Mark Penn, who served as an adviser to the Clintons from 1995 to 2008 and now runs the Harris Poll, agreed that the “politics of demonization” from Democrats toward President-elect Trump on the campaign trail did not work.
“I think that they went way over the top here — Hitler, fascist, picking up on these things — and I think the voters just tune those out eventually because they’re way over the top,” Penn said when asked about Democratic strategy on Fox News on Friday.
“I think they wasted a lot of the campaign time doing that because, you know, fundamentally campaigns need to be about issues, not insults, not identity,” Penn later added.
Penn’s remarks come as some political figures have used “fascist” to describe Trump or amplified past comments made by the president-elect related to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
On the campaign trail, Harris has avoided using the word “fascist” directly to describe Trump. But when asked at a CNN town hall if she thinks Trump is a fascist, Harris replied: “Yes I do.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were quick to come to Trump’s defense after Harris’s indirect comment, issuing a joint statement condemning the vice president.
The former president’s ex-White House chief of staff John Kelly said Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist” in an interview in The New York Times.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, in October, declined to call former President Trump a “fascist” but referred to him as an “authoritarian” instead.
“I don’t like using those words, but clearly he has a strong, strong tendency to authoritarianism and to undermining American democracy,” Sanders said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” when asked whether he thinks Trump is a fascist.
Reporting from The Atlantic earlier this year cited comments alleging that Trump once praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The comments came from an interview with retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff under the Trump administration. Kelly claimed that Trump lauded Hitler’s generals for their loyalty.
Trump has also used the term fascist to describe Harris as he doubled down on his insults against Harris and ratcheted up the intensity of his own rhetoric against political opponents.
“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona in September.
