Trump really could be the next president. So it’s time to call his instincts what they are: fascist | Jonathan Freedland

There is a good chance that in 10 days’ time, Americans will elect the first fascist president of the United States. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds hysterical. Indeed, for exactly those reasons, many of his opponents long held back from using that word about Donald Trump. But the hour is late. Voting is already under way. It’s time to spell out what Trump has said and done, what he threatens to do, what he is.

Put aside the personal grossness, on display again in recent days with his reference to the size of the late Arnold Palmer’s manhood. Put aside the fact that he’s a twice-impeached, four times indicted, convicted felon who has been found liable by a court for rape. Put aside the latest accusations from a former model who says she met Trump through Jeffrey Epstein, and that the former president groped her in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.

Focus instead on the F-word. In recent days, the taboo on that word has been broken, starting with a warning from a former head of the US military, Mark Milley, that the president he once served is a “fascist to the core”. In an interview a few days later, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi told me she shared that view, and Kamala Harris herself has spoken in similar terms. But this week came perhaps the most detailed, and therefore persuasive, deployment of that term.

It came from a man who worked exceptionally closely with Trump, serving as his White House chief of staff: General John Kelly. Like Milley, Kelly did not use the word “fascist” to mean racist or really rightwing, as some loosely throw around that term, but rather to describe Trump’s attitude to power. Indeed, Kelly took pains to be precise.

In an interview with the New York Times, he read aloud a definition of fascism: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said, adding that Trump fitted that description. “In my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

It’s not a stretch to speak of “autocracy”. Kelly and others have told how Trump believed all power should reside in him, how he bridled at the insistence by senior officials in the government or military, including those he called “my generals”, that their loyalty was to the constitution rather than to him personally. Trump saw that and all such constraints on his authority, including the law, as irritating – if not illegitimate.

That was troubling enough in his first term, but it would be more alarming in a second. For one thing, Trump will not repeat his mistake of appointing lieutenants who believe their duty is to serve the country rather than him, even if that means thwarting his will. Next time, he will be surrounded by loyalists. Some of them have been remarkably candid about their plans. In the words of one, Russell T Vought, speaking of how Trump aims to take direct control of every corner of the US federal government, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

An obvious early target will be the department of justice. Trump has left little doubt that he will not respect that body’s independence. Instead he will use it as a weapon to get the “retribution” he has promised by prosecuting his enemies. What’s more, a second-term Trump will be emboldened by an extraordinary ruling of the supreme court. In July that bench, remade in his image with three Trump-appointed judges, granted the president sweeping legal immunity.

What especially alarms the retired generals is Trump’s repeated threats to use the US military against American citizens, to crush dissent. When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Washington DC in 2020, Trump sent in the national guard, but now he talks, explicitly, about going much further, promising to use the army against those he calls “the enemy from within”. When pressed to say who he had in mind, he did not cite terrorists or criminals but Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman from California.

The same instinct animates his serial threats to the free press. “CBS should lose its license,” Trump posted on social media last week, after the network displeased him with an interview with Harris: “60 Minutes should be immediately taken off the air.” Earlier he had called for ABC’s licence to be “terminated” because he didn’t like the way his debate with Harris had gone. Presidents cannot block TV networks on a whim, but they do appoint the board that hands out broadcast licences – so it’s not an empty threat.

This, remember, is a man who gushes like a teenager in his admiration for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, but rarely has a good word to say for America’s democratic allies. This is a man who has promised to be a dictator “on day one”. What more does he have to do to tell us who he is, short of dressing up in jackboots and doing a Hitler salute? And before you dismiss that as a joke, recall Kelly’s confirmation that, more than once, Trump spoke positively of the Nazi dictator: “You know, Hitler did some good things, too,” he would say.

Given all this, it should be shocking that Trump is even a contender for the White House, let alone one who, polls suggest, is locked in a tie with his opponent. But too many Americans are fed up with high prices and fearful about immigration; too many blame the incumbent Democratic administration and see Harris as part of that status quo. In that context it didn’t help that, when asked if she would have done anything differently from Joe Biden these last four years, Harris replied, “Not a thing that comes to mind.”

In her closing argument, Harris is rightly focusing on the threat Trump poses to democracy and freedom. But she has to make that threat ever more concrete. Polls show she is losing ground among Black and Hispanic voters, especially men. Why not, as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has argued, remind those voters that Trump threatens to cut federal funding to police departments that don’t implement “stop-and-frisk”, a practice that disproportionately targets Black men? Or that Trump plans a door-to-door operation against undocumented immigrants, a programme of mass deportation that could see the rounding up of 11 million people? This is not a niche issue: there are 4 million young US citizens with at least one undocumented parent. And if you’re wondering where they would all go, recall that Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has said that “illegals” awaiting deportation will be sent to massive internment camps.

On Monday, Donald Trump will address a rally at Madison Square Garden. Others have already noted the uncomfortable echo of the vast America First rally held in that same venue in 1939, when an earlier variant of American fascism was at its height. The US, and the world, got lucky then, as that movement was steadily eclipsed by events. On 5 November, America and the world desperately need to get lucky again – and time is running out.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist