew up in communist Hungary and knows a lot about the current illiberal and corrupt Orbán regime, I cannot tell you how much I disagree with your guest's analysis. There is no comparison to Putin or even Orbán in terms of the potential outcomes. Even less so, I've been an American since 2012, and I've lived here for 20 years, and I recoil at this claim that democracy would end, and I hate Trump."

That's a very interesting mix of views from that person with that interesting mix of experiences.

Tom Nichols: Well, let me just say I take the listener's point. I spent the first part of my career, starting in 1983, going back and forth to the Soviet Union. I was in the Soviet Union during the period of-- even before Gorbachev, when it was the coldest days of the Cold War. I can understand why someone would say, "Look, don't compare what we have now to what's going on in Hungary." You'll notice, nowhere have I made that comparison. I hate the whole reductio ad Hitlerum, where everything becomes Hitler and Nazism.

Brian Lehrer: That's how people relate to you using the word "fascism".

Tom Nichols: Some people do. I think to sound the alarm, especially from somebody like me, who warned people for years not to use this word-- because I agreed. I kept saying, "Stop using that word. Everything you don't like isn't fascism. Everything you don't like isn't communism. Everything that is big government spending isn't socialism. Stop using words you don't understand."

On the other hand, when you have a political movement that is based on demonizing other Americans, talking about using the military and the Justice Department and the national police force, the FBI, others, capturing those as political institutions and turning them into a ministry of the interior, you have to sound the alarm that we're not there yet, but this is the danger that this person represents.

I agree completely, we are not living in 1983 Soviet Union or 2024 Hungary, but there was once a time, I was in Hungary 20 years ago, about the time your correspondent came over, when Hungary was a much freer country. I would have been shocked if you had said 20 years later that Hungary was going to be led by someone basically running interference for Putin, carrying out the biggest war since the Nazis in the middle of Europe.

I said at the time, I think we need to reach out to Putin. We need to have a better relationship with Russia, I'm not worried about an attack on Ukraine, the Russians aren't nearly strong enough, all of those things that I thought were a pretty happy world 20 years ago. I guess what I'd say to your correspondent is, today I agree with you. Tomorrow, I hope that we're not both sitting here wondering how we had such an immense failure of imagination.

Brian Lehrer: Let me slip in one more call before we run out of time. Leon in Atlanta. Leon, I apologize in advance. We've got about 30 seconds for you.

Leon: Okay, good deal. I'm a forensic psychologist. Canadian psychologist doctor, Robert Hare, he developed the psychopathy checklist in the early 1970s to evaluate inmates that were due to be released from prison. It's a 20-item checklist, and it assesses things like lack of empathy, impulsivity, and pathological lying. Donald Trump scores 30 or higher on this thing, which indicates clinical psychopathology. You're looking at narcissism, but woven in there is the psychopathy, and that's what people are avoiding, that this guy has a legitimate mental illness. This instrument, which measures that, brings it out.

Brian Lehrer: Leon, thank you very much. Last question. If you agree with that take on Trump's personal psychology, how does it interact with the sociology of what you're calling fascism?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that a lot of people simply hear Trump the way they want to hear him. They do what Glenn Youngkin did unconsciously. Youngkin did it intentionally. I've had this conversation with Trump supporters where they say, "Oh, he didn't say that," or, "He didn't mean that," or, "I understood him." That's a common one you'll get.

You'll be sitting with a friend, you say, "Look at what he just said. This makes no sense. He's ranting. He's talking about sharks and batteries and his uncle." They say, "Listen, I understood him," because Trump now is just a character in their mind. He's not a fully formed person that they can think of as somebody they are voting for. They think of him as this kind of character in a tv show.

I think that's part of the reason Harris has had such difficulty getting traction, because he has turned her into a cartoon. She's a far left, radical, Marxist, Leninist, fascist, lunatic, scum, vermin, not just a 60-year-old woman who's been an attorney general and a senator from a big state and vice president of the United States. Trump is very good at that. Again, that's a very common authoritarian trope and particularly fascist trope, which is to dehumanize other people to the point where you don't think of them as human beings, and where you can think about treating them horribly as something acceptable to you.

You have people that literally can say, "As a Christian, I agree that we should use the military against other citizens." You fall into this kind of Orwellian double-think that really is the door to doing terrible things.

Brian Lehrer: Tom Nichols, Atlantic staff writer who had a short piece this week on some of Trump's recent rallies and tv appearances called Donald Trump's Fascist Romp, and he's got the COVID story, a larger take on some of the same themes in the November Atlantic print edition called The Moment of Truth. Thank you for joining us, Tom.

Tom Nichols: Thank you for having me.

 

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