Nearly half of the Cabinet-level officials who served in Donald Trump’s first term have refused to endorse his reelection. Many have spoken out against him, at deep personal and political risk. Their descriptions all revolve around familiar themes: Trump is unfit to lead a democratic government; he either cannot understand or simply refuses to accept distinctions between his personal interests and those of the state; he admires dictators and wishes to emulate their methods.

Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and almost every president in history, has had zero high-level officials from her Cabinet describe her as fascistic or otherwise fundamentally unfit for high office. The number of Trump officials who have made this claim about him is extraordinary.

Conservatives have largely ignored or dismissed these warnings. The recent flare-up over revelations by former chief of staff John Kelly that Trump repeatedly expressed a desire for his generals to display the level of fealty that Trump believed was given by Adolf Hitler’s forced them to acknowledge the issue. The responses they’ve offered have been revealing.

The reactions I’m collecting here are representative of the conservative movement’s impulse to dismiss or deflect from the overwhelming evidence that Trump is considered dangerous by many officials he appointed to office.

Conservative talk-radio personality Erick Erickson waves away warnings about Trump on the grounds that some liberals have made claims about other figures that Erickson disagrees with:

Y’all, it’s not that I believe or don’t believe John Kelly. It’s that I don’t care. Democrats have been calling Republicans “Hitler” since Reagan. The Democrats are as authoritarian as Trump, but he never threw a grandmother in prison for praying at an abortion clinic.

Donald Trump is a fascist say the people who believe this nation was conceived in slavery and is........

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