Stephen Yang
Soon after Donald Trump announced he was holding a campaign event in the most famous arena in his hometown, Hillary Clinton accused him of “re-enacting the Madison Square Garden Nazi rally in 1939.”
Virtually every left-wing pundit, and numerous elected Democrats, also claimed that Trump, and the 20,000 attendees at MSG, were mimicking the notorious German American Bund event.
During the Trump campaign event, MSNBC’s ran a chyron that read, “Trump MSG rally comes 85 years after pro-Nazi rally at famed arena,” interspersing its coverage with old film of Heil Hitler salutes and goose-stepping in case anyone didn’t get the message.
For years, Democrats told us that Trump had been installed in the White House by the dictator Vladimir Putin to destroy our sacred democracy from the inside.
But that’s old news. In 2024, Democrats are trying to persuade us that Trump, a man who has been in the public eye for nearly 50 years, is just biding his time to become the American Hitler.
The hysteria isn’t surprising. As I detail in my new book, “The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists,” the contemporary left is now captive by a paranoid style of politics that’s unprecedented in American history.
What differentiates the Democrats’ paranoia from past strains of mass hysteria is that its conspiracy theories are laundered through establishment media, championed by “experts,” and egged on by once-respected institutions.
Kamala Harris is probably the first major presidential candidate in history to accuse her opponent of longing to be a genocidal authoritarian.
“Donald Trump is out for unchecked power,” the Democrats’ candidate recently claimed. “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.”
This accusation is, in part, based on a recent partisan hit piece from The Atlantic, in which sources claim Trump once praised Hitler’s generals. But none of it is new. Democrats want you to believe that Trump, perhaps the most pro-Israel president in history — a man who not only moved the US embassy to Jerusalem but has Jewish grandchildren — will try and recreate the Third Reich.
Sorry, it’s not Republicans who keep coddling the Islamic terror state of Iran and pro-Hamas protesters.
In any event, there is an institution that already exists to ensure presidents don’t have unchecked power. It’s called the United States Supreme Court, and Democrats like Harris are constantly delegitimizing and trying to destroy it.
But, then again, many of the left’s most hysterical assertions are just projection.
“Donald Trump has been very clear that he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies. You know who does that? Dictators do that,” Harris recently warned.
Though we may not be able to predict the future, we do know that Trump never weaponized the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies when he was president. The same can’t be said of Democrats, who are behind a slew of rickety legal attacks meant to destroy Trump’s political fortunes and business. This inconvenient fact hasn’t slowed the Democrats’ flood of conspiracy theories.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, perhaps the most paranoiac personality in major media, has warned that Trump “will imprison and execute whoever he’s allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country; just look at his past.”
The big problem for Scarborough is that Americans can look to his past. Trump was president for four years, and not one Democrat I know of was executed for crimes against the state.
Then again, Morning Joe’s partner, Mika Brzezinski, might disagree. Sure, it’s important to talk about “Trump’s fascism,” the host of Morning Joe recently explained, but what we really need to remember is that the GOP presidential candidate is already “killing” Americans. “I’m talking about us women, he’s killing us!”
Big if true.
And if you think living in a Blue State is going save you from Orange Hitler, think again. As Molly Jong Fast notes, even Americans in Democrat-heavy states will be vulnerable. “If we are the ‘enemy within,’ that means we go to the camps too.”
It’s true that Trump does himself no favors using exaggerations and often-reckless hyperbole. Many of quotes used as evidence of Trump’s alleged Hitlerian disposition are at best misleading and often just outright lies.
The most recent is the claim that Trump promised to deploy the military to political opponents – the “enemy within” –when it was just a garbled section of a speech about civil unrest. It is reminiscent of the allegation that Trump called neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.” It’s not true. Yet, Democrats repeat the lie nearly every day.
Nothing gets past them.
Now, to be fair, there are Democrats out there who offer more expansive arguments about Trump. Take the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who contends, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” The Washington Post’s Robert Kagan, who warned in 2016 that Trump was how “fascism comes to America,” and now says a “Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” likened the billionaire not only to Hitler but Napoleon.
I can’t believe they forgot Mao and Ming the Merciless.
Do all these left-wingers really believe Trump will round up his political foes and send them to concentration camps?
Some almost surely do. Once you whip yourself into a frenzy over politics, you will believe a lot of things. Partisanship is unhealthy for the soul. And for the modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, threatens the very pillars of “democracy.”
Most pundits and politicos, however, are more than likely to be cynical operatives, willing to tear the country apart to enhance their power.
As we’ve seen from the two attempted assassination on Trump, if you keep telling people their political opponents are fascists who want strip away their agency and liberties, and possibly send them to detention, at some point they’re going to start believing you.
Maybe that point is now. A new ABC News poll finds that an astonishing 87 percent of Democrats believe Trump is a “fascist.” This is reminiscent of polls taken during the heyday of the Russia-panic mongering, which found over 60 percent of Democrats believed it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Russia tampered with order to get Donald Trump elected”—even though there was not a shred of evidence pointing to a manipulation of votes.
Of course, none of this happened in a vacuum.
Condemning GOP presidential candidates as would-be Hitlers goes back at least to the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater. “The stench of fascism is in the air,” then-California Gov. Pat Brown famously declared. The practice revved up after Ronald Reagan won the presidency. Democratic William Clay said the Gipper was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from ‘Mein Kampf.’ ”
By the time George W. Bush was in the White House, it was the norm to suggest the president was like Hitler. Some, like left-wing megadonor George Soros, accused the moderate Republican president of adhering to the “supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany.”
All of it pales in comparison to the attacks that have been launched on Trump. It began the day he walked down the escalators in 2015 and announced his candidacy.
“It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust. Here’s why” was one explainer that ran the Washington Post. Another Washington Post op-ed implored people to not “compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.” Why? “It belittles Hitler.”
On MSNBC, former Sen. Claire McCaskill warned that Trump was even “more dangerous than Hitler,” because the former president “has no philosophy he believes in” and “is not going for a grandiose scheme of international dominance.”
The key differences between Trump and the German fascists, MSNBC contributor Bruce Bartlett once explained, was that “Hitler served honorably in the military, Trump didn’t; Hitler was faithful to his wife, Trump cheated on all his wives; Hitler wrote a book, Trump’s were all ghostwritten.”
It’s one thing for emotionally distraught left-wing pundits to say stupid things on television. It’s another thing for elected officials to spread paranoid historical equivalences that belittle not only the memory of millions who died in unimaginably horrifying ways under the Nazi regime but their fellow citizen.
When President Biden’s fortunes were faltering in 2022, he traveled to Philadelphia to deliver a prime-time speech, typically reserved for solemn moments. In front of crimson background, the president gave one of the angriest, most unhinged speeches in presidential history, accusing tens of millions of Republican voters of supporting “semi-fascism.”
We have been forever warned that it’s conservatives who are most susceptible to conspiracy theorists. In contemporary America. Democrats, incapable or unwilling to debate issues, have turned to paranoiac slanders, villainizing their partisan adversaries as seditionists and Nazis.
Perhaps the most destructive effect of the modern left’s embrace of this worldview is that they increasingly see their neighbors as fifth columnists — a hallmark of the authoritarian mindset.
And yet, tragically, this is the closing argument of Kamala Harris and Democratic Party in 2024.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner author of the new book “The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists.”