NIALL FERGUSON: Why Kamala Harris poses a larger risk to democracy – each at residence and overseas – than Donald Trump

He’s back. Donald Trump, that is. Only weeks ago he was falling behind in the polls and being left for dust in the fundraising stakes. Now the race is too close to call. No wonder the Democrats are scaremongering. 

‘Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,’ wrote the commentator Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic magazine last week. ‘He and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win,’ she argued.

Kamala Harris herself is now worried enough to echo this argument. When a radio interviewer recently described Trump’s political vision as fascism, she replied: ‘Yes, we can say that.’

She did it again on CNN last Wednesday, when she was asked if she believed her opponent met the definition of a fascist. ‘Yes, I do,’ she quickly shot back. ‘Yes, I do.’

And the American liberal press got right behind her with one outlet arguing ‘Trump is obsessed with having a dictator-level military’, while another alleged Trump had been heard to say: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’.

The strange thing is that, according to research by the Center for Working-Class Politics – hardly a conservative organisation – this line of argument is almost entirely ineffective in changing the minds of registered voters.

And that should not surprise us because it failed when Hillary Clinton’s campaign tried the same thing against Trump eight years ago. ‘America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny’ ran a headline in New York Magazine back then. Clinton was at it again, calling Trump ‘blatantly fascist’ on CNN on Thursday.

Does Trump look or sound like Hitler? To answer that question, I refer readers to his hilarious performance at an annual fund-raising dinner for Catholic charities in New York on October 18.

Tradition dictates that presidential candidates in attendance tell jokes at their own expense. Harris broke with convention and appeared in an unfunny video rather than in person. Trump jokingly declined to send himself up, saying: ‘I guess I just don’t see the point of taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a hell of a long time.’ He proceeded to skewer the Democrats.

Or how about the good humour with which Trump dished out fries in a memorable election stunt at a drive-in McDonald’s. The Führer didn’t do stand-up. Nor did Mussolini serve fast food.

In the past three weeks, Trump has pulled ahead of Harris in all seven of the swing states in this election – Georgia and North Carolina in the south, Arizona and Nevada in the west, and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the midwest – and not because Americans thirst for fascism. (Just to remind you, fascism was all about state control of the economy and militarisation in preparation for war, pretty much the opposite of Trump’s philosophy.)

It’s because they trust Trump over Harris on the issues they care about most: the economy, which suffered a nasty bout of inflation while Harris was serving as Joe Biden’s vice president, and illegal immigration, which has spiralled out of control on Biden and Harris’s watch.

I admit it: I was wrong about Donald Trump. I thought on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, that his political career was at an end. The reality is that, regardless of how recklessly he behaved that day, the Democrats have failed to persuade around half of likely voters that his conduct revealed him to be a Hitler-like threat to democracy.

If he is re-elected, his critics warn of a threat to the constitutional order. But they also foresee a threat to what they call the liberal international order. In a second term, it is often argued, Trump would pull the plug on support for Ukraine. 

His desire to be a dictator at home, they say, is complemented by his desire to align America with dictators abroad – in particular, Russian President Vladimir Putin. If Trump’s critics are right, then democracy is doomed – not only in America but also in the wider world, beginning in Eastern Europe.

I half-seriously said at the beginning of this year that the U.S. election was a choice between Republic and Empire. By that I meant that if you believe Trump poses a threat to the republic, you must vote for the Democratic candidate. But if you believe the Democratic candidate poses a threat to American primacy in the world, then you must vote for Trump.

I accept that, as Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, said this week, President Trump has no great respect for the Constitution or the law. But the question is not how far Trump has authoritarian proclivities: it is how far he would be able to indulge them if re-elected to a second term.

Assuming he won on November 5, how would Trump – as some of his critics fear – change the Constitution to give himself a third term. That is something unambiguously ruled out by the 22nd Amendment. It’s not even something a president is empowered to propose.

And what if, as in his first term, Trump sought to change U.S. immigration policy by executive order, but the courts struck it down. What could he do if the Supreme Court upheld the initial court ruling?

And, finally, if Trump ordered the U.S. military to take action against domestic political opponents where is the evidence that the senior echelons of the Army would be willing to carry out such an order?

The rule of law is deeply embedded in the U.S., not just because it is, by design, a republic of laws, but also because it remains a country run to a striking extent by people with law degrees. In addition, it has an officer class deeply committed to the separation of the military from politics. 

Trump himself may have little respect for lawyers and generals. Who can really blame him after nearly four years of ‘lawfare’ – politically motivated litigation designed to discredit if not to jail him – and multiple political attacks by generals he fired? But there is no aspect of the Republican platform that envisions any change to the Constitution.

Indeed, the irony is that it is not Trump but the more radical Democrats who openly discuss constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the U.S. political system to their own advantage. To give one example of many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at, respectively, Harvard and Yale, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to ‘reclaim’ the ‘broken’ Constitution but to ‘radically alter the basic rules of the game’.

‘It’s difficult,’ they wrote, ‘to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written by largely affluent men more than two centuries ago. It would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution.’

‘In democracy … majority rule always must matter most,’ they declared. It should not have to ‘surviv[e] vetoes from powerful minorities that invoke the constitutional past to obstruct a new future.’

‘One way to get to this more democratic world,’ they wrote, ‘is to pack the Union with new states’, in order to ‘break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.’

To anyone who reveres the U.S. constitution – the most successful political document in history – all of this is blood-curdling. It is nothing less than a call for revolution: for replacement of the American republic with a unicameral tyranny of the majority.

And who is to say that, if elected president with majorities in the Senate and the House, Harris would not be open to such revolutionary schemes?

The real threats to American democracy take other forms, too – not least the ever-rising federal debt burden. It’s worth recalling that history has few examples of great powers that stayed great for long after the costs of debt service exceeded the costs of defence, as they have this year for the first time.

That, more than Trump’s Russophilia, is the real problem for America’s allies. On its current trajectory – which I assume would continue under a Harris presidency – U.S. defence spending simply does not suffice simultaneously to defend Ukraine, Israel and also Taiwan [from China] if all three come under attack.

And that is quite likely. The foreign policy of the Biden-Harris administration likely condemns Ukraine to be defeated; Israel to risk a war against Iran, with only limited U.S. support; and Taiwan to fear a blockade by China at some point in the next four years. The signature term of this administration has been ‘de-escalation’. On closer inspection, this term is the functional opposite of ‘deterrence’.

We cannot know for sure if Trump is right when he says that the attacks on Ukraine and Israel would not have occurred if he had been re-elected in 2020. All we know is that no such acts of aggression by authoritarian powers occurred during his first term.

So Republic or Empire? I would say the latter looks more vulnerable to four more years of Democratic government than the former does to four more years of Trump.

This election remains excruciatingly close. It could turn on the decisions of ten or twenty thousand voters in a few dozen counties. But of this you can be sure: Not one of those swing voters is voting for Kamala Harris because they’ve been persuaded that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

The fact that Harris has resorted to playing the Hitler card is a sign of desperation, so I’ll go ahead and say it. She’s losing this election.

Sir Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.