Donald Trump defended himself Monday from being a Nazi, even claiming to be “the opposite of a Nazi” after several days of controversy surrounding the potentially authoritarian leanings of the Republican candidate for the White House.
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One week before a particularly uncertain election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the latter is under fire for attacks for old statements he allegedly made and after a rally in New York marked by racist remarks.
“They called me everything from a mad scientist trying to take over the world to a very, very stupid person,” Trump said at a rally in the key state of Georgia.
“I am not a Nazi, I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he insisted.
Last week, John Kelly, his former chief of staff at the White House, estimated that his ex-boss met the definition of a fascist, an accusation echoed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
According to John Kelly, the ex-president also said that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had “done good things.”
On Sunday, it was his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York that created controversy, after the statements of a comedian everywhere denounced as racist — Puerto Rico, an American territory in the Caribbean, is “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” said Tony Hinchcliffe.
“This joke does not reflect the opinion of the president” Trump, said one of his spokespersons.
In contrast, Kamala Harris immediately exploited the controversy, promising in a video to “chart a new and happy path” for Puerto Rico.
“The best for the economy”
The vice-president and her running mate Tim Walz will travel to all of the seven key, most contested states this week.
The 60-year-old candidate began Monday in Michigan, with a trip focused on the manufacturing sector in this Great Lakes state, cradle of the automobile industry.
At a rally Monday evening in Atlanta, Donald Trump hopes to reconquer Georgia, a state in the “Bible Belt” that he lost by some 11,000 votes in 2020.
Cesar Viera, 18, who lives north of Atlanta, tells AFP that he will vote for the first time in his life for Donald Trump.
“He is simply the best for our economy,” he said, an American flag around his shoulders. He watched the rally at Madison Square Garden the day before and didn’t see anything racist or hurtful about it: “I’m also Latino and I’m voting Trump.”
A stone’s throw from the ex-president’s rally, two large signs call to vote for Kamala Harris.
Tucker Spires, a 20-year-old student and future engineer, has already slipped his ballot into the ballot box for the Democrat. “Trump is simply a despicable person,” he says, sipping an energy drink.
More than 44 million Americans, like him, have already voted early for this election which promises to be the closest in the modern history of the United States.
President Joe Biden himself voted Monday in the state of Delaware where he has his private residence. The 81-year-old Democrat is largely kept away from the campaign led by his vice-president, who knows that it is in her interest to distance herself from the unpopular leader, marked by the weight of his years.
“Final indictment”
At the national level, polls still give Kamala Harris, who would become the first black woman president of the United States, and Donald Trump, candidate for the White House for the third time, neck and neck.
Illustration of the ambient tensions, two metal electoral boxes, containing hundreds of ballots cast early, were the target of arson Monday in Washington and Oregon, bordering states in the northwest of the country.
Kamala Harris gave an interview Monday to CBS in which she said she was willing to take a cognitive assessment, calling on her 78-year-old rival to “take the same” exam.
“He is more and more unstable and unbalanced,” she assured.
Kamala Harris, who has made the defense of the right to abortion one of her campaign priorities, will probably include this theme in the “final indictment” that she plans to deliver Tuesday against Donald Trump, in a speech near the White House. This is where Donald Trump addressed his supporters on January 6, 2021, before they attacked the Capitol.
