Political campaigns lie. This comes as a shock to no one. But sometimes the lies that campaigns tell are so big, so absurd, that there really should be lasting consequences.
In the presidential campaign, the lie that “Donald Trump is worse than Hitler” is one such lie that should have consequences that ripple well beyond November.
Many Democrats have spent the last eight years calling Trump a Nazi. In truth, many of them have spent the last 24 years calling all Republicans Nazis. Remember “BushHitler?” But oh, they loved John McCain…until he was the Republican presidential nominee. Then he was a Nazi, too.
Mitt Romney had all the edge of a warm glass of milk, but it was apparently a warm glass of Nazi milk. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was called a Nazi by Democrats and their media allies during his gubernatorial reelection campaign and during the primaries for this presidential election, just in case he’d won the nomination.
So these guys don’t leave much to chance. They also don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
It’s not unusual to attack your political opponent. It’s less common to tell people you are all that stands between them and the violent death of the republic.
Such unhinged rhetoric has certainly escalated lately. Is it impossible to recognize that all those ridiculous claims that there will be no more elections if Trump wins again might just inspire some unstable person to take matters into his own hands?
If you are willing to call your political opponent literally worse than one of history’s greatest monsters, is it unreasonable to think that at least a handful of your listeners — perhaps a few mentally unstable people with a political obsession — might take you seriously and act to stop the threat?
“Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation,” Biden said just three weeks ago. “That is not hyperbole. He’s a threat to our freedom. He’s a threat to our democracy. He is literally a threat to the America that we stand for.”
If you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, you would do it, right? So if Biden and Hillary Clinton believe their own assertions that Trump is an existential threat to our nation and our way of life, then how can they be happy that Trump survived the assassination attempt over the weekend?
If Democrats and left-wing commentators have been at all serious in what they say about Trump, then they really should not even be expressing relief about Trump’s safety and recovery, as most of them have done. How can they be happy that orange Hitler — a literal “threat to our democracy” who they claim will cancel the 2028 election if he is allowed to resume the presidency — is doing well and will soon be back on his glide-path toward the total destruction of our country?
The simplest answer is that none of these people are sincere. None of them believe a word they have been saying about Trump. And the assassination attempt — thank goodness it failed — has at least succeeded in exposing their lies.
I have written before, including in my book, that much of the left’s political strategy is to keep people in an emotional frenzy. They understand that people in an emotional state are easily manipulable and less likely to think or act rationally. The problem is, it isn’t easy for them to keep that pot simmering without having it boil over. A constant state of outrage is almost impossible to maintain.
But when your only campaign strategy is “The other guy is Hitler” — and Biden has little else to run on, given his record — you’ve assessed the risk and decided it is worth trying.
As you hear all this talk of “unity” from the left, recognize that they will accept it only on their own terms. They all but blame Trump for his own assassination, and then they attack anyone who calls out their own vile rhetoric.
Although nearly all noteworthy Democrats have condemned the shooting, it is only because their non-stop, scorched-earth, Trump-is-a-Nazi propaganda campaign became unsustainable and embarrassing as of 6:11 p.m. on July 13.
I don’t expect the feigned calls for unity to last. But it is instructive for anyone paying attention how everything the left has been saying about Trump for years immediately fell by the wayside the moment reality intervened.
Maybe some rank-and-file Democratic voters and even liberals will finally wake up to the fact that they’ve been lied to. Then again, to have believed any of the progressive rhetoric of recent years, you have to have been in a very, very deep sleep. So who knows?
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.). He is the author of “Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.“
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