US Election 2024: Republican US Presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters that he is ‘not a Nazi,’ during a rally on Monday as his neck-and-neck campaign against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris for the White House enters final week. Trump’s remark is aimed at pushing back on accusations of authoritarianism, including from a former chief of staff who branded him a ‘fascist.’

As November 5 election nears, both Presidential candidates and their teams have ramped up the political rhetoric, bringing an already simmering campaign to a boil.

Democrat Harris, who has accused Trump of stoking divisions, was in Michigan on Monday while Republican Trump headed to Georgia, another of the decisive swing states, where he said critics are accusing him of being a modern-day “Hitler.”

“The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi,” Trump told a a rally in Atlanta. “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he said as reported by French news agency AFP.

Madison Square Garden Row

The comments come a day after Trump held a mega-rally in New York’s famed Madison Square Garden that was widely condemned for racist remarks that his allies made during the event.

They also follow recent publication of a New York Times interview in which Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired general John Kelly, said the Republican fits the definition of a fascist – something Harris said she agreed with in a live CNN event last week.

Kelly also told the paper that Trump had remarked that “Hitler did some good things too” and that instead of the US military, he “wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had.”

Polls suggest that the Presidential race is too close to call, fueled by fears that former president Trump could again refuse to conede a defeat, as in 2020, AFP report said.

Concerns increased after a fire reportedly consumed hundreds of early ballots cast in a supposedly secure drop-off box in a highly competitive district in northwestern Washington state. Arson was reportedly suspected in another ballot box fire hours earlier in Portland, Oregon.

And Trump has faced renewed outrage after one of the warm-up speakers at his huge Sunday rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden called US territory Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”

More than 47 million Americans have already cast ballots in early voting – including outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, who voted Monday after waiting in line near his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

Battle for Swing States

As the clock ticks down, the challenge for Harris and Trump is both to energize core supporters and pull in the tiny number of persuadable voters who might still tip the balance – especially in the seven swing states where polls have them running neck-and-neck.

Harris held three events Monday in Michigan, while Trump hosted two in Georgia – a pattern set to be repeated across the country’s other battlegrounds for the next week.

At her first event Harris stopped at a semiconductor factory, reflecting the Democrat’s need to appeal to blue-collar voters and promise recovery in America’s post-industrial “Rust Belt.”

On Tuesday in Washington, Harris will deliver what her campaign calls a “closing argument” from the same spot near the White House where then-president Trump allegedly stoked his supporters on January 6, 2021, to launch a violent assault on the US Capitol.