Despite two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump that were likely the result of extremist rhetoric — notably that he is an “existential threat to democracy” — Vice President Kamala Harris irresponsibly likened Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Having no accomplishments to present to Americans, Harris at last resorted to the rhetoric that her own party denounces, first in a speech at the Naval Observatory, then on X, and then again in last night’s disastrous CNN town hall.
Harris maligned Trump after The Atlantic reported that Trump said he wanted generals similar to Hitler, a story from former chief of staff John Kelly. The retired Marine then told The New York Times that Trump would be a fascist dictator.
Instead of denouncing the rhetoric, Harris piled on.
The Speech and X Post
Trump said he wanted generals akin to Hitler’s “because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution,” Harris claimed:
He wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be 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 said that Trump “invoke[d]” Hitler, which is “further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.”
Quoting Kelly, who told the Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of ‘fascist,’” Harris claimed that Trump “vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”
Harris closed her deranged remarks by claiming that “Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable” and that men such as Kelly “would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions.”
Trump, she said, “wants unchecked power.”
There followed this dangerous rhetoric on X:
Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution.
He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.
Harris repeated the claim to CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the network’s town hall.
Replied Trump:
Comrade Kamala Harris sees that she is losing, and losing badly, especially after stealing the Race from Crooked Joe Biden, so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind. She is a Threat to Democracy, and not fit to be President of the United States — And her Polling so indicates!
Trump supporter and X proprietor Elon Musk called Harris’ post a “major incitement to violence.”
Atlantic Hit Piece
In the piece obviously timed to wound Trump two weeks before the election, The Atlantic’s Joe Goldberg recycled a tale from a book about Trump, The Divider: Trump in the White House, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
The book claimed that Trump asked Kelly, “why can’t you be more like the German generals.”
“According to Baker and Glasser,” Goldberg reported, “Kelly explained to Trump that German generals ‘tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.’ This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: ‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president responded.”
Continued Goldberg:
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Goldberg also reported that Trump knows nothing about military history — as if Harris does — and that he disdains the military.
The writer published a similar piece that attacked Trump in September 2020.
A similarly timed and themed hit piece by Anne Appplebaum appeared days earlier. Headline: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
Kelly, first homeland security chief then chief of staff for Trump, then spoke to the Times.
Unconcerned that a woman whom many consider to a communist — a prosecutor who promised to raid homes to check on gun owners and had a woman arrested because her daughter missed school while battling sickle cell anemia — Kelly said, “it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
Trump Is a “Fascist”
Kelly told the Times that Trump is a fascist.
“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 told the newspaper.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” Kelly continued. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly also called Trump a would-be “dictator.”
Knowing what Harris has said and done, perhaps Kelly somewhat lacks self-awareness.
On October 22, the same day Kelly’s remarks appeared in the Times, former President Barack Obama campaigned for Harris and, again lacking self-awareness, uttered these words: “There are times where I just, I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter.”
