In the last two weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has been trying to revive her stagnant campaign by smearing Trump as being Hitlerian and a fascist.
She claims Trump is planning to put his enemies in encampments.
Yet in the modern era, it was not Trump who put large numbers of US residents and citizens into “relocation camps,” but liberal Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt who sent Japanese-American citizens and residents into them.
If Harris refers to Trump’s supposed fascist policies during his prior four-year tenure, there is no such evidence.
Nonetheless, the once “joyful” Harris is ending her campaign by trafficking in lies and smears reminiscent of the Joe McCarthy era.
Recall that fascists hijack law enforcement and the military to suspend constitutional rights and punish enemies.
But Trump did neither.
Instead, in 2016, a corrupt FBI went after Trump himself during the Obama administration with the bogus Steele dossier.
The FBI, which in 2016 had hired the faker Steele, in 2020 fused with social media to suppress accurate news reporting of the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
A number of former FBI directors and intelligence officials — John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe — who openly sought to destroy Trump had a long history of either lying or feigning amnesia under oath.
Fascists try to warp the legal system.
But Trump’s own Justice Department selected an independent special counsel to investigate the invented Russian collusion accusations against him.
In vast contrast, the Biden Justice Department coordinated with Georgia prosecutors Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James to prosecute Trump, bankrupt him and keep off the campaign trail.
Fascists use their governments to destroy their enemies.
During Trump’s term, for the first time in history, the House of Representatives impeached a first-term president twice.
And in another first, the Senate tried Trump as a private citizen.
A self-styled “anonymous” federal official bragged openly of deliberately, and likely unlawfully, leading a bureaucratic cabal to sabotage Trump’s lawful executive orders.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, in collusion with other bureaucrats, deliberately leaked a classified presidential phone call in an effort to ensure that Trump was impeached.
Fascists seek to change existing laws to destroy opponents and illegally consolidate power.
Currently, it is only the Democrats who seek to pack the court, destroy the Electoral College, end the Senate filibuster, and create two new states and thus gain four left-wing senators.
In key states, they radically changed voting laws.
As a result, roughly 70% of voters in 2020 did not cast their ballots in person on Election Day — even as the traditional rejection rates for fraudulent ballots mysteriously dived amid the influx.
Fascists arbitrarily nullify any laws they feel do not aid their agendas.
Biden-Harris destroyed immigration law in order to bring in more than 12 million illegal aliens and gain new constituencies.
They also protected sanctuary cities, as some 600 such jurisdictions illegally and with impunity nullified federal immigration laws in neo-Confederate fashion.
Fascists seek to politicize the military.
But in Trump’s case, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, brazenly violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by libeling Trump as a fascist.
Worse still, Milley sabotaged the chain of command by ordering theater commanders to report directly to him in times of serious crises.
And in near-treasonous fashion, Milley contacted his Chinese communist counterpart in the People’s Liberation Army to assure him that he would warn the Chinese military before carrying out any Trump order he felt existentially dangerous.
Some of the most prominent retired four-star military officers — again in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — publicly smeared Trump as a coward, liar, fascist, Hitler-like, a Mussolini, a creator of Auschwitz-like death camps, and worthy of being removed “the sooner the better.”
Fascists seek to control and weaponize the media.
So Facebook and Twitter both conspired with the FBI to censure news accounts favorable to Trump.
The major newspapers, social media corporations, television networks and public broadcasting systematically and continually attacked Trump, censured his supporters and fused with his opponents.
Why then the charges of Trump the fascist and Hitler reincarnation?
Simple. Harris’s personal negatives are rising, her polls inert.
She has abandoned her prior run-out-the-clock avoidance of the media and her smiley “joy” campaign, and instead now embraces the big lie, while President Joe Biden writes off Trump supporters as “garbage.”
Harris is now confirming to voters that she really can neither think nor speak well and has no consistent agenda that appeals to the middle class.
So, in final desperation, Harris is smearing Trump as a fascist, even though ironically he has been the target of fascist machinations from her own party and supporters for nearly a decade.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
