Democrats are closing their campaign of “joy” this election by desperately smearing their political opponents as fascists hellbent on igniting an American Third Reich. It’s the same tired playbook from a political party that’s been projecting its own authoritarian impulses onto Republicans for years, and they ramp up the projection every time the GOP threatens the leftist regime’s grip on power.
Case in point: Former President Donald Trump held a sold-out rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden Sunday night after surviving two assassination attempts and a lawfare crusade designed to bankrupt and imprison him. After efforts had failed to illegally thwart Public Enemy No. 1’s return to the ballot, Democrats and their deputy surrogates in the press hysterically depicted the Manhattan rally as a racist convention for a wannabe dictator. Apparently Trump forgot to play autocrat when he was first elected president eight years ago.
Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published his latest hit on Trump several days before the New York City rally to defame the ex-president as an admirer of Adolf Hitler. In an article based almost entirely on anonymous sources, Goldberg said that Trump apparently mused that he wanted the kind of generals Hitler had. The story dropped just as Vice President Kamala Harris’ favorability ratings fell underwater in the final weeks of the election. The vice president’s lead in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of surveys has now been erased, with Trump leading Harris in the national polls and a majority of key battleground states.
As Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden neared, failed 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton compared the event to a gathering of American Nazis that took place in 1939.
“One other thing that you’ll see next week, Kaitlan, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden [Nazi] rally in 1939,” Clinton said on CNN. “Neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.”
In other words, Clinton — who infamously called Trump’s supporters “deplorables” in 2016 —called not just the Republican nominee a Nazi but all of his supporters Nazis for rallying where a bunch of Nazis had gathered nearly a century ago. Would she say the same thing about former President Jimmy Carter who rallied there in 1976 and 1980?
Democrats and the press, however, would follow Clinton’s lead and dramatize their worst imaginations of what was actually an unapologetically patriotic event complete with all the “joy” and fanfare of a major political movement on the cusp of victory. Corporate media outlets called the event with black and Jewish Trump supporters in attendance racist, while Democrats attacked the event as a 21st-century reincarnation of Hitler’s rise.
“They knew the story they were going to write before the rally,” said independent Substack journalist Michael Shellenberger on X.
The Lincoln Project even translated out-of-context quotes from Trump into German, while MSNBC aired clips of the 1939 Nazi rally at the venue to draw a parallel between that rally and the 2024 event that saw Republican voters and celebrity Trump supporters flooding into the venue in deep blue Manhattan.
After Democrats have gone all in to declare that their political opponents are synonymous with German Nazis, it remains to be seen whether a Vice President Harris will actually accept the election results and certify a so-called modern-day Hitler as commander-in-chief.