On October 23, Anderson Cooper asked Vice President Harris whether she considered Trump a fascist, and she said, “Yes, I do.” She later alluded to Trump as someone who “admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Today, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens says that Kamala shouldn’t have called Trump a fascist because it makes his supporters feel like they’re being called fascists too.

Did that make a difference? I don’t know. But here’s what she could have said:

“I don’t know if Trump’s a fascist – I cannot read into his heart and mind. However, I can tell you one thing with confidence: He talks like a man who loves violence.

“When Trump refers to people in our country – our fellow human beings – as vermin and sub-human animals, he’s following a long tradition of leaders using language to encourage or excuse mass violence against those people. Some of them have been fascists, like Hitler, who referred to an important but vulnerable minority group in his country as maggots, trash, germs, garbage, and poison. Others have used this kind of language to support genocide or ethnic cleansing, like the Hutu people of Rwanda who referred to their Tutsi neighbors as cockroaches. Stalin, too, called some of his people swine, bloodsuckers, insects, and enemies. Stalin was evil in many ways, but he was not a fascist.

“Is Trump talking like this because he wants our permission for a campaign of violence? Or is it just because he knows that language like that gets people riled up?

“I don’t know whether Trump is a fascist. People we all trust, military leaders who have spent much more time with him than I have, have said so. The alternative is that he’s using talk like this to manipulate you and your emotions. He wants to flip the “fear and righteous anger” switch in your brain and make you vote for him. Are you okay with being used like that?”