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 for the American people,” she said, “from the people who know him best.”
His family? His longtime business associates? The New York tabloids?
No. According to the vice president, the people who know him best are “the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.”
That 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 a few months later was named White House chief of staff. On Dec. 8, 2018, Trump announced that Kelly was out.
But Kelly certainly doesn’t hold a grudge over being fired. Not at all. It’s just that he happened to remember, two weeks before the 2024 election, that Trump admires Hitler.
“He said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Kamala Harris intoned in her most serious voice.
Harris was repeating the story that Kelly told The Atlantic. One of the major investors in that publication is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who happens to be Harris’s longtime friend and donor.
Kelly also told the story to 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 actuality, that story was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was later fined by the Federal Election Commission for falsely reporting the fees it was charged for fabricating the story as if those bills were legal expenses.
Hillary was back at it this week, telling CNN that Trump’s upcoming New York rally, to be held at Madison Square Garden, is exactly like a pro-Nazi rally that was held at that venue by the German-American Bund on Feb. 20, 1939.
In mid-October, longtime Clinton family confidante and campaign advisor James Carville told CNN’s Jake Tapper that if he was advising the Harris campaign, he’d “have a flood of people say,” that Trump is “holding a rally in Madison Square Garden that, I’m sorry, is a mimic of a rally held on February 20, 1939, by the American Nazi Party. And we’ve got to quit being timid about making these connections that he is going out of his way to make.”
That’s exactly what happened. A week later, there was Kamala Harris in front of the official residence of the vice president of the United States, reading aloud, “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.” 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 repeating the John Kelly story about Trump wanting Hitler’s generals. Obama went on to list other former officials who worked for Trump (and were fired) and who now are happy to tell MSNBC that Trump is a “fascist.”
Trump flatly denied making the comments Kelly attributed to him, posting online that Kelly had “made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred!” The former president wrote, “This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together. He was tough and dumb.”
Let me take you back to the spring of 2016, when first-time candidate Donald Trump was chosen by GOP primary voters over a busload of candidates with years or decades of government experience. Then in September, in the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump called Clinton’s endorsers “political hacks that I see that have led our country so brilliantly over the last 10 years with their knowledge,” adding, “Look at the mess that we’re in.”
So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that Trump didn’t always take the advice of the bipartisan “so brilliantly” crowd when he was in the White House, or that they want the former president to lose this election. If he’s re-elected on Nov. 5, many of those people will not have jobs in the government for at least another four years, and that’s their best-case scenario. For anyone who has been cashing in with corrupt or sketchy dealings, unemployment could be the least of their problems if Trump returns as the nation’s chief executive on Jan. 20.
Considering how little credibility these national security names had back in 2016, it’s not likely they’ll persuade many voters by becoming part of James Carville’s “flood of people” repeating the absurd talking point that Trump is copying Hitler. Trump was president for four years and the total absence of death camps, world wars and round-ups of political enemies was hard to miss.
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Apparently Trump was so busy moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and negotiating the Abraham Accords to bring normalized relations to Israel and its Arab neighbors that he completely forgot to invade Poland.
This all leaves one important question unanswered.
When the Democrats discover that calling Trump “Hitler” doesn’t convince anyone to vote for Kamala Harris, what next?
They could try calling him Lord Voldemort. Or Lex Luthor.
How about Professor Moriarty?
Snidely Whiplash? O.J. Simpson? Alan Brady from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”?
Face it, Hitler is a hard act to follow. Once a campaign starts calling its opponent and his supporters Nazis, it’s time to ring down the curtain. If the latest polls in the battleground states are correct, this show is over.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley