Thank you, General Kelly, for speaking the truth about Trump

Americans who value democracy owe General John Kelly their gratitude for going public with information instrumental to an informed voting decision as this chaotic presidential campaign careens toward its close.

Kelly, who first served as Donald Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security and then became his longest-serving chief of staff, told The New York Times that he believes Trump meets the definition of a fascist and that he “prefers the dictator approach to government.’’ And not just that, but that the former president is also, at least to some degree, a praiser of Adolf Hitler.

In response, Trump, an inveterate fabricator of falsehoods, said Kelly “made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred!’’

Comparing Trump’s attributes to the various facets of fascism, Kelly, in an interview with the Times, offered this assessment: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.’’

Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has issued a similar warning, telling author Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.’’ Trump, readers may recall, has previously suggested via social media post that Milley should be executed, a post so baleful it underlines the accuracy of both men’s observations.

Upon leaving the White House, Kelly had decided he would speak out about Trump only if the former president said something radically wide of the mark about Kelly personally or uttered things he found deeply disturbing, according to the Times. Trump’s repeated comments about using the military against his perceived domestic enemies crossed that line for the conservative four-star Marine general.

According to Kelly, Trump told him he wanted the same kind of loyalty from US generals that German fuhrer Adolf Hitler got from his military leaders. Further, the former White House chief of staff said Trump remarked on more than one occasion, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’’’

This, it hardly need be said, is highly unusual talk from an American president. In that light, it’s noteworthy that according to a 1990 Vanity Fair piece, Ivana Trump, Donald’s now deceased first wife, told her attorney that “from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.’’ Asked about that, Trump told the magazine, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.’’

Now, a person could certainly have a benign historical interest in Hitler and his speeches, but when they begin using Hitler-like terms and tropes and themes such as “vermin’’ — hardly an everyday word — and “poisoning the blood of our country’’ and commences ranting about “the enemy within,’’ it can’t help but raise questions about his rhetorical role model.

On the right, where rally-round-the-nominee Republican Party loyalty has proved more powerful than prophylactic patriotism, Trump enablers are tumbling into ridiculous reasoning chasms as they try to justify supporting Trump despite his attempted auto-coup and his dark, divisive, demagogic candidacy.

One is to assert that Trump’s blatantly authoritarian declarations aren’t a concern because our federal system will constrain him. That’s akin to saying that there’s no problem renting your home to a confirmed arsonist given that it’s equipped with smoke alarms. Yes, the country survived last time, but if returned to the White House, Trump would stock his administration with yes-men from the get-go and so wouldn’t be restrained by officials who care about the US Constitution and the rule of law.

The second is to engage in the logical fallacy known as false equivalence or, informally, comparing apples to oranges. To wit: Even though Trump tried to trample on the Constitution and overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats are far more worrisome, because if they win, they might expand the Supreme Court, end the filibuster, and try to forgive additional student debt.

That argument reduces to this: It doesn’t matter what illicit schemes Trump tried to carry out to stay in power after losing in 2020. Nor does it matter what authoritarian abuses he could visit upon the nation, from ordering the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents to using the military to go after “enemies within,’’ because Republicans think goals the Democrats might pursue legally and according to the legislative rules would be worse.

Speak of your risible justifications! But as we’ve seen in the Trump era, the power of pretzel logic is immense on the right.

Let’s hope General Kelly’s courageous and patriotic candor plants a large conceptual boulder in the middle of the GOP’s path of least rationalizing resistance.

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.