Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking before a campaign rally in Texas on Thursday, spoke out against violent rhetoric but immediately reminded supporters that her opponent, former President Donald Trump, is a “danger” and a “threat” to this nation.
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A reporter asked Harris about a statement put out by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in which they vociferously decried the current rhetoric coming from the Democrat nominee equating Trump to Hitler.
The statement accused her of having “fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus” with her recent actions. Actions amplifying specious reports out of The Atlantic and The New York Times accusing the GOP nominee of expressing admiration for Hitler and his generals.
Several high-ranking officials have disputed the allegations, and it seems unlikely that former Gen. John Kelly, a key player in the smear campaign, just suddenly remembered something that was allegedly said five years ago.
The reporter requested her reaction to the statement from McConnell and Johnson. And bear in mind this is against the backdrop of two recent assassination attempts against her opponent, one that came within millimeters of succeeding and plunging the country into chaos.
“Well, listen, we all must speak out against any form of political violence and I’m very clear about that,” Harris said before becoming very murky on the matter.
“No one should be the subject of violence, much less political violence,” she added. “But, the American people deserve to be presented with facts and the truth.”
“And the fact and the truth is that some of the people closest to Donald Trump when he was president — generals, including most recently John Kelly, a four-star Marine General — have been very clear about the danger and the threat that Donald Trump poses to America.”
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It is the kind of reprehensible wink-and-a-nod rhetoric that leads to actionable violence against aggrieved people and their political adversaries. You can’t, within seconds of each other, say “no to political violence” while adding a disclaimer of “but this guy is a threat to our nation.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, folks. Kamala’s statements are practically a dog whistle to her supporters to take another shot at Trump. Literally, another shot.
But then, we’ve grown accustomed to this kind of behavior. Harris, following the first attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, stood alongside President Biden after he publicly responded by suggesting Americans need to “lower the temperature in our politics.”
“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” Biden said at the time. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period.”
He would later offer his “deepest condolences” to the family of Corey Comperatore, the man killed at the Butler rally, while flanked by Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
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A Politico report within 72 hours of that statement revealed Harris was struggling to find ways to denounce the violence while continuing to argue “why he’s unfit to be president.”
“There must be unity around the idea that while our nation’s history has been scarred by political violence, violence is never acceptable. There can be no equivocation about that,” she said before equivocating it. “At the same time, the hallmark of American democracy, the hallmark of any democracy, is a strong competition of ideas, policies, and a vision for the future.”
Harris then indicated the American people needed to be aware of what is “at stake in this election.”
You know, the end of democracy and such.
That was bad enough at the time, but now, according to Kamala’s last press conference, what is at stake is the possibility that a man the likes of Hitler could be put into the White House.
“Trump said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Harris claimed without evidence. “He wants a military that is not loyal to the Constitution, but loyal to him.”
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is from the people who know him best.”
Hillary Clinton backed up those statements by letting her own unhinged followers know that Trump’s rally this Sunday featuring Tucker Carlson at Madison Square Garden is practically a Nazi rally.
“One other thing that you’ll see next week, (CNN host) Kaitlan (Collins), is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book,” Clinton said. “President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.”
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“So I don’t think we can ignore it.”
Clinton also went on to suggest Trump is a “clear and present” danger to the nation.
The media spreads the lie, Harris amplifies it, and Clinton confirms it. Again, it’s the “We’re totally against political violence, we swear … but it’d be a shame if something were to happen to Hitler 2.0” nonsense. *Wink wink nudge nudge*
The Trump campaign responded to Harris’s latest comments on X, saying they are “abhorrent, shameful, and completely disqualifying.”
My colleague Teri Christoph recently points out that this negative turn in messaging, this pivot away from “joy” and headlong into darkness, is evidence that Democrats are “successfully telegraphing to their foot soldiers that the ‘orange man’ isn’t just bad, he’s a ‘threat to democracy.'”
What do they think is going to happen in the days leading up to the election when they state over and over again that he is a threat to the very foundation of this nation, a clear and present danger, a fan of Hitler holding a Nazi rally with all of his Nazi supporters?
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Can you imagine what one of Harris’s unhinged followers, wholeheartedly believing these hysterical smears, might do?
They can. They know exactly what they’re doing.