Opinion: "Is The Left Preparing For War If Trump Wins?"

[Twin Tiers Living 489]

By Lee Smith

October 29, 2024

 

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country. 

As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss. 

By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests? 

For instance, last week the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted former Trump administration officials claiming that the Republican candidate is contemptuous of America’s armed forces and, according to Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, wishes he could command the same respect that Hitler commanded from his general officers. 

This is not the first time that Trump has been compared to Hitler or that Kelly, a retired Marine general, turned on his former commander-in-chief. Kelly was the key source for a story published before the 2020 election, also in the Atlantic and also by Jeffrey Goldberg, that alleged Trump had called American WWII soldiers buried in French cemeteries “suckers and losers.” 

The veracity of Kelly’s latest revelation that Trump admires Hitler must of course be judged against the fact that he waited five years to disclose it, even if it is unlikely to have much effect on the current election cycle. The military, and veterans of the Global War on Terror in particular, overwhelmingly support the candidate opposed to waging endless and strategically pointless foreign wars. Moreover, Trump has weathered far more damaging fabrications — like the false allegations that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence — that only galvanized support for him.

The purpose of the Hitler narrative is not to alter the electoral preferences of left-wing media audiences already solidly in the anti-Trump column, but rather to justify taking extreme measures against the Republican candidate and the America First movement and ensure that the bulk of the military sides with the anti-Trump plot. Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote. 

For example, last week the New York Times published a long interview with a scholar of fascism who declared that Trump is a fascist. The paper of record followed up with another long article by two Harvard professors calling for mass mobilization in the event of a Trump victory. The proposal suggests that private industry join civil society organizations to ostracize Trump and his supporters and engage in large public protests to provoke a crisis. Kamala Harris herself, commenting on Kelly’s allegations in the Atlantic story, claimed that her opponent “is a fascist” during a CNN town hall.

These stories are only the latest in an ongoing series of media reports warning of a Trump dictatorship. Beltway insider Robert Kagan was out of the gate early, writing even before Trump wrapped up the nomination that, without mounting resistance against the Republican candidate, America is “a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.” A January story from NBC claimed that Trump was exploring ways to use the military to assassinate political rivals. 

The propaganda meant to establish a predicate to employ violence to stop Trump has been reinforced at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.   

When Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if he was confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the 2024 election, he answered, “If Trump wins, no I’m not confident at all.” Then, seemingly correcting himself, the president said, “I mean if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose there will be a bloodbath.’”

Biden was referring to a comment Trump made in March about Chinese efforts to build auto manufacturing plants in Mexico. The export of those cars to America, Trump said, would result in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry. Naturally, the Biden campaign used the figure of speech to accuse Trump of inciting “political violence.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) advertised a more specific scenario leading to violence when he promised that Congress will remove Trump by invoking Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office. “It’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” Raskin has said. “And then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions.”

But the most significant post-election scenarios were drafted by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official whose 2020 wargaming with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has been credited by the left-wing press for its “accuracy.” 

Ahead of the last election, Brooks and TIP, according to the Guardian, “imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the U.S. Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.” 

That’s a fanciful way of obscuring the truth. TIP anticipated that Trump would contest the results because party operatives knew beforehand that election irregularities resulting from new voting procedures, like mass mail-in voting, designed to facilitate fraud would be glaringly obvious. Thus, because of Brooks’s past performance and her central role in a network comprising the media and current and former defense officials, her work is widely acknowledged as the Left’s roadmap for post-election contingency planning. 

For the 2024 election, Brooks teamed up with journalist Barton Gellman to run a series of wargames in May and June under the auspices of the Democracy Futures Project (DFP), part of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. 

As with the 2020 wargames, the two opposing teams were staffed by former government officials from the Republican as well as the Democrat establishment. The results were announced with a mid-summer media rollout to ready other officials and operatives for likely post-election operations. Four articles were published the same day, July 30 — in the New Republic; the Guardian; the Washington Post, which ran a piece by Gellman; and Brooks herself writing for the Bulwark — showing that Brooks and Gellman’s scenarios, at least those disclosed, assume a Trump victory. The play then is to block.

Disruption, destabilization, and violence are legitimized by a narrative driven by self-congratulatory mirror-imaging and projection in which the so-called defenders of democracy face down an authoritarian Trump. 

Brooks and her cohort ignore the evidence of Biden and Harris’s abuse of power and assert that it is Trump who will who use the federal government against his opponents. It is Trump’s CIA and DOJ, according to the wargamers, that will cashier national security officials for “raising concerns about the politicization of intelligence and the pressure to launch ideologically motivated investigations.” It is Trump who will use the IRS to go after nonprofits. It is at Trump’s behest that journalists will be targeted and Democrat-aligned media outlets investigated as the FCC revokes broadcast licenses. And, writes Brooks, the Trump administration will force out top military officials on account of their “objecting to Trump’s cozy relationship with Russia.” 

The forecasts read like paranoid fantasy, but they’re carefully scripted inversions of reality meant to to rewrite history and obscure the crimes of the Left that have shaken the pillars of the republic. 

The most alarming scenario involves political and military officials “resisting efforts to federalize their national guard units and send them to quell anti-Trump protests in major U.S. cities.” That is, the post-election playbook calls for (or takes for granted) widespread violence so intense that the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The forecast posits a split in the senior ranks of the U.S. military after Trump replaces the chiefs of staff with officers who comply with his order and deploy forces to put down the riots. 

This is where the political violence cultivated by the destructive Left is leading: blood-soaked streets and a divided military. The purpose of the Hitler narrative is to force members of the military to turn against Trump. After all, loyalty to the constitution means fighting Hitler, not obeying his orders. 

With the two recent attempts on Trump’s life, we’ve seen how the regime’s narratives simultaneously create the conditions for violence and explain it away. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA, Democratic Party officials and the media not only denied any connection between the shooting and their inflammatory rhetoric but even blamed Trump himself. After all, he and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy,” wrote David Frum in, of all places, the Atlantic. 

On this view, Trump has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately responsible for the attempt on his own life. But that is another inversion of reality, tailored to suit the bloodlust of a dark regime. It is the logic of terror: It is only the violence of our victims that drove us to slaughter them. 

This self-serving logic not only gets the Left off the hook for past depredations; it serves as the pretext for future violence against Trump, his aides, and his supporters. After November 5, this weaponized narrative could be expanded to justify violence on a mass scale designed to break the republic.

Lee Smith is a bestselling author whose new book, "Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic," was published October 22. This article was first published at TomKlingenstein.com.

 

 

This article was originally published by RealClearWire and made available via RealClearWire.

 

[Ann 439]

After reading this article it would appear Democrats are the wanna be dictators and threat to Democracy; our way or the highway.  If true, they are doing what they accused Trump of doing, not accepting the results of a valid election.  Be careful of what you ask for.

[Pvt Snowball 44]

1 hour ago, Ann said:

After reading this article it would appear Democrats are the wanna be dictators and threat to Democracy; our way or the highway.  If true, they are doing what they accused Trump of doing, not accepting the results of a valid election.  Be careful of what you ask for.

Base on what if the generals won't want to follow this man then why should we as a nation is a dangerous concept to think the military will be divided up by loyalty's .

[Andy 105]

I think looking at comparisons between 2016 and 2020, there is an obvious difference between reactions. To the extent of my memory, one side cried in the streets, posted #NotMyPresident for ages, and just complained on CNN for years afterwards. What they didn't do was storm the Capitol. What their candidate did do was concede pretty quickly (I think it was that election night/early next morning?). The other side did storm the Capitol building, their candidate did try to alter the results of a valid election, such as calling Georgia to "find" votes, and set up schemes with fake electors. When the VP, the second in command goes against the President, that's a serious thing, and thank God Pence did exactly that, even with chants of "Hang Mike Pence" outside.

Take every single thing that's come out over the last 4 years, and to me, the 14th Amendment absolutely should have been enacted, and Trump should be nowhere near the White House.

Let's say Harris wins - Trump without doubt will carry on the "stolen election" garbage, his hardcore supporters will be up in arms, and what do they do (again)?  

On the other hand, I really don't see mass bloodshed like this guy seems to think will happen will come to fruition if Trump wins. There will totally be protests that will be blamed on Antifa or whatever, but I doubt they will be to the scale and significance January 6th was. I would certainly hope that the military isn't weaponized against Trump voters, just like how they should hope they aren't weaponized against Harris voters like myself. But when Trump is saying stuff like "I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen", I am going to take his words seriously - Vance can run cover all he wants but that is a serious concern to me. I am way past the point of just disregarding things he says because they're "jokes" or "he's just being sarcastic".

I certainly hope I'm not wrong though, I'm the one here who has to live the longest through whatever follows the shitshow next week.

Edited October 30 by Andy

[Chris 3,211]

2 hours ago, Andy said:

On the other hand, I really don't see mass bloodshed like this guy seems to think will happen will come to fruition if Trump wins.

I don’t think we’ll see “bloodshed” per se, but we will see more of the rioting and chaos like we saw in 2020.

[MsKreed 1,570]

50 minutes ago, Chris said:

I don’t think we’ll see “bloodshed” per se, but we will see more of the rioting and chaos like we saw in 2020.

I agree.

And whichever candidate wins, I really don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see either administration will be rounding up dissenters.

And with either outcome, I fully expect protests from the supporters of the losing candidate. And sadly, we’re likely to see more of the violent clashes from those protests like we saw on January 6th.   

 

However, what concerns me the most is that personal divisions between the “winners and losers” have been growing worse.  The rhetoric of “existential danger” seems to be taken as a personal threat to an alarming number of otherwise normal/sane human beings.

“I can no longer have a personal relationship with someone supports [that evil candidate], because their political choice means that they hate me and everything I care about”.  

I see these sentiments ‘shouted to the world’ on social media.....and witnessed it in my own extended family in 2020. My sister’s adult children “disowned” another sibling that voted for the wrong person. It took a family death for them to set that animosity aside and rebuild some civility and ‘family’ bonds. But I worry that it could resurface next month.

 

And sadly, their story is all too common. Both traditional and social media fan the flames by amplifying the polarization-- 2016 was worse than previous elections and 2020 was worse than 2016. And it feels like 2024 will be telling 2016-2020 to “hold my beer”.

[Chris 3,211]

Ive been seeing a lot of “no longer speaking to ____”  because they support one candidate or another. It’s a sad state of affairs and only shows the level of tribalism American politics have devolved into. 

On another site I see a guy always posting that anyone who supports Trump is a racist, plain and simple. And it irritates me because I know a lot of good people who, for whatever reasons, support him. But I wouldn’t list xenophobia or racism as the reason.

And for whatever reasons it’s worth, though we know that we disagree on the issues ( as much as I disagree with the least-leaning ) we’re still able to have some really good, meaningful conversations about current affairs without it becoming a divisive kind of thing.

If friends can do that, it amaze that FAMILY are somehow unable to. 

[Ann 439]

I will not ever argue over politics.  I have my opinion and everyone is entitled to theirs and I respect that.  One of my sisters and I have differing views about this election’s candidates.   She’s more about personality and I’m about policy.   If things start to “warm up” during a discussion I tell her we’ll have to agree to disagree and we move on.  People will disagree about so many things, how you handle it is a matter of respect and maturity.   

[Adam 527]

9 hours ago, Pvt Snowball said:

then why should we as a nation

because, unless the election process is NOT as secure as some have maintained, he would be the POYUS, elected by the People.

doing otherwise would bring us full circle on the "not my President" refrain of the last 4 years

[Adam 527]

1 hour ago, Ann said:

have to agree to disagree

funny, ive seen an uptick from left-leaning folks that the above response is tantamount to complicity, as Chris said, the extent to which tribalism has reached is alarming. even more alarming is that those folks either dont see or choose to ignore, it is the political class that benefit most from that very situation.

 

[Ann 439]

18 hours ago, Pvt Snowball said:

Base on what if the generals won't want to follow this man then why should we as a nation is a dangerous concept to think the military will be divided up by loyalty's .

Those Generals, and all military personnel, swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.  That is a lifetime oath.  Whoever is elected is their Commander in Chief, the HMFIC, if you don’t like him/her, their personality, their policies then resign your commission or position.  The Joint Chiefs, Members of the Cabinet, White House personnel, etc. serve at the pleasure of the President.  Don’t disrespect the Office of the President, your own position and rank because the views of the person holding that Office differ from yours…..or to sell books.  

[MsKreed 1,570]

15 hours ago, Chris said:

On another site I see a guy always posting that anyone who supports Trump is a racist, plain and simple. And it irritates me because I know a lot of good people who, for whatever reasons, support him. But I wouldn’t list xenophobia or racism as the reason.

 

10 hours ago, Adam said:

funny, ive seen an uptick from left-leaning folks that the above response is tantamount to complicity, as Chris said, the extent to which tribalism has reached is alarming. even more alarming is that those folks either dont see or choose to ignore, it is the political class that benefit most from that very situation.

I also see an alarming level of this.  Sadly, not just on discussion boards.  

I'm truly concerned that the “war” we’ll see if Trump wins is more likely to play out in everyday lives across the country than DC.

I would say that overall....more of my friends and contacts lean conservative than progressive. But even “moderate” Harris supporters seem to openly declare hatred for people who support the opponent. And it’s weird to see the party of ‘tolerance’ as the ones spewing the intolerant beliefs. I see a scary number of memes and posts that reflect THIS sentiment to a higher degree than when it was written in 2020. 

It’s scary to see so many (primarily on one side) casually announce that half the country are “morally incompatible”.  Not just the candidates whose character or policies they disagree with....but their fellow citizens (including their family members, coworkers and neighbors).

Being the Libertarian in a solid blue state, my none of my nieces or nephews direct their disgust at me, thankfully.  But while that sometimes puts me in a “neutral” seat where I can at least have a conversation with either ‘side’, I doubt there is any way that I could ever change the minds of either....even if I wanted to.

 

And if I lived in a swing state (where my vote “mattered”), voting for a third party (or not voting at all) might put me squarely into the same “enemy” (dangerous, immoral, deplorable) category as a MAGA ‘cultist’.

[Twin Tiers Living 489]

In related news:

Quote

 

CNN — Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss outlining a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again.

For months, those activists – who have been priming Trump supporters to believe the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud – have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results.

“I have a plan and strategy,” Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Trump, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month. “And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”

 

Source

[Chris 3,211]

It’s stuff like this that’s just plain insanity.