Throughout the campaign, the Democrats have talked around the obvious—that, in his rhetoric and in his calls to violence against his perceived enemies, Trump has adopted full-throated fascist messaging. And Trump has done so without provoking even a peep of indignation from the GOP leadership in Congress.

The Democrats have labeled him “weird” and “authoritarian,” denounced him for being “erratic,” and called him out for his increasingly incoherent babbling. Butonly in the last week, as Trump’s campaign trail message has gotten ever darker, have both Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz come out and said their opponent is a fascist.

The Democrats’ permission slip for using the F-word came from, of all people, ex-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley. You may recall the top-ranking general walking, in full uniform, across a riot-torn square outside of the White House with President Donald Trump in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. He has spent the years since apologizing for giving his imprimatur of authority to Trump, who militarized the response to protesters and politicized the military in so doing.

When Milley, hardly known for his radical politics, established a back channel to his Chinese counterparts and promised them that there were safeguards in place to stop Trump from launching a nuclear attack solely to retain power, he incurred the Mar-a-Lago man’s eternal wrath. Years later, Trump would announce on social media that in the good old days a figure who had done what Milley did would have been executed for treason.

In the wake of that broadside, Milley was inundated by threats from MAGA fanatics, and had to install blast- and bulletproof protections around his house.

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Now, the general is getting his revenge. In veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s just-released book War, Milley is quoted as saying that Trump is a “fascist to his core.” It’s an extraordinary statement from a man who rose to the top military job in part by staying studiously away from partisan politics. It also speaks to the level of horror, and the fear of an earth-shattering upheaval of the global order, that many senior officials in the military and national security agencies feel at the prospect of Trump regaining the White House and being made king in all but name by the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

Trump hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to dispel Milley’s analysis of his personality.

In recent weeks, the Republican candidate for president has said that the military should be called on to annihilate his political foes, the people he called “the enemy within.” He has insisted that shoplifters should face a “very rough hour” at the hands of the police. He responded to a heckler at one of his rallies by saying that she should “have the hell knocked out of her.” He has called for media outlets he doesn’t like, such as CBS, to lose their broadcasting licenses. He has advocated the mass jailing of anyone involved in “election interference,” which in his telling seems to be anybody who stands up to his goon squads in favor of fully counting all the votes. And he told an audience of Jewish voters that Jews would “bear a lot of blame” if he lost the upcoming election.

That’s not even the half of it. He has inspired attacks on asylum seekers and on the schools their children attend with his unforgivable spreading of rumors that Haitians living in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status were stealing pet cats and dogs to eat. And he continues to refuse to say whether he will peacefully accept the election outcome, and will urge his supporters to do likewise, if Harris wins.

Astoundingly, despite—or maybe because of—his increasingly demented rhetoric, Trump’s base has solidified around him, and he is riding as high in the polls today as at any time since Harris became the Democrats’ nominee. This isn’t politics as normal; it’s a vastly dangerous departure from the norms and rhythms of democracy, and, because the GOP and the conservative media ecosystem have so wholeheartedly bought into the Trump cult, it’s happening without much of the public being aware just how radical this shift is.

Belatedly, the Democrats have realized that it might be a good idea to call a fascist a fascist. After Trump said that the military should be used against his enemies, Walz denounced Trump as being “un-American,” and on a swing through Wisconsin he finally called Trump out for being a fascist. Then, earlier this week, Kamala Harris was asked by radio host Charlamagne tha God whether one could say that Trump’s was a fascist vision. Harris finally said the obvious: “Yes, we can say that.”

They should have done this months ago, instead of letting Trump rehabilitate himself in the political imagination of millions of Americans. They should have defined this terrible man, this man who, like so many despots throughout history, revels in the language of violence and intimidation, as what he is.

But better late than never.

With Trump’s campaign getting a vast infusion of cash from deeply antidemocratic multibillionaires, including the ever-more-unlikable Elon Musk, it’s past time for the Harris team to coalesce a popular front–style opposition to Trump’s lurch toward fascism. Let everyone who fills in the ballot bubble for Donald J. Trump know exactly what they are giving their support to. Not who they are supporting—the unhinged old man with the grotesque anecdotes and personal stories, who stopped talking at a rally and instead danced (badly) to his playlist for half an hour—but what they are voting for: the kind of ghastly, bloody, nihilistic, political movement that their grandparents and great grandparents fought against in World War II.

Put it that way, and it’s a pretty stark choice. Is America about to hand the keys to power to a man who, as Milley so correctly put it, is a “fascist to his core”? If the country does, it will be a tragedy far beyond the tragedy that occurred in 2016. For this time around there won’t be even the most rudimentary of guardrails to stop Trump and his hoodlums from truly wrecking American democracy.