Thiessen: Harris’s closing argument is dishonest, desperate and hypocritical

Kamala Harris clearly has settled on a closing argument: Donald Trump is a fascist who “calls Americans who disagree with him the ‘enemy from within’” and says that, as commander in chief, “he would use the military to go after them.” This is the desperate and dishonest strategy of a campaign that must believe it is losing.

As I have written many times in these pages, I don’t think Americans should be calling our political opponents enemies — whoever does it. North Korea is our enemy. Russia is our enemy. Fellow Americans who disagree with us are not.

But it’s also wrong to distort and mischaracterize what an opponent says. When Trump used the phrase “enemies from within” at a rally this month in Coachella, California, he was specifically referring to “shifty Adam Schiff” — a.k.a former House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-California), who is not a person who merely disagrees with Trump.

Schiff, in fact, spent years telling Americans he had seen secret intelligence indicating that Trump was a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which turned out to be a vicious smear. In a 2017 interview on “Meet the Press,” Schiff declared, “I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now” that Trump colluded with Russia. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper in a 2018 interview whether Democrats have seen evidence of collusion, Schiff replied, “Yes, we have.” A few months later, he told ABC that Trump’s Russia collusion was a scandal of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.”

Trump later expanded the attack beyond Schiff, but it’s also true that Schiff was not the only Democrat pushing the lie that Trump was a Russian agent.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California), a member of the Intelligence Committee, was asked by MSNBC host Chris Matthews: “Do you believe [Trump], right now, has been an agent of the Russians?” Swalwell replied: “Yes, I think there’s more evidence that he is.” An incredulous Matthews pressed him: “An agent like in the 1940s where you had people who were ‘reds,’ to use an old term, like that? In other words, working for a foreign power?” Swalwell replied: “He’s working on behalf of the Russians, yes.”

An “enemy from within,” in other words. That’s not all. Then-Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) claimed the FBI had “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said, “There is no longer a question of whether this campaign sought to collude with a hostile foreign power to subvert America’s democracy.” Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), then the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, declared that “enormous amounts of evidence” existed of collusion between Trump and Russia.

They all accused Trump of being an enemy from within — quite literally — working on behalf of a foreign power. Then it blew up in their faces when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III issued his report finding the evidence “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”

In their miasma of outrage, Democrats seem to have forgotten that they have been demonizing Republicans as “enemies” for years. During his noxious 2022 speech in Atlanta, President Joe Biden accused Republicans who opposed his proposed federal takeover of our elections of standing with traitors such as Confederate president Jefferson Davis and explicitly called them “enemies” of America, thundering: “I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies — foreign and, yes, domestic.” Barack Obama famously declared “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us” (He later conceded that he should have used the word “opponents” instead.)

Trump also did not say, as Harris claims, that he would use the American military to go after his political opponents. At her rallies, Harris plays a selectively edited clip of Trump saying in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo: “We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics, and I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military.” She then tells voters: “So, you heard his words. … He’s talking about that he considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country. … He is saying that he would use the military to go after them.”

No, he’s not. The words “in terms of Election Day” are omitted from the clip she plays, to mask the fact that Trump was answering a question about possible Election Day unrest — which he said could be “easily handled” by National Guard. She takes his quote out of context to make it seem he is saying something different than he is.

That’s not just dishonest, it’s hypocritical. As I recall, it was Democrats who accused Trump of violating his oath of office for failing to deploy the National Guard to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Let’s be clear: I’d prefer Trump didn’t talk this way. In addition to being bad for the country, it’s bad politics: Such rhetoric is like fingernails on the chalk board to swing voters. But misrepresenting his words to suggest Trump would use the military to target ordinary Americans who oppose him is far more offensive.