Vice President Kamala Harris on Oct. 23 dramatically escalated her campaign’s rhetoric to defeat former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election by likening her opponent to German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, seizing on an allegation without evidence reported by The Atlantic that Trump had once wished he had generals like Hitler had, a charge Trump has denied.
In a post on X on Oct. 23, Harris stated, “Donald Trump vowed to be a dictator on day one. He vowed to use the military to carry out personal and political vendettas. His former chief of staff [John Kelly] said he wanted generals like Hitler’s. Trump wants unchecked power. In 13 days, the American people will decide what they want.”
And yet, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who never formally resigned despite apparently believing he was working for Hitler. Instead, Kelly was unceremoniously fired, with Trump making the announcement in Dec. 2018, stating, “John Kelly will be leaving, I don’t know if I can say retiring, but great guy… John Kelly will be leaving at the end of the year.”
Somehow, Kelly didn’t bother to mention that Trump was a Hitler-wannabe in 2020 when Trump was seeking reelection, instead opting to allege without evidence that Trump had called military service members who died in combat “suckers” and “losers”, another charge Trump and other White House staff were said to be present have denied.
The X post by Harris linked to a video of Harris speaking in front of the White House the same day, wherein she stated, “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… This is a window into who Donald Trump really is.”
Later, at a CNN town hall on Oct. 23, Harris doubled down on the allegation saying Trump would be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
As if two assassination attempts on Trump in recent months were not enough, one which nearly claimed his life in Butler, Pa. on July 13, it is clearly Harris — not Trump — who is recklessly invoking Hitler.
In doing so, Harris not only once again endangers Trump and his campaign’s lives, but those of his millions of supporters, one of whom, Corey Comperatore, whose life was claimed in Butler by the assassin’s bullets while Comperatore shielded his family.
Harris even associated Trump — whose son-in-law, daughter and grandchildren are all Jewish, and who has been a staunch supporter of Israel, even moving the U.S. embassy there to Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, and was the first U.S. President to recognize Jerusalem is in fact Israel’s capital, and instituted the historic Abraham Accords between Israel and her Arab neighbors to ensure the Jewish state’s survival — with the Holocaust, the systematic elimination and murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million Slavs, Gypsies and others during World War II.
While the would-be assassins’ manifestos are not fully public, it is easy to imagine that if someone believes that a modern-day Hitler was taking over the country, that any action, including murder, but also refusing to certify the election should Trump win could be justified.
Again, it is dangerous, but with a straight face, Harris delivers the punch despite the fact Trump has already served and never took any actions even remotely comparable to Nazi Germany’s wars and genocides.
In fact, Trump and Harris for that matter, like all elected officials in the United States have almost nothing in common with the racist policies of the Nazi Third Reich.
Neither Harris nor Trump is trying to establish the Volk (ethnic Germans who lived outside of Germany), concocting a myth of progenitor fake Aryans who Hitler falsely believed were responsible for all of humanity’s great civilizations, attempting to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian Bible and impose so-called “positive” Christianity on the Church, rewriting history in the process, putting everyone in re-education systems to adopt those new beliefs or implementing a genocide of those who were being erased, put into camps and exterminated.
Because, these were not fringe but were all central aspects to the Nazis’ political program, centered on Hiter’s own belief system espoused in Mein Kampf. It is almost impossible to account for the aims and scale of the Holocaust without taking these core tenets into consideration, which when put into context, wholly account for Hitler’s and the Nazis’ actions before and during the war.
Neither candidate is Hitler, and no major political movement by Democrats nor Republicans in modern American history really resembles let alone compares to that sort of eugenicist and revisionist rendering of history as the Nazis had, although there are certainly fringe groups not just in America but all over the world who may still echo it. But the truth is almost nothing in world history really comes close to what occurred in World War II.
So, to invoke Hitler and the Nazis’ racist program as Harris is now, without apparently knowing much about it, instead, might be viewed as sheer desperation by the Harris campaign as polls continue to show Trump leading in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona, and may even be leading nationally. If Harris was safely ahead in the race she might not bother with indulging in this.
On the other hand, “protecting democracy” polls high enough in various surveys that there is definitely an audience for this. Besides bolster the Democratic base to turn out against Trump, the other target audience are the small percent of Republicans who opposed Trump after the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol after Trump had given a speech wherein he had called on supporters to make their “voices peacefully and patriotically heard” and who afterwards deployed the National Guard to put down the riot and condemned any violence that had occurred.
On Harris’ other charges of Trump being a would-be dictator and prosecuting his political opponents, in the meantime, Harris has routinely celebrated prosecuting her opponent, Trump. At a Milwaukee, Wisc. rally three months ago, Harris stated “I was a courtroom prosecutor… I took on perpetrators of all kinds… I know Donald Trump’s type” as her supporters led chants of “Lock Trump up! Lock Trump up!” as she looked on smiling. Harris went on to highlight Trump’s various prosecutions and the conviction obtained thus far in New York as an advantage for her campaign, exploiting the politically charged prosecution of Trump that should send chills down everyone’s spine.
Harris is a demagogue who knows all about state power to target people because as she notes she was a prosecutor, and she has no problem with it being used against her opponent in this election.
Harris has also supported the social media censorship of conservatives and Republicans, with the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security and FBI targeting opponents for supposed misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (MDM).
And Harris has supported the most racist program since segregation in the way of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) racial and gender hiring quotas that seek to exclude, demote and disenfranchise White males from jobs.
While none of those things make her Hitler (that’s a special kind of crazy), Harris’ reckless use of the same charge against Trump nonetheless sets a predicate for other crazies and overzealous prosecutors out there to take matters into their own hands, to target Trump and his supporters with force: legal or lethal.
This is deceptive, desperate and dangerous and yet again sets a predicate wherein should Trump win, the result might not be upheld, threatening to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Harris is playing with fire — and she knows it.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
