“You have heard from this president over and over again about the threats to democracy,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday. “You have heard from the former president himself, saying that he is going to be a dictator on day one. This is him, not us.”

Jean-Pierre referenced Vice President Kamala Harris‘s remarks earlier Wednesday and Trump’s behavior before and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“Do we agree about that determination? Yes, we do,” she said. “Yes, we have said, he said himself, the former president has said he is going to be the dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that. We cannot.”

Biden has previously called Trump’s political philosophy “semi-fascism.”

Jean-Pierre confirmed that Biden was “aware” of Kelly’s comments and was not surprised by them.

“He believes in our institutions. He believes this will be a free and fair election,” she said of Biden. “We have to give the American people, some of them are voting right now, to make sure that they have the confidence in their vote and how important it is to cast their vote.”

In an interview that was published on Wednesday, Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told the New York Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist” and that he once said Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” Kelly said. “So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

“Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area. He’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators, he has said that,” the former Marine Corps general added. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

The Kelly interview came one day after the Atlantic published a similar story about how Trump reportedly said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The Trump campaign has denied that report and criticized Kelly as suffering from “a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“John Kelly has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his president well while working as chief of staff and currently suffers from a debilitating case of trump derangement syndrome,” Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung told the Washington Examiner.

Harris added an impromptu speech to her schedule Wednesday, describing Trump as “increasingly unhinged and unstable.”

“It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Harris said. “This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.”

She went on: “In a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guard rails against his propensities and his actions.”