The outlandish hit piece on Donald Trump published this week by Jeffery Goldberg at The Atlantic, which was immediately denied on the record by all the people who were in the room with Trump, isn’t just a shoddy smear that would never have passed muster in a newsroom 20 years ago.
It’s more than that. It’s part of a larger psy-op to justify mass post-election violence if Trump wins in November, to signal activists to reject the results of the election, to divide the military, and to coax an insurgency out of the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party and unleash it on American cities.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ shocking remarks Wednesday on the steps of the Naval Observatory should be understood in this light. Citing comments quoted in The Atlantic from former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, Harris explicitly compared Trump to Hitler and claimed that if elected he will rule as a dictator and unleash the military on his domestic political opponents.
“He does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him,” she said. “He wants a military that is loyal to him personally. One that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.”
Harris went on to call Trump a fascist, claim he would be a dictator on day one, and repeat a line she’s been using often lately, that Trump will use the military to go after American citizens, using it as “his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.” She closed by saying Trump is “increasing unhinged and unstable” and that he “wants unchecked power.”
Soon after her remarks, Harris’s X account posted these claims without reference to Kelly or the The Atlantic piece, repeating the Hitler smear and all the rest as fact:
This is not just the normal heated rhetoric that comes out in the final weeks of a close presidential election. This is something else. It is at least a tacit call for violent resistance, for insurrection, and even for a third assassination attempt against Trump.
It’s hard to overstate how reckless and dangerous this is two weeks before an election that Harris appears to be losing. Having staked out this rhetorical ground, what is she supposed to say if she loses the election? How is she supposed to concede? Will she come out and say, “Sorry everyone we tried hard to save America but now you must all live peacefully under the new Hitler?”
She’s not going to say that. She can’t now. She’s going to call for resistance. “Patriotic resistance,” she might call it, but it will be coded as a call for street violence or worse. After all, you don’t just accept a Hitler-like, fascist regime. You fight it any way you can.
This is why, after the first assassination attempt back in July, many of us called for a cooling of the rhetoric coming from the left. Joe Biden’s repeated insistence throughout the spring and early summer that Trump represented an existential threat to democracy created an opening for radicals and would-be assassins to take action against Trump. And then one of them actually did in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Even after Trump was shot in the face, Democrats didn’t listen. Harris picked up right where Biden left off, repeating the line, over and over, that a second Trump term would be the end of our democracy, the last election, the rise of an authoritarian regime. If those are the stakes, what are people supposed to do? Vote and hope for the best? Of course not. Harris and the Democrats kept pushing the line that a Trump presidency meant the end of America as we know it. And so, inevitably, there was a second assassination attempt.
And now, as we come down to Election Day and Harris’ campaign looks to be failing, they are going in one last time, more explicitly than before, to make the case that Trump is Hitler and his return to the White House means the end of American democracy.
And it’s not just Harris or her campaign pushing this. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked whether Biden agrees that Trump is a fascist and a would-be dictator. She said he does agree, and then went a long rant about how dangerous Trump is, how we can’t forget about Jan. 6, how we can’t forget that “two thousand people were told to go to the Capitol and undo a free and fair election by the former president.”
Is this reckless and dangerous? Is it designed to prepare the ground for mass violence? Is it assassination prep? Yes, it’s all those things. But understand that we’re not dealing with a normal political party here. We’re dealing with an ensconced institutional oligarchy that has already executed a coup against the previous Democrat nominee (and sitting president), forcing him to end his reelection campaign. They have already discarded millions of Democrat primary votes to install their hand-picked successor despite their claims to care about “preserving democracy.” They have already refused to tone down their incendiary rhetoric despite two assassination attempts against Trump.
In other words, these are not people who care about political norms. They care about power and power alone. And by invoking the specter of Hitler and fascism, Harris is laying the groundwork for a post-election display of power that will shock the country, ruin our cities, and paralyze our civic life.
And even if you think it goes too far to say that Harris and the Democrats are tacitly calling for violence in the event of a Trump victory, at the very least they are providing a permission structure for a vast swath of the Democrat Party to reject the results of the election. And we all know what that means.
