This week, Kamala Harris stepped outside the door of the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the Vice President of the United States, to announce that she knows “who Donald Trump really is.”
There is “further evidence of the American people,” she said, “from the people who know them best.”
His family? His longtime business partners? The New York tabloids?
No. According to the vice president, the people who know him best are “the people who worked side by side with him in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.”
This seems unlikely.
This new evidence of “who Donald Trump really is” comes from John Kelly. He joined the Trump administration in 2017 as secretary of homeland security, then was named White House chief of staff a few months later. On December 8, 2018, Trump announced that Kelly had left.
But Kelly certainly holds no grudges over the firing. Not at all. He just happened to remember, two weeks before the 2024 election, that Trump admired Hitler.
“He said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler,” Kamala Harris said in her most serious voice.
Harris was repeating the story Kelly told The Atlantic. One of the main investors in this post is billionaire Lauren Powell Jobs, who happens to be a longtime friend and donor to Harris.
Kelly also told the story of The New York Times, a newspaper that won’t return the Pulitzer it won for reporting the completely false story that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. In reality, that story was cooked up by the campaign Hillary Clinton, who was later fined by the Federal Election Commission for falsely reporting the fees she was billed for fabricating the story as if those bills were legal expenses.
This week, Hillary returned to it, telling CNN that Trump’s upcoming rally in New York, to be held at Madison Square Garden, is just like a pro-Nazi rally that was held at that location by the German-American Bund on 20 February, 1939
In mid-October, longtime Clinton family confidant and campaign adviser James Carville told CNN’s Jake Tapper that if he had been advising the Harris campaign, he would have “dipped people to say” that Trump was “holding a rally at Madison Square Garden that , sorry, is a parody of a rally held on February 20, 1939 by the American Nazi Party. And we need to stop being afraid to make those connections that he does his best to make.
That’s exactly what happened. A week later, Kamala Harris was outside the official residence of the Vice President of the United States and read aloud: “It is deeply disturbing and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Harris called it “a window into who Donald Trump really is.”
“It gives us a window into how Donald Trump thinks,” former President Barack Obama said at a Harris campaign rally in Atlanta on Thursday, after echoing John Kelly’s story about Trump wanting Hitler’s generals. Obama went on to list other former staffers who worked for Trump (and were fired) and who are now happy to tell MSNBC that Trump is a “fascist.”
Trump vehemently denied making the comments Kelly attributed to him, posting online that Kelly had “made up a story out of pure hatred of Trump Derangement Syndrome!” The former president wrote: “This man had two qualities that didn’t work well together. He was hard and blunt.”
Let me take you back to the spring of 2016, when first-time candidate Donald Trump was elected by Republican primary voters over a bus full of candidates with years or decades of experience in government. Then in September, in the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump called Clinton’s supporters “political hacks who I see have run our country so brilliantly for the last 10 years with their knowledge,” adding: “Look at the mess that we” inside .”
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump didn’t always take the advice of the bipartisan “so brilliant” crowd when he was in the White House, or that they want the former president to lose this election. If he is re-elected on November 5, many of these people will be out of government jobs for at least another four years, and that is their best-case scenario. For anyone who has profited from corrupt or fraudulent deals, unemployment may be the least of their problems if Trump returns as the nation’s chief executive on January 20.
Given how little national security credibility these names had in 2016, it’s unlikely they’ll convince many voters by becoming part of James Carville’s “people stream” repeating the absurd talking point that Trump is copying Hitler. Trump was president for four years, and it was hard to miss the complete lack of death camps, world wars, and arrests of political enemies.
Apparently, Trump was so busy moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and negotiating the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel and its Arab neighbors that he completely forgot to invade Poland.
All this leaves an important question unanswered.
When Democrats discover that calling Trump “Hitler” doesn’t convince anyone to vote for Kamala Harris, what’s next?
They might try calling him Lord Voldemort. Or Lex Luthor.
How about Professor Moriarty?
Mock whiplash? OJ Simpson? Alan Brady from The Dick Van Dyke Show?
Face it, Hitler is a tough act to follow. Once a campaign starts calling its opponent and its supporters Nazis, it’s time to bring down the curtain. If the latest polls in the battleground states are correct, this show is over.
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