“Trump is Hitler” — and why

by Scott Johnson in 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Media

Over the past several weeks we have noted that the Harris presidential campaign is not going altogether swimmingly based on signs emanating from the campaign itself. The latest is the campaign’s turn to the flyblown theme that “Trump is Hitler.” At the moment it comes courtesy of Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, and his interview with former Trump chief of staff John Kelly.

Park MacDougald reviewed it yesterday evening at The Scroll in “Breaking News: Trump is Hitler.” This is what MacDougald had to say on this component of Goldberg’s contribution to the Harris campaign (please forgive the length of the excerpt and read the whole thing):

As for the claims that Trump expressed “admiration” for Hitler and apparent desire for more “loyal” generals “like Hitler had,” it is of course impossible to say anything definitive. Could it have happened exactly how Kelly described? Sure. Could Kelly have garbled something Trump said, or put a sinister spin on harmless bullshitting? Of course. Indeed, we see this happen all the time with Trump comments that are part of the public record, such as the oft-repeated lie that he praised neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.” More recently, we’ve seen the Harris campaign claiming that Trump is threatening to deploy the U.S. military against his “political opponents” if elected. What Trump actually said was that the National Guard, or military “if really necessary,” would be capable of handling postelection rioting from “radical left lunatics,” which is not some deranged hypothetical but something that happened in 2017, when black-bloc rioters affiliated with Disrupt J20 blocked intersections, smashed windows, set fires, and injured six police officers in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day. Two days later, a participant in the riot praised it, and a videotaped assault on the “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer, in glowing terms in The Nation.

Indeed, Kelly, who remains the sole source for the claim that Trump referred to American war dead as “suckers” and “losers,” claims to now be revealing these years-old comments for the first time because Trump’s promises to use the military against domestic opponents—which, we repeat, is a fake Harris campaign talker—are “so dangerous” that “he felt he had to speak out,” according to an interview with The New York Times timed to coincide with the release of the article in The Atlantic. In that interview, Kelly referred to Trump as a “fascist” and “authoritarian” who would “govern like a dictator” if reelected, and repeated the Hitler accusations. And in what is no doubt a stunning coincidence, Kamala Harris was ready with a 1 p.m. press conference on Wednesday to discuss Kelly’s comments: “Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military that will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders, even when tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.” Thanks, Momala.

In other words, it seems that the closing argument from Harris—who just last week told an antisemitic heckler who accused Israel of genocide, “I know what you’re speaking of”—is that this guy is Hitler:

We’ll see if the American people believe it. As for us, we prefer Jim Mattis, who, despite his stated dislike for Trump, said at a conference last December, “retired generals… need to go silent during elections. The American people do not need military officers telling them how to vote.”

Harris has turned her campaign to the “Trump is Hitler” theme. The joy is gone. Fear has come to the fore. She seeks to instill it in others. Her own fear is that she is losing. That’s why “Trump is Hitler.”

“Trump is Hitler” — we’ve only heard it a million times before, give or take a million, specifically as to Trump. Before that George W. Bush was Hitler, George H.W. Bush was Hitler, and Ronald Reagan was Hitler.

Yesterday Harris made a statement from her home at the Naval Observatory (White House transcript here). While she has made her antipathy to Israel patent, she held herself out as some kind of guardian of the Jewish people. Thanks, but no thanks.

“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,” she observed. It would be nice if she took up the opposition to the would-be genocidaires of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. For some reason, though, she is otherwise engaged.

“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable,” according to Harris. IF so, I feel like the woman in When Harry Met Sally. I’ll have what he’s having.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/trump-is-hitler-and-why.php