It’s as predictable as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, only if the swallows came chirping numerous much-asterisked words and speaking unmentionably disgusting allegations against former President Donald Trump.
It’s the third election in a row where this has happened. And, wonder of wonders, it appears America has caught onto it.
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, no less than two major hit pieces have been released claiming the GOP nominee did reprehensible things. A bevy of minor allegations surfaced on social media, albeit with less than nothing to back them up.
All of this, in 2016 or 2020, might have moved the needle. Indeed, the media tried to make these allegations have some sort of impact. Spoiler alert: It isn’t working anymore.
To go through all of the little hit pieces that have cropped up over the past few weeks would be a Sisyphean task at best, so it’s probably most worthwhile to focus on the two that got the most attention: Jeffrey Goldberg’s rambling piece in The Atlantic in which he claims that the former president venerated Hitler’s military style, and a U.K. Guardian piece in which a former model tells a tale of groping by Trump — with Jeffrey Epstein involved, because of course — back in 1993.
And none of it has made a blip.
We’ll start with The Atlantic piece, which is truly stunning as an “October surprise” in one respect: There’s literally almost nothing new in it. In fact, he makes clear he’s echoing charges that have been made in other places — most notably in a 2022 book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
But that wasn’t published in a presidential campaign year, much less weeks before the election. That’s more or less the difference between Goldberg’s piece and the claims made in that book. In fact, the Atlantic writer — perhaps best known for the oft-rebutted 2020 claim (in an election year! Imagine that!) that Trump said American soldiers who died in war were “losers” and suckers” — basically throws as much mud as he could and sees what sticks.
The piece begins with the matter of Vanessa Guillén, a soldier at Fort Hood who was murdered. Trump promised to help the family out financially if possible with the funeral.
But then, he claims, things changed when he found out the cost:
In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f***ing Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “F***ing people, trying to rip me off.”
You may not be surprised to learn that after he relays that story, he relays the denials from both Trump’s camp and members of Guillén’s family. But that’s not the part that everyone else in the media picked up on, obviously.
That’s also not the part that you came for, which was more talk about how Donald Trump loves him some fascists — particularly Hitler.
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”
So basically, what he did was reprint something from a two-year-old book, then get a pull-quote from John Kelly, an ardent NeverTrumper currently doing the media rounds to claim Trump fits the definition of a “fascist.”
He’s virtually the only person who will go on record for any of this, and when he does, his memory of the Trump administration doesn’t seem to comport with anyone else who’ll lend their imprimatur to a quote, but never mind that. Because Kamala Harris and Co. were quickly willing to attempt to spin this hay into electoral gold:
Vice President Harris: “Trump said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had. 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” pic.twitter.com/wJsPTcTWM6
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 23, 2024
Vice President Harris: This is not 2016 or 2020. Donald Trump has become more confused, more unstable, and more angry. We just learned from his chief of staff that he praised Hitler. If he wins, there will no longer be anyone there to control him pic.twitter.com/A7DRxfK0QP
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 25, 2024
Vice President Harris: Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly just told us that Donald Trump said, ‘Why aren’t my generals like those of Hitler?’ Go online and listen to him say it pic.twitter.com/kCLwIFYX6C
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 24, 2024
So much for the “joy and vibes” campaign: Donald J. Trump is now Literally (Praising) Hitler™.
The Guardian’s piece with former model Stacey Williams was hardly more revelatory, offering salacious allegations of unwanted groping from Trump over 30 years ago with virtually nothing to back them up.
Williams, the Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Lucy Osborne reported Wednesday, “said she first met Trump in 1992 at a Christmas party after being introduced to him by Epstein, who she believed was a good friend of the then New York real estate developer. Williams said Epstein was interested in her and the two casually dated for a period of a few months.”
“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams told the publication.
You can probably guess at where this goes next:
The alleged groping occurred some months later, in the late winter or early spring of 1993, when Epstein suggested during a walk they were on that he and Williams stop by to visit Trump at Trump Tower. Epstein was later convicted on sex offenses and killed himself in prison in 2019.
Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other.
The evidence for this?
Williams says that Trump sent her agent a postcard via courier later in 1993, an aerial view of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach residence and resort. She shared it with the Guardian. In his handwriting – using what appears to be his usual black Sharpie – he wrote: “Stacey – Your home away from home. Love Donald”.
Williams, who made this revelation on a Zoom call with a group called Survivors for Kamala, which is one of the numerous support groups set up to support the Democratic nominee. (See also: “White Dudes for Harris.”)
During the call, she described it all as a “twisted game” the two were playing with each other: “I felt shame and disgust and as we went our separate ways, I felt this sensation of revisiting it, while the hands were all over me. And I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated. I felt like a piece of meat.”
Tucked away in the 20th paragraph, after details about Williams’ unsubstantiated allegations and other allegations made against Trump in the past was this: “No evidence has surfaced that Trump was aware of or involved in Epstein’s misconduct.” Oh.
The 24th and 25th paragraphs, meanwhile, were given over to something that should have been discussed much earlier in the piece — namely, why now, with just weeks to go in the 2024 campaign?
Asked whether she had considered coming forward in the past, as other women were making allegations against Trump, Williams said she was a person who wanted to avoid negative attention or risk the backlash many other survivors have faced.
“I left the business,” she said. “I disappeared on purpose because I love being anonymous and I love my life of being a private citizen. Then I watched what has happened to women who come out and it is so horrifying and abusive. The thought of doing that, especially as a mother with a child in my house, was just not possible,” she told the Guardian.
So instead, she shared it with two weeks to go in the 2024 campaign, because she wanted to risk negative attention or a backlash. Sure, sounds legit.
Also of note is the fact that, like Goldberg’s piece, this hit came from a writer who did the exact same thing during the campaign four years ago:
We saw this in 2020.
Same reporters, same publication.
Same allegations, same timing, same opponent – but different elections.
It seems the Democrats have a preferred venue to run their October surprise. And a reporter willing to do their bidding. pic.twitter.com/zXfd0RRjtE
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) October 24, 2024
Gosh, what a coincidence.
Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the matter about as much attention as it deserved: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false,” she said in a story.
“It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
And that’s the thing — these and other hit pieces aren’t working anymore because they’re transparently false.
On Friday morning, The New York Times and Siena College released their final poll before the presidential election. The result? Harris and Trump tied at 48 percent.
The Times noted that the results are “not encouraging for Ms. Harris,” given the fact that a large lead in the national popular vote is generally needed by the Democratic candidate to ensure wins in the critical swing states.
“Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump remain effectively tied even after three of the most tumultuous months in recent American political history. A high-profile debate, two attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, dozens of rallies across seven battlefield states and hundreds of millions spent on advertisements have seemingly done little to change the trajectory of the race,” the Times reported.
“Ms. Harris’s position, if anything, may have declined among likely voters since the last Times/Siena College poll, taken in early October. At the time, she had a slight lead over Mr. Trump, 49 percent to 46 percent. The change is within the margin of error, but The Times’s national polling average has registered a tightening in polls over the past few weeks as well, suggesting at the very least that this contest has drawn even closer.”
What’s critical are the dates the poll was taken, too: Oct. 20 through 23. This means that respondents had at least two days of the media and the Kamala thundering down their necks about Trump’s love for Hitler, and potentially one day of hearing another unsubstantiated claim he was a sex offender.
The result? Zero movement to Kamala’s side. She fared slightly than a Wall Street Journal poll that showed Trump ahead nationally by a 49 percent to 46 percent margin released the day prior and conducted between Oct. 19 and 22, but that survey has generally shown Trump in a better position than the Times/Siena poll.
And it feels unlikely that either one of these poorly sourced allegations will make a difference — for reasons this X user succinctly noted:
– It’s 2016, Trump gets accused of groping a woman with no proof
-It’s 2020, Trump gets accused of groping a woman with no proof
-It’s 2024, Trump gets accused of groping a woman with no proof pic.twitter.com/nNVBvlsRvg
— Kaguya’s Top Gal (@hayasaka_aryan) October 24, 2024
It’s all been tried, and this week threw into relief just how hackneyed the strategy is. Picking up every poorly sourced allegation of sexual misconduct? Been there, done that. Saying that he loves fascists? It’s so old that the Atlantic had to dredge up allegations that were already public two years ago and spruce them up with a yawn-tastic quote from a professional NeverTrumper to make them newsworthy.
Kamala Harris and her surrogates are trying to make this work — and they’re flailing and failing. We’ve heard this before. The swallows have returned, but we’ve learned to tune them out. From here on in, America is paying attention to results, and that’s bad news for the Democrats. The numbers prove it.
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