WASHINGTON — The “joy” is gone.
Vice President Kamala Harris popped up Wednesday to cite a disputed Atlantic report as evidence that Donald Trump is a tyrant-in-waiting who admires Adolf Hitler and disrespected a murdered soldier — despite the account being challenged by the victim’s sister.
Harris, 60, spoke for three minutes in hastily arranged remarks at her Washington residence ahead of an evening CNN town hall near Philadelphia — saying Trump, 78, wants to gain “unchecked” authority after the Nov. 5 election.
“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,” Harris, 60, said from the Naval Observatory.
“All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is,” she insisted.
“In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within, and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens,” Harris said.
“Let’s be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within. Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify, in his mind, as the enemy within — like judges, like journalists, like non-partisan election officials.
“We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?”
Harris was mocked for her perfunctory remarks as well as not taking questions about retiring President Biden telling supporters in New Hampshire a day earlier of Trump: “We gotta lock him up!”
“I understand Kamala calling a press conference to read The Atlantic out loud [because] sometimes I call press conferences and just read Commentary out loud,” tweeted Seth Mandel, senior editor of the conservative publication. “CNN doesn’t carry it live tho.”
“So the actual closer is, after all the Joy™ and the I’m Not Biden™ and the Let’s Come Together™…Trump is Hitler,” reacted Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro. “Wow, are they bad at this. And boy, do they deserve to lose.”
“Holding a daytime presser in front of the VP residence to discuss an Atlantic article feels a bit like abusing the Walmart intercom to make jokes,” added National Journalism Center program director T. Becket Adams.
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Shortly after Harris spoke, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden regards Trump as a “fascist.”
“Yes,” Jean-Pierre said at her regular briefing. “We cannot ignore or forget what happened on Jan. 6 [2021].”
“To be praising Adolf Hilter is dangerous and it’s also disgusting,” the press secretary added.
On Tuesday, The Atlantic quoted Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly as saying the former president spoke positively about “Hitler’s generals” and had shown disdain for US military servicemembers during his term of office.
Kelly — a former Marine Corps general and Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019 — also slammed Trump in a New York Times interview published Tuesday, claiming his former boss fits the “general definition of a fascist” and “prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Kelly, who was known to boast privately about resisting Trump’s orders while working for him, also said that Trump called troops who fell in battle “losers and suckers” — despite Trump’s denials, and claimed the 45th president had told him, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
“Everything [Hitler] did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good,” Kelly told the Times.
The author of The Atlantic piece, Jeffrey Goldberg, also wrote Trump had cursed and refused to pay for Texas soldier Vanessa Guillen‘s funeral — allegedly saying, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f—ing Mexican!” — which prompted Guillen’s sister Mayra to tweet that the Atlantic report was “hurtful & disrespectful” and that Trump was “respectful” to her family.
It’s unclear if any evidence exists contradicting the report that Trump failed to pay for funeral expenses after publicly offering to do so.
Mayra said she was misled by Goldberg during his reporting of the story and was initially told by the journalist that he was writing a piece about her sister’s murder and the family’s advocacy work in the years since then to be published around the fourth anniversary of her death, back in April.
But that story was never published.
“Initially, when we first spoke, he did mention that this was going to be a wrap-up of the four-year anniversary and how we passed legislation and all the achievements that were done in Vanessa’s honor… He never — not once mentioned any of the comments that he was going to put in this article or how it was going to be published this late in the year,” Mayra told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Wednesday night.
She said when she learned a couple of days ago what story Goldberg was actually publishing, she said she told him that she no longer wanted her name or her sister’s attached to the article.
“And he still proceeded to not only publish it but basically stain my sister’s image with this and it’s very upsetting,” she said during an appearance on the news station.
Goldberg authored a widely circulated September 2020 article ahead of that year’s presidential election claiming that Trump skipped a military cemetery visit during a trip to Paris in 2018 by falsely citing poor weather. That report was the first to claim that Trump disparaged war dead as “suckers” and “losers,” citing then-anonymous sources.
“When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true,” Goldberg wrote.
The lede of Goldberg’s story was debunked — but never corrected — when military communications surfaced via the Freedom of Information Act proving that Navy officials informed Trump’s team that visibility was too poor for safe use of a helicopter for the trip that day.
The Atlantic is owned by Democratic billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Trump has argued his comments about top Democrats being the “enemy from within” isn’t a “threat” — and that the Democrats are the ones threatening him through what he alleges are four politically motivated criminal prosecutions.
“Kamala Harris is a stone-cold loser who is increasingly desperate because she is flailing, and her campaign is in shambles,” Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement Wednesday.
“That is why she continues to peddle outright lies and falsehoods that are easily disproven. The fact is that Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics. She is despicable and her grotesque behavior proves she is wholly unfit for office.”
