Just when you think the Harris campaign can’t sink any lower, it does.
This has been a week in which we’ve seen the Democrats plumb new depths. It’s clear they’re out of ideas, out of enthusiasm—out of time. They’re desperate and they don’t know what to do. Election day is almost here. Kamala Harris can’t stop shouting. Even ice-cool Barry Obamna has taken his hands out of his pockets and raised the volume.
It’s bad. Really bad.
Two things stick out. The first is the “Trump is Hitler” rhetoric. It’s getting worse.
This isn’t new. Trump has been “Orange Hitler” to a certain kind of hysterical retarded person since he first came down that escalator, nearly a decade ago.
And when Trump isn’t the living incarnation of history’s most famous art-school reject, he’s someone else bad from history, usually Julius Caesar.
I won’t say those parallels are carefully chosen. The Caesar parallel, at least, has specific content and context. It’s meant to evoke the final days of the Roman Republic and tell us that Trump, like old Julius when he made that fateful decision to cross the Rubicon, is preparing to bring to an end the centuries-old experiment in self-government we call American democracy.
Trump is an existential threat to the United States of America. Got it.
But the Caesar thing is also meant to tell us what to do, and that’s where it gets much more sinister. Every schoolboy used to know that Caesar was only stopped by a conspiracy of his fellow senators, who stabbed him 23 times on the Senate floor.
When people like Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland’s husband, tells us a “Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and make references to Caesar and the article has a photomontage of Trump’s head on a bust of Caesar, they’re telling us the same thing needs to be done to stop Trump as stopped Caesar, only we can do it in advance. I’ve called this “the Brutus Option,” and I predicted way back in December that Trump would be subject to an assassination attempt during this campaign. There have now been at least two, maybe even four.
Sic semper tyrannis, and all that.
The Hitler thing is just a stand-in for the Devil or Satan or Beelzebub or whatever he used to be called. The ultimate evil. It’s just a way of saying, “This man is bad.” So bad, in fact, that we don’t need to talk about specifics, we don’t need to debate, we can roll those two syllables off our tongues—HIT-ler—and be done with it.
We say the name and that’s enough. It’s why Vladimir Putin is called “Hitler” too, or “Putler” as my friend Bronze Age Pervert has it, because it means we don’t have to talk about the reasons why a Russian leader might invade Ukraine that have something to do with NATO expansionism in violation of sworn promises and State Department-backed color revolutions on Russia’s doorstep and so on. Putin is just an insane despot. And insane despots, by definition, can’t be reasoned with. They just have to be beaten and either locked up or killed.
You know this, I’m sure.
Anyway, this week we had an Atlantic hitpiece claiming Trump is a fervent admirer of Hitler, at least according to his former chief of staff, John Kelly. Kelly said Trump expressed admiration for the man with the little moustache on a number of occasions—so of course it must be true and we must all vote for Kamala Harris instead.
Democrats, including the President of Vice herself, seized on the comments. Harris held an impromptu press conference at which she deplored, painfully, Hitler-loving Trump and his disrespect for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Then we had Hillary Clinton, looking every inch the proverb “you get the face you deserve,” telling us that Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden is nothing but a reenactment of the famous 1939 German American Bund rally that took place there. Twenty thousand people attended that rally to hear the pro-Nazi leader of the Bund, Fritz Julius Kuhn, speak beneath an enormous image of George Washington flanked by two equally large swastikas.
The rally begins at 5pm EST today.
We’ve had Tim Walz and Gavin Newsome saying Trump is a fascist, and John Bolton saying Trump is “too stupid to be a fascist.”
It’s too much even for Democrats to stomach.
At a press conference on Saturday, New York Mayor Eric Adams—a man who could hardly be accused of harbouring secret Republican sympathies—said, “enough is enough.”
Adams was asked explicitly if he thinks Donald Trump is a “fascist.”
In response, Adams said there was no question of the former president being a “fascist,” since what Adolf Hitler did, and what a fascist government actually looks like, is well known.
“You know, I have been—had those terms hurled at me by some political leaders in the city using terms like ‘Hitler’ and ‘fascist,’” Adams said.
“My answer is no. I know what Hitler has done, and I know what a fascist regime looks like. I think… we could all dial down the temperature.”
Adams also addressed criticism of Clinton’s comments about Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden.
“I’ve heard people say that the former president should not be able to have a rally in Madison Square Garden. I strongly disagree. This is America, this is New York. I think it’s important that we allow individuals who exercise their right to get their message clear to New Yorkers. Our job as a city, and as a police department is to make sure they can do that in a peaceful way. I think that we must be extremely cautious. The heat we turn up today, pre-election, is going to have to be the heat we’re going to have to govern in.”
Adams, like other more level-headed Democrats, may only be saying this to hedge his bets for a Trump victory, but it still feels significant. Less than ten days out from the election, the Democrats’ unity is—well, there isn’t any.
And now for the second thing that really stands out: the Democrats’ latest attack ad.
It begins with a young man masturbating to internet pornography on his phone, in bed. An old man in a suit and red tie suddenly appears, snatches his phone and tells him, “Sorry, you can’t do that.”
“What the hell, man!? How did you get in here?” the young man whimpers.
“I’m your Republican congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning porn nationwide.”
“You can’t tell me what to do! Get out of my bedroom, you creep!”
“I won the last election, so it’s my decision. I’m just going to watch and make sure you don’t finish—illegally.”
The ad, called “Republicans rubbing you the wrong way,” was produced by the Progress Action Fund and Defend the vote, and is said to have cost $2.5 million. It’s being aired on streaming services in seven swing states.
Watch it for yourself. It’s disgusting and embarrassing. Thirty seconds of your life you’ll never get back. Your hope and faith in humanity gone forever.
While Donald Trump builds huge momentum in the closing days of his bid for a second term, this is the Democrat Party, making its final case to the American people: Our opponent is Hitler and he wants to stop you jerking off. Vote for us if you don’t like Hitler and like jerking off.
The pits. You couldn’t make it up.
I dread to think what’s in store next week.