Is Left-Wing 'Trump-As-Hitler Iconography' In The Mainstream Media Responsible For The Attempt To Assassinate The 45th President?
Authored by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann via American Greatness,
So many of us watched in horror last Saturday when a 20-year-old assassin aimed at Donald Trump’s head just after he started his remarks at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. How and why did this happen? Did the mainstream and social media enable a radical to commit murder?
The June issue of the far-left publication The New Republic featured on its cover a vile photo of the faces of Trump and Adolf Hitler merged together. At the time it was released, we had no idea of what would transpire on July 13, 2024, when Thomas Matthew Crooks, using an AR-15 from 400 feet away, attempted, at the highest level, to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
But should we be surprised? Hardly.
It’s been an open secret among leftist elites that regime-approved violence falls somewhere between “it’s okay to punch a Nazi” and “your speech is violence, while our violence is speech.” Media outlets like The Intercept’s Prem Thakker claim that Crooks was a registered Republican but he also made a small donation to Act Blue, a far-left PAC.
Regardless of party affiliation, the 20-year-old shooter was shockingly motivated to commit murder. Did it come to him in a dream? Was he personally harmed and looking for justice? Did he conclude that this was a logical and necessary act for the protection of society at large?
No. His motivation was driven by a firehose of personal hatred and outrageous propaganda promulgated by media platforms (and Democrats) that utilize Hitler imagery and Nazi narratives that are embedded in our minds as murderous, dangerous, and anti-human, all the while tying them to Donald Trump. If anyone thinks that the concept is outlandish, one only has to look at the past decade and see how this imagery and narrative have been pushed to influence the weak minds and radicals among us.
In reverse chronological order, let us examine three of the most egregious examples of the left using Trump-Hitler iconography to spew their disgusting narrative.
The New Republic (June 2024)
For its June 2024 issue, Owner and Editor-in-Chief Win McCormack and Editor Michael Tomasky were rightfully savaged on X/Twitter for the cover merging the faces of Trump and Hitler together. On X/Twitter, this was their rationalization and justification.
“We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
“Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.
“We unreservedly choose the latter course. And so we have assembled herein some of our leading intellectual historians of fascism; a member of the fourth estate who learned firsthand what the Trump lash feels like; a leading expert on civil-military relations; a great Guatemalan American novelist with a deep understanding of immigrants’ lives; one of our most incisive cultural critics; and a man with all-too-real experience in living under a notorious authoritarian regime. The scenarios they describe are certainly grim. We dare you to say, after reading these pieces, that they are impossible.”
It should be noted that The New Republic is barely profitable. One can hope that, because of its lack of editorial integrity, even left-wing elite intellectuals will abandon it before the 2028 presidential election so that it will go bankrupt and sink below the waves into historical irrelevance.
The Washington Post (December 20, 2023)
Back in December, author and attorney Mike Godwin opened his WaPo op-ed Opinion: “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you,” with a side profile graphic of Trump and Hitler back-to-back.
“My very minor status as an authority on Adolf Hitler comparisons stems from having coined ‘Godwin’s Law’ about three decades ago. I originally framed this “law” as a pseudoscientific postulate: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.’ (That is, its likelihood approaches 100 percent.)”
Godwin continues, “But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”
This plays directly into the ongoing progressive left narrative that Trump presents an existential threat to American democracy. If elected, Trump will be a dictator, and the 2024 election will be the last to be held in America. It goes back to the words of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels’ law of propaganda, who once said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” We’ve seen the media become sheep, often repeating the exact same talking point simultaneously, like for the last couple of years that Joe Biden is “sharp as a tack” and “runs circles around staffers that are half his age,” and that he “would never ban gas stoves.” We could go on.
Many on the progressive left, including influencers like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, serve up this pablum for the masses on almost every broadcast. Worst of all, their low-information audiences tend to accept and believe it, repeating it at cocktail parties inside the DC Beltway. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy to them.
The Daily Beast (January 13, 2018)
The Trump-as-Hitler narrative didn’t happen overnight. The villification started the moment Trump announced his candidacy when he rode down the golden escalator with his wife Melania back on June 16, 2015. But it certainly accelerated when he dispatched his primary opponents, was nominated, and defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Once in office, the attacks intensified, with no editorial guardrails to be seen. The mainstream media had the green light to engage in any attack, no matter how insane it might seem. The editors at the left-wing website, The Daily Beast, opined on January 13, 2018, just a year into the Trump Presidency, with the op-ed Trump’s War on the Press Follows the Mussolini and Hitler Playbook. Not only did they compare the evil Orange Man to Hitler but to Mussolini as well. The graphic? A color image of Trump superimposed over a historic black-and-white photo of Hitler and Mussolini standing side-by-side. It stated:
“The abasement of language by Donald Trump and his assorted flacks began long before, but this concept was so naked, so novel and so unblinkingly forthright that it established the rules for the assault to come, just as the first salvo of an artillery barrage signals the creation of a new battlefield where there will be many casualties.”
But it didn’t stop there.
“Trump has spent two years vilifying the “dishonest” media (including The Daily Beast), even invoking the Nazi chant of ‘enemies of the people.’ Aided by the alt-right zealots at Breitbart, he has successfully persuaded millions of Americans that The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are seditious forces bent on denigrating and destroying the man they elected.”
Funny how, more than six years on, we have watched how all the media outlets cited above have turned out to be nothing more than stenographers for the Democrat Party, and since January 2021, for the most authoritarian presidency in our 245 years, the Biden administration until his dismal debate performance two weeks ago.
The Basic Difference Between Right- and Left-Wing Media
There are very few right-leaning popular culture magazines to find anything comparable to The New Republic, newspapers like the Washington Post, or web platforms like The Daily Beast that would merge an image of Joe Biden with Forrest Gump to return the favor. You won’t see mainstream conservative websites with a large following like The Blaze or Brietbart (or American Greatness) publish anything like that. With the exception of Fox News and all the major broadcast and cable networks. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and especially MSNBC, lean left.
It’s not because the imagery and political pushback are not deserved. It’s because this is not a “both sides” issue. The violence here is solidly footed on the left. Antifa, BLM, Occupy Democrats, Just Stop Oil…all left-wing organizations. And they are organized, not nutty individuals with their own ideas at work. Violence is a common tool in the left’s arsenal, and they are not hesitant to use it.
Most likely, we will find that the 20-year-old who shot Trump is among that group. He was probably marinating in hate his entire young life. It likely began at home, where parenting has nearly collapsed, and was extended in the public school system, where kids are taught the absolutist Marxist notion of “oppressors versus the oppressed,” villains versus heroes, Good versus Evil. He would have been a fine candidate for the KKK back in the 1950s and 1960s.
A media and political party that ties a man to Hitler, to a petty dictator, to an authoritarian, and to someone who needs to be defeated “by any means necessary” is complicit in this murder attempt. Democrats and the legacy media completely understand that they can still influence weak-minded, radical people to do their bidding and hide their complicity under the veneer of plausible deniability.
Of course, there will be no real media accountability here aside from sharply declining readership and viewership. The media will just move on, unapologetically changing the subject and hoping nobody will notice or remember the slanders.
Politicians, however, push these extreme narratives at their own peril. They are creating an underclass of radicals that cannot be controlled, and once these murderers-in-training are set loose, the leftist politicians who made them will need to hide, for they could be the next target.