They’ve attacked him. They’ve impeached him. They’ve arrested him. They’ve desperately tried to imprison him. They unconstitutionally denied him access to the ballot. They’ve tried to kill him.
Democrats have failed at every turn to get rid of Donald Trump.
Now the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy and their corporate media allies are turning to the last vestige of hope for the desperate in an extremely tight presidential race: Lies.
And name-calling.
‘Do You Think Donald Trump Is a Fascist?’
Democrat presidential hopeful Kamala Harris opened Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with a long tirade in which she warned ostensibly undecided voters that Trump would be a dictator if given another term in the Oval Office.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” host Anderson Cooper asked the vice president in the opening moments of the latest long-form, packaged-as-news political ad for the Harris-Walz campaign.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris answered as if reciting an unholy wedding vow.
Of course she does. The “Trump is Hitler” narrative is Harris’ — and the left’s — closing argument in a Reader’s Digest presidential campaign for the Democrats. It must be noted that Harris’ abridged quest began with the Democrats’ bloodless coup that removed the demented Democrat president of the United States from his run for a second term.
In an act of corporate media collusion so transparent it burns the eyes, the shameless Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, published the hit piece earlier this week that Harris and her team are using in one last-ditch effort to paint the former president as “unfit” to be president again. The smear job, citing bitter former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly, claims, among other outlandish charges, that while in office Trump suggested Hitler “did some good things.” The story, mostly employing anonymous sources, was quickly debunked on the record by multiple people who were in the room with Trump.
As my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson wrote, the story “would never have passed muster in a newsroom 20 years ago.” And former Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi aptly noted on X, “The Hunter Biden laptop story couldn’t be repeated by any major outlet because it hadn’t been independently verified. The Atlantic pieces can be repeated by everyone. Weird how that works.”
Of course, it’s not weird at all. Painting the former president as the devil has long been the playbook. Lies and empty accusations are just fine, if they’re in pursuit of what the left thinks is right. And what is right to the Democrats is holding on to power by any means necessary.
Just ask the late spawn of satan, Harry Reid. The nasty, formerly breathing Democrat senator infamously lied about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney not paying his taxes. Reid lied from the Senate floor. When called out on his lie, Reid sneered, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
‘She May Lose’
That’s the left. It’s what they do. And, yes, sometimes the lies work.
But there is political peril for Harris. Voters have heard it all from Democrats, particularly the patently false stuff about Trump and his relationship with the military and service members.
As pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz told CNN’s Kasie Hunt hours before her network’s town hall, Harris runs a real risk of alienating the relatively few undecideds in the race. Luntz said Harris did well in the opening days of her Joe Biden replacement campaign focusing on “why she should be elected.” Remember all those “good vibes” and joy and crap?
“She’s had the best 60 days of any presidential candidate in modern history. And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused on him and said, ‘Don’t vote for me, vote against him,’ that’s when everything froze,” the strategist said.
The polls show as much. Trump in recent weeks has devoured any gap as Harris could no longer hide and had to answer at least some actual questions about her record and her agenda. In Harris parlance, he is unburdened by what has been.
Trump is defined, Luntz said.
“He’s not gaining, he’s not losing. He’s who he is and his vote is where it is,” the pollster said.
“[Harris] is less well defined and if she continues just to define this race as ‘vote against Trump,’ she’s going to stay where she is now and she may lose.”
But desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess. Democrats haven’t been able to stop Trump to date. So they’re hoping to deal him a death blow with lies.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.