By LEE SMITH
The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country.
As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss.
By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests?
For instance, last week the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted former Trump administration officials claiming that the Republican candidate is contemptuous of America’s armed forces and, according to Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, wishes he could command the same respect that Hitler commanded from his general officers.
This is not the first time that Trump has been compared to Hitler or that Kelly, a retired Marine general, turned on his former commander-in-chief. Kelly was the key source for a story published before the 2020 election, also in the Atlantic and also by Jeffrey Goldberg, that alleged Trump had called American WWII soldiers buried in French cemeteries “suckers and losers.”
The veracity of Kelly’s latest revelation that Trump admires Hitler must of course be judged against the fact that he waited five years to disclose it, even if it is unlikely to have much effect on the current election cycle. The military, and veterans of the Global War on Terror in particular, overwhelmingly support the candidate opposed to waging endless and strategically pointless foreign wars. Moreover, Trump has weathered far more damaging fabrications — like the false allegations that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence — that only galvanized support for him.
The purpose of the Hitler narrative is not to alter the electoral preferences of left-wing media audiences already solidly in the anti-Trump column, but rather to justify taking extreme measures against the Republican candidate and the America First movement and ensure that the bulk of the military sides with the anti-Trump plot. Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote.
For example, last week the New York Times published a long interview with a scholar of fascism who declared that Trump is a fascist. The paper of record followed up with another long article by two Harvard professors calling for mass mobilization in the event of a Trump victory. The proposal suggests that private industry join civil society organizations to ostracize Trump and his supporters and engage in large public protests to provoke a crisis. Kamala Harris herself, commenting on Kelly’s allegations in the Atlantic story, claimed that her opponent “is a fascist” during a CNN town hall.
These stories are only the latest in an ongoing series of media reports warning of a Trump dictatorship. Beltway insider Robert Kagan was out of the gate early, writing even before Trump wrapped up the nomination that, without mounting resistance against the Republican candidate, America is “a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.” A January story from NBC claimed that Trump was exploring ways to use the military to assassinate political rivals.
The propaganda meant to establish a predicate to employ violence to stop Trump has been reinforced at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.
When Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if he was confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the 2024 election, he answered, “If Trump wins, no I’m not confident at all.” Then, seemingly correcting himself, the president said, “I mean if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose there will be a bloodbath.’”
Biden was referring to a comment Trump made in March about Chinese efforts to build auto manufacturing plants in Mexico. The export of those cars to America, Trump said, would result in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry. Naturally, the Biden campaign used the figure of speech to accuse Trump of inciting “political violence.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) advertised a more specific scenario leading to violence when he promised that Congress will remove Trump by invoking Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office. “It’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” Raskin has said. “And then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions.”
But the most significant post-election scenarios were drafted by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official whose 2020 wargaming with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has been credited by the left-wing press for its “accuracy.”
Ahead of the last election, Brooks and TIP, according to the Guardian, “imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the U.S. Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.”
That’s a fanciful way of obscuring the truth. TIP anticipated that Trump would contest the results because party operatives knew beforehand that election irregularities resulting from new voting procedures, like mass mail-in voting, designed to facilitate fraud would be glaringly obvious. Thus, because of Brooks’s past performance and her central role in a network comprising the media and current and former defense officials, her work is widely acknowledged as the Left’s roadmap for post-election contingency planning.
For the 2024 election, Brooks teamed up with journalist Barton Gellman to run a series of wargames in May and June under the auspices of the Democracy Futures Project (DFP), part of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
As with the 2020 wargames, the two opposing teams were staffed by former government officials from the Republican as well as the Democrat establishment. The results were announced with a mid-summer media rollout to ready other officials and operatives for likely post-election operations. Four articles were published the same day, July 30 — in the New Republic; the Guardian; the Washington Post, which ran a piece by Gellman; and Brooks herself writing for the Bulwark — showing that Brooks and Gellman’s scenarios, at least those disclosed, assume a Trump victory. The play then is to block.
Disruption, destabilization, and violence are legitimized by a narrative driven by self-congratulatory mirror-imaging and projection in which the so-called defenders of democracy face down an authoritarian Trump.
Brooks and her cohort ignore the evidence of Biden and Harris’s abuse of power and assert that it is Trump who will who use the federal government against his opponents. It is Trump’s CIA and DOJ, according to the wargamers, that will cashier national security officials for “raising concerns about the politicization of intelligence and the pressure to launch ideologically motivated investigations.” It is Trump who will use the IRS to go after nonprofits. It is at Trump’s behest that journalists will be targeted and Democrat-aligned media outlets investigated as the FCC revokes broadcast licenses. And, writes Brooks, the Trump administration will force out top military officials on account of their “objecting to Trump’s cozy relationship with Russia.”
The forecasts read like paranoid fantasy, but they’re carefully scripted inversions of reality meant to to rewrite history and obscure the crimes of the Left that have shaken the pillars of the republic.
The most alarming scenario involves political and military officials “resisting efforts to federalize their national guard units and send them to quell anti-Trump protests in major U.S. cities.” That is, the post-election playbook calls for (or takes for granted) widespread violence so intense that the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The forecast posits a split in the senior ranks of the U.S. military after Trump replaces the chiefs of staff with officers who comply with his order and deploy forces to put down the riots.
This is where the political violence cultivated by the destructive Left is leading: blood-soaked streets and a divided military. The purpose of the Hitler narrative is to force members of the military to turn against Trump. After all, loyalty to the constitution means fighting Hitler, not obeying his orders.
With the two recent attempts on Trump’s life, we’ve seen how the regime’s narratives simultaneously create the conditions for violence and explain it away. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA, Democratic Party officials and the media not only denied any connection between the shooting and their inflammatory rhetoric but even blamed Trump himself. After all, he and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy,” wrote David Frum in, of all places, the Atlantic.
On this view, Trump has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately responsible for the attempt on his own life. But that is another inversion of reality, tailored to suit the bloodlust of a dark regime. It is the logic of terror: It is only the violence of our victims that drove us to slaughter them.
This self-serving logic not only gets the Left off the hook for past depredations; it serves as the pretext for future violence against Trump, his aides, and his supporters. After November 5, this weaponized narrative could be expanded to justify violence on a mass scale designed to break the republic.
Lee Smith is a bestselling author whose new book, “Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic,” was published October 22. This article was first published at TomKlingenstein.com.
This article was originally published by RealClearWire and made available via RealClearWire.
An effective tactic is accuse your adversary of what you are planning to do yourself.
Donald J. Trump is the odds on favorite to win the presidential election for multiple reasons, not least being the Democrats stumbled badly by advancing a candidate abundantly lacking in executive and administrative skills and incapable of connecting with an enormous swath of the electorate likely to vote this election cycle. Harris has Lia at people and reflects a certain kind of personality engaged in politics who actually lacks hardened, mature political skills.
None of which suggests Trump is without flaws. He has a few.
In the end, Harris will lose because she comes up short in the minds of most voters on the economy and border security.
Harris had. Chance to inform the voters about what she would do as our president. She didn’t and her failure practically guarantees Donald J. Trump will prevail. He turned out to be the better candidate.
There will b hand-wringing when Trump and s sworn in for Term II, but no significant violence.
The hysterical projections spun out by this author reflect much of the kind of silly sentiments expressed by coastal progressives, most of which reflect a fabulous detachment from reality as it actually exists.
My recommendation is the author go out and get a real job instead is spinning out rank speculation.
If they do, they better understand the consequences. There are 18,000,000 veterans alive in our republic who most likely not put up with that sh–. If they do, they will most likely destroy their own cities as they did in the past. I’m thinking most Americans are law abiding patriotic citizens.
Would be funny to watch Antifa and BLM burn down blue cities cause Trump won
Democrats will not give up power, they have said that. Hillary Clinton herself has said it. It’s why the rhetoric has gone off the charts these last few days before the election. Many see through it but there are those who believe every word and harbor hate on a fanatical scale. We’ll see what happens.
The letter signed by intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop accusations “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” doesn’t offer legal retribution because it was all weasel wording, even if it outed the weasels who signed it (maybe we need all flag officers to be tested as well?…….Did Obama do so when he purged the flag officers corp?) Any “split” within military ranks is fully open to UCMJ action, though, and treason is the most serious charge on the books.
People should be more careful of manipulation. Satan didn’t use nuclear weapons to destroy the universe. He used a lie.
Nothing like projecting the GOP plan onto the Democrats, the MAGA crowd demonstrated what they are capable of on Jan. 6, 2021. No there is no deep state out to get Trump, there is no plan. He fears law and order as he knows he has broken the law consistently. He wants to go back to the good old days when the wealthy could donate their way out of trouble.
Only you missed 1 thing Mr commie Alaskans for freedom. No one was armed. Your insurrection was BS.
The left has been pushing and pushing and pushing using law, stretching the law making up rules attacking media stealing elections, letting criminals out, not even arresting them, and they talk about war.
The selection will be interesting and will see what happens after the fourth, but be careful what they wish for turn this country upside down. Used to be a great country, but the politicians and elites have ruined it by stealing lying and robbing the taxpayer.
We have all of heard the ‘screaming harpies’ as I describe them, stating unto the individual, be they a leftist politician, leftist ‘journalist’, leftist ‘celebrity’, etc., that they shall be somehow ‘targeted’ by, and ‘imprisoned’ by Trump, as well as all of their leftist idealogue friends and groups, such as same sex couples, interracial couples, transexuals, etc., even if individuals from these same groups do not adhere unto their own leftist beliefs, because it is the victimization that matters, not the actual threat itself, or which there is none.
So, one must wonder, within pragmatic thought, what these leftist woe mongers are actually afraid of?
Not of Trump, as a second term President, because he did NONE of the things they so thought he would have within his first term, so it must be something else.
Methinks that is the exposure of their wrongdoings, which lawfully, would land them within incarceration, regardless of whether Trump was actually elected POTUS, but by the rule of law within this Nation.
What have they done, hidden by the cloak of the supposed media that supported them?
I believe fully that what is feared most is exposure unto what ‘they’ have engaged within, that has remained hidden for so long.
Trump will lay open the record of their acts, and that is what they fear most.
The truth.
Trump didn’t fire Kelly, he promoted him then praised him when he left. He didn’t fire Pence. He didn’t fire Mattis, Miley or the vast majority of other Trump appointees telling the truth about him. So this whole argument that they are all lying because Trump fired them is BS. Imagine telling yourself that John Kelly, Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and Mike Pence are all lying to you, but a twice-impeached, rapist, business fraud, convicted felon who paints himself orange and rambles about sharks, batteries and a golfer’s appendage is telling you truth.
If Trump wins and seriously considers repid deportation of 1 million people, we should all prepare for war. Sheer lunacy.
Almost every lefty is intolerant to any other point of view. I’m ready to loose many friends this coming administration. And yes a civil war is coming.
Not true, but I know many righties on here that are.
Somehow, the thought of thousands of pussyhat-wearing soyboys rioting doesn’t instill much fear in me!
Years ago this might have been fictional. Today, I believe every word of it!
If Trump wins the left will riot. If he loses the left will riot under the guise of celebrating.
Only real question is how much damage they will do and if they actually kill someone this time.
If he looses, the right will riot claiming cheating and restitution. This after the hundreds of court challenges get shot down.
Looking forward to meeting you forkner. In battle. Nose to nose just you and me. You’re a Marxist pos.