This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

On Tuesday night, Kamala Harris, taking part in a televised question and answer session with voters in Pennsylvania, was asked if she believed Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist.

“Yes, I do,” she said without any hesitation. 

Later, she explicitly used the f-word to describe her rival in the race for the White House.

Answering a question about the plight of Palestinians, she told the audience: “For many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries.

“They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

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It’s a hell of a moment in the campaign and a hell of a moment in US democracy.

Harris is not the only one sounding the alarm.

John Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told the New York Times that, in his opinion, the half-Scottish tycoon would govern like a dictator if allowed.

“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," he said.

Kelly also claimed that Trump had commented “more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too’.”

Even by Trump’s standards, there have been jaw-dopping moments during this campaign. Perhaps most startingly was when he talked about using the military against what he called the “enemy within".

That is, deploy the military against Americans, in America.

Trump — who owns golf courses in Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire — seeks complete control over the armed forces and the "kind of generals that Hitler had".

So is the US on the cusp of becoming a fascist dictatorship?

(Image: PA/Andrew Milligan)

Dr James Foley, a lecturer in politics at Glasgow Caledonian University, tells me he’s worried about what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic, but that we have to be careful when deploying a term like that.

“I don't want to undermine the idea that there are all sorts of problems attached to a Trump presidency, but the use of this word, I think, is misleading.”

He says it’s important that we have a “level of intellectual and moral clarity when we're using the term".

Using it in such a “flippant and throw-away context” risks “undermining the idea that fascism could actually be a thing that emerges from the current conditions".

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There is war, there is economic decline, and there is, he adds, "real credible risks of that type of authoritarianism returning to politics".