Oct. 23: Breaking News: Trump Is Hitler
Kamala-connected disinfo group plots to kill Twitter; New McDonald's update; Gender doctor withholds data
A note to readers: Tablet, and The Scroll, will again be closed on Thursday and Friday for Shemini Atzeret.
The Big Story
The Atlantic solemnly warned on Friday that Donald Trump was “speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” in the headline to an essay that went on to liken his “dehumanizing” rhetoric to that of Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and the leaders of the East German Stasi. Apparently worried this might have been too subtle, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg followed up Tuesday evening with an article on Trump’s admiration for Hitler, desire to rule like Hitler, and Hitlerian disregard for the military. Have we mentioned Hitler?
The meat of the story consists of two anecdotes. The first is a claim by Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly—originally sourced from a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser and repeated on the record to Goldberg—that at one point during his first term (the article is not clear on when), Trump, who had grown “frustrated” by what he saw as his “disloyal and disobedient” generals, asked Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Here’s how Kelly described the exchange to The Atlantic:
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.
Elsewhere in the article, Goldberg cites two anonymous sources who claim that Trump said in a White House meeting that “I need the kind of generals Hitler had,” those who were “totally loyal” and “followed orders.” Goldberg also cites allegations from Kelly, reported in a book by Jim Sciutto, that Trump “praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership,” though the only example is an alleged comment by Trump that Hitler “rebuilt the economy.” Kelly says he told the president, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” So, not only a Hitler lover but a philistine, who doesn’t even know about Bismarck and Rommel!
The second big claim, anonymously sourced to “two people present at the meeting,” is that in a December 2020 Oval Office meeting, Trump disparagingly referred to murdered U.S. servicewoman Vanessa Guillén as a “fucking Mexican” and ordered his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to stiff Guillén’s family on a $60,000 funeral bill that he had offered to pay.
What to make of this report? We’ll take the second claim first, since there’s more evidence to work with. In the story, Goldberg claims that then acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel, and Meadows were all present at the meeting where Trump allegedly insulted Guillén and refused to pay her funeral bill. According to The Atlantic, Patel denied the story fully, while Meadows, through a spokesman, denied “hearing” Trump’s remark or receiving the order. Goldberg also claims that the Guillén family’s lawyer, Natalie Khawam, told him that she sent a bill to the White House but “no money was ever received by the family from Trump.”
Within hours of the story’s publication, however, several of the sources cited by Goldberg took to social media to attack it. Khawam, the family lawyer, posted on X that Goldberg had “misrepresented our conversation” and “outright LIED” in order to “exploit” her clients and Guillén for “cheap political gain.” Guillén’s sister, Mayra, similarly accused Goldberg of “exploiting” her sister’s death and said that Trump “did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa.” Meadows said directly that the accusations that Trump disparaged Guillén or refused to pay her funeral expenses were “absolutely false,” and his spokesman, Ben Williamson, published a screenshot of the statement he sent to Goldberg for the story, in which Williamson said (on Meadows’ behalf) that Trump “did not say” the words attributed to hi. Goldberg translated that statement in the article as Meadows denying “having heard Trump make the statement” (emphasis ours). So, that’s two anonymous sources backing the story, and several named ones contradicting it.
As for the claims that Trump expressed “admiration” for Hitler and apparent desire for more “loyal” generals “like Hitler had,” it is of course impossible to say anything definitive. Could it have happened exactly how Kelly described? Sure. Could Kelly have garbled something Trump said, or put a sinister spin on harmless bullshitting? Of course. Indeed, we see this happen all the time with Trump comments that are part of the public record, such as the oft-repeated lie that he praised neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.” More recently, we’ve seen the Harris campaign claiming that Trump is threatening to deploy the U.S. military against his “political opponents” if elected. What Trump actually said was that the National Guard, or military “if really necessary,” would be capable of handling postelection rioting from “radical left lunatics,” which is not some deranged hypothetical but something that happened in 2017, when black-bloc rioters affiliated with Disrupt J20 blocked intersections, smashed windows, set fires, and injured six police officers in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day. Two days later, a participant in the riot praised it, and a videotaped assault on the “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer, in glowing terms in The Nation.
Indeed, Kelly, who remains the sole source for the claim that Trump referred to American war dead as “suckers” and “losers,” claims to now be revealing these years-old comments for the first time because Trump’s promises to use the military against domestic opponents—which, we repeat, is a fake Harris campaign talker—are “so dangerous” that “he felt he had to speak out,” according to an interview with The New York Times timed to coincide with the release of the article in The Atlantic. In that interview, Kelly referred to Trump as a “fascist” and “authoritarian” who would “govern like a dictator” if reelected, and repeated the Hitler accusations. And in what is no doubt a stunning coincidence, Kamala Harris was ready with a 1 p.m. press conference on Wednesday to discuss Kelly’s comments: “Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution, he wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military that will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders, even when tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.” Thanks, Momala.
In other words, it seems that the closing argument from Harris—who just last week told an antisemitic heckler who accused Israel of genocide, “I know what you’re speaking of”—is that this guy is Hitler:
We’ll see if the American people believe it. As for us, we prefer Jim Mattis, who, despite his stated dislike for Trump, said at a conference last December, “retired generals… need to go silent during elections. The American people do not need military officers telling them how to vote.”
IN THE BACK PAGES: Jeff Weiss on Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson’s final masterpiece
The Rest
→On the subject of “loyalty,” however, we can’t help but note that Trump’s generals, officials, and subordinates often had interesting ideas about the Constitution and chain of command. For instance, we reported in our Sept. 26 edition, in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, that Trump separately instructed then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and then acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to prepare at least 10,000 National Guard troops to keep the protest “safe.” Both of them ignored Trump—much to the chagrin of Nancy Pelosi, who was captured on camera fuming about the National Guard’s absence that day. After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, top Trump DOJ officials discussed convincing members of the cabinet to depose him via the 25th Amendment. And officials routinely attempted to undermine his foreign policy decisions through leaks, lying, and bureaucratic legerdemain. Take Syria, where Trump twice ordered the military to draw down its troop presence over the objection of his generals. Bureaucrats opposed to the order simply pretended they were complying and did the opposite. As the diplomat Jim Jeffrey told Defense One in 2020, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had [in Syria].”
→An “anti-disinformation” nonprofit whose founder is now advising the Harris presidential campaign states that one of its primary goals is to “Kill [Elon] Musk’s Twitter,” according to internal documents obtained by Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is a nonprofit lobbying and messaging vehicle for the Irish political strategist Morgan McSweeney—credited as the man behind the Labour Party’s electoral victory this year—and his ally Imran Ahmed, who, since 2021, has run the CCDH from Washington, D.C., as an IRS-registered 501(c)(3). As Thacker reported for Tablet last year, the CCDH regularly coordinated with the Biden White House to provide pro-censorship talking points during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the group and its offshoots have led attempted advertiser boycotts against ZeroHedge, The Federalist, Substack, and other alternative news sites for publishing alleged “disinformation.” Under the leadership of McSweeney and Ahmed, the CCDH has developed a close relationship with Democrats and their allies in the world of progressive dark money. McSweeney has simultaneously cultivated more overt ties between Labour Party members and the Democrats, including by dispatching teams of advisers and door knockers to support the Harris-Walz campaign.
According to internal strategy documents obtained by Thacker and Taibbi, the CCDH has listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as the top item in its list of “annual priorities” every month dating back to at least January of this year, presumably through the group’s favorite tactics: advertiser boycotts. Thacker and Taibbi also report that:
According to documents provided to both publications along with interviews with CCDH whistleblowers, an invitation-only conference held this past summer in Washington underscores the group’s priorities. Attendees at CCDH’s private event included a slew of liberal groups now organizing against Musk including a senior advisor at the White House, a Democratic Party staffer in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, Biden/Harris State Department officials, Canadian MP Peter Julian (recently tweeted “Boycott all advertisers on Twitter”) and Media Matters for America (a Democratic party-aligned watchdog now locked in a lawsuit with Musk).
No longer able to control content on Twitter/X via national security state officials planted inside the company, it would appear that Biden and Harris are exploring Plan B: calling in foreign reinforcements.
Read the report here:
→Special Report: Burgerism, Vol. II
On Monday, we had some fun mocking The New York Times’ attempt to prove that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s as a teenager, which branded skepticism of this detail of Harris’ biography as a conspiracy theory on par with birtherism. The “proof” was based solely on the word of the campaign and a childhood friend who claimed to have heard the story from Harris’ dead mother nearly 20 years after the fact. Today, The Washington Free Beacon, which first highlighted the holes in Harris’ story, published an update. It turns out that the “childhood friend” from the Times’ story, Wanda Kagan, is a Harris campaign surrogate who has been invited to the White House and has appeared onstage with Harris at campaign events—facts that the Times either didn’t know or neglected to include in its story. A spokesman for the Times, Charlie Stadtlander, whose previous jobs were with the National Security Agency and U.S. Army Cyber Command, told the Beacon that the Times’ initial report was a “thoroughly reported and edited piece of independent journalism” that the paper “stands by completely.”
→One of the leading U.S. advocates for “gender-affirming care,” Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told The New York Times on Wednesday that she had conducted a study showing that puberty blockers failed to improve the mental health of gender-dysphoric children, but that she had refused to publish the results due to her fears that her findings could be “weaponized” by those seeking to ban the practice. Olson-Kennedy’s study, which began in 2015, failed to replicate an earlier Dutch study (which has been criticized on methodological grounds) suggesting that puberty blockers improve mental health in children who believe they are trans, which is one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) in its recommendations of these treatments in its “Standards of Care” guidelines, widely cited by insurers and health providers. (Indeed, one of the key justifications for such treatments is that children may commit suicide without them.) Olson-Kennedy, who frequently serves as an expert witness in legal challenges to youth “gender medicine” bans, told the Times she had withheld the data for fear they could be used in court to argue that “we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact” the well-being of patients. She has also failed to publish data she has collected on the effect of puberty blockers on bone development.
→In fact, Olson-Kennedy is an expert witness for the government in United States v. Skrmetti, a case initially brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and later joined by the Department of Justice, which challenges the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on “gender-affirming care” for children. In a devastating amicus brief filed last week, however, the state of Alabama cited extensive evidence (some of which we reported on in June) showing not only that the science behind these treatments is flawed but also that officials in the Biden administration had exerted political pressure on WPATH to remove its recommended age restrictions for “gender-affirming” surgeries, including but not limited to double mastectomies, facial surgeries, and vaginoplasties. Despite the concerns of WPATH members that, for instance, breast removal was inappropriate for girls under the age of 15, aides to Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services Adm. Rachel Levine informed WPATH that “she and the Biden administration” believed that the inclusion of the age limits would result in “devastating legislation for trans care.” WPATH ultimately put aside its members’ concerns and complied with the administration’s request.
→If you read The Scroll, sometimes you’ll get tomorrow’s news today. In our Sept. 12 Big Story, we made fun of a report in The New York Times suggesting that Biden, at the urging of “senior American military planners,” was considering allowing Ukraine to use U.S. missiles to strike targets deep in Russian territory. As we pointed out at the time, there was no way Biden would allow a major escalation in a losing war effort shortly before an election, and the story was almost certainly a bit of messaging designed to make Biden and Harris look tough on Russia while casting Trump as a Putin stooge. This afternoon, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich reported that the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon had both recommended against any policy change on the missiles, citing—among other reasons—that there are “few targets” in Russia inside missile range.
TODAY IN TABLET:
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Hunter S. Thompson Was a Weird Visionary Before Drugs and Politics Ate His Brain
In 1972, he was a wounded, disillusioned political observer who turned a beating in Chicago into a potent source of rage at the machine
by Jeff Weiss
In the fall of 2004, Hunter S. Thompson visited Los Angeles for a signing on the Sunset Strip at a place called Book Soup. Even though he’d barely written anything worthwhile since I’d been born, he remained one of my few heroes still breathing. A mythic artifact of an analogue culture on the verge of extinction.
So on a rainy and miserable October night, I left my entry-level job on the outer rings of journalism to fight an hour of rush hour traffic. By the time I arrived in West Hollywood, the line already stretched three blocks long. I didn’t have an umbrella, but I took a number, and headed to the back of the queue. The crowd was what you’d expect: self-styled eccentrics sipping flasks of rotgut whiskey, smoking dirt weed spliffs, and proudly showing each other their Gonzo-related tattoos.
After an hour and a half, I strolled up to the windows to see if I could glimpse the Good Doctor. Some commotion was brewing inside and the security guards quickly shut the door. Within a few minutes, a clerk came out to tell us that “Mr. Thompson had to leave. No more books will be signed at this time.” Someone exiting from the shop cracked that he’d seen Thompson start uncontrollably puking. He’d been openly guzzling a bottle of champagne while hanging with Benicio del Toro. Once he got sick, the pair quickly escaped into a white stretch limousine.
Today, this is the Thompson that most people remember. The slurring and vulgar Halloween costume caricature idolized for his overindulgence.
But over half a century ago, he produced one of the most memorable feats of political writing in American history: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. In retrospect, it was the last of his three full-length masterpieces. He was just 35 on publication day.
This was the Hunter S. Thompson transformed by the "Battle of Chicago" at the 1968 Democratic convention, where he watched thousands of anti-war protesters get cornered and clubbed like Russian harp seals under the paternal watch of Mayor Richard Daley. A patriot who reviled nationalism and a serious writer with a deceptively sensitive streak. The journalist claimed that witnessing the assault permanently tweaked his brain chemistry. For a month afterward, the 31-year-old was crippled by inconsolable angst and hysteria. “It changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it,” Thompson wrote nearly two full decades later. “There was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago.”
After several years living in the Bay Area at the height of the acid era, Thompson saw the nation’s soul as locked in a Manichean struggle where his side—“The Good Guys”—were destined to prevail. Then Martin Luther King Jr. and Thompson’s chosen candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, were murdered two months apart in the spring of ’68. The chaos led him to Chicago in search of material for a never-delivered book called “The Death of the American Dream.”
Despite avoiding the worst of the violence, Thompson still received a night stick to the solar plexus while trying to cross a police barricade with his press pass. All in all, the Louisville native considered himself lucky, having witnessed at least 10 officer-inflicted beatdowns far worse than anything he’d ever seen the Hells Angels crank out. But the psychic scars never healed. For years, the Smith & Wesson-strapped “outlaw journalist” burst into tears every time he attempted to tell anyone what he’d witnessed. His first wife claimed that it was one of two times she ever saw him cry. He understood Chicago as a fatal rupture—a radicalizing jackboot stomp that abused him of any lingering doubts about the storm troopers-and-storm-clouds future of the republic.
While the written word has natural limitations, it offers a staggering capacity for revenge. And Thompson was highly flammable, filled with rage and venom toward the traitors behind this state-sponsored attack. While he couldn’t pursue legal or physical retribution from the 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, Thompson could describe him in Rolling Stone four years later as a “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”
None of Thompson’s Molotov tangents convinced Humphrey’s VP candidate, Edmund Muskie, to reevaluate his Vietnam position. But he could spark a rumor that a Brazilian witch doctor had furnished “the man from Maine” with a mysterious African root hallucinogen called ibogaine. And this “rumor” could be rereported to where it significantly damaged Muskie’s prospects in the ’72 Democratic primary.
In some respects, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a savage one-man counterinsurgency. Thompson’s bimonthly Rolling Stone dispatches—later collected in book form—offered space to not only flay his favorite villain Richard Nixon, but also the double-speaking Democratic Party hacks hatching their own cynical propaganda and calculations. Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics. A death letter directed at the schizophrenic duality of the national character, the slimy stock poltergeists who chronically haunt us, and our credulous need for both authenticity and artifice. It’s also a hysterical slapstick about meeting a deranged ex-Dead roadie turned acid casualty in a hotel bar, offering him your press credential, and letting the “Boohoo” run amok on Muskie’s Sunshine Special train across Florida.
At its most straightforward On the Campaign Trail remains an essential history for its shrewd political insight, guillotine prose, and immersive reporting. McGovern’s campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the “least accurate and most truthful” book about the election. But it’s best understood as a road map of spiritual tragedy and cultural decline. A bildungsroman about human limitation, our allergy to the truth, and the importance of trusting your instincts.
Things started with cautious optimism. In letters, Thompson told his Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner that they needed to create an underground movement to unseat Nixon. In 1971, the United States passed a constitutional amendment allowing 18-year-olds the right to vote, and Thompson imagined a generational awakening that embraced both the “latent & massive Kesey-style voter with the 18-21 types.”
From the first missives, Thompson mocked the folly of pure objectivity (“the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction.”) His guiding principle was H.L. Mencken’s adage that “the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” But over the months shadowing the candidates, Thompson practically became a McGovern surrogate. Without compromising his honesty, the writer quixotically tried to tip the election toward the son of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, described by Bobby Kennedy as “the most decent man in the Senate.”
On the Campaign Trail is a tragic comedy, too. For all of the sleepless nights flailing at the typewriter in a Ballantine and amphetamines trance, the malfunctioning Bavarian nightmare motels in Milwaukee, and Thompson’s own fight to keep his dim faith alive, Nixon still won 49 of 50 states, along with more than 60% of the popular vote. It was one of the most brutal landslides in history.
That’s why the epigraph is taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: “between the Idea and the Reality … Falls the Shadow.” This is a nervous wail of volcanic anguish, immaculate shit-talking, and vanishing illusions. The growing awareness that this imperfect reality will only become more flawed. The slow twilight will be filled with broken shadows.
***
At a 1971 Big Sur retreat for Rolling Stone staffers, Wenner floated the idea of a writer moving to Washington, D.C., to cover the campaign between Nixon and whoever emerged from the Democratic scrum. The smart money was on Maine Sen. Muskie or Ted Kennedy—although the latter allegedly wasn’t running because of the Chappaquiddick incident. No one but Thompson wanted the assignment.
In the aftermath of Chicago, politics had become the writer’s obsession. Thompson’s Rolling Stone debut in October 1970 chronicled his stint managing the Aspen mayoral bid of a biker-lawyer named Joe Edwards. His near victory convinced the Hells Angels author that a political revolution was brewing among an unlikely coalition of bikers, dropouts, ski bums, acid heads, Black and Chicano radicals, and lunch-pail stiffs angered by the exploitative excesses of technocratic capitalism. Freak Power was the answer.
Thompson soon embarked on his own quest to be the sheriff of Pitkin County. He’d sunk his book royalties into a “heavily fortified compound” in Woody Creek, a remote, snow-capped postcard not far from Aspen. But shortly after he arrived in the Rockies, his red-cliff paradise began to be terraformed into slope-side luxury resorts for the wealthy.
The Freak Power candidacy was about retaliation. Shaving his head bald, Thompson started referring to his Dragnet-looking, law-and-order rival as “my long-haired opponent.” If Thompson won, he’d rip up all the city streets with jackhammers and fill them with sod. Drug sales would be controlled and dishonest dealers placed in the stocks. Only residents could hunt or fish. No sheriff’s deputies would be armed in public. And Aspen would be renamed “Fat City” to “prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals” from capitalizing on its name. A new and honest populism where “these swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land."
It nearly worked. Thompson won the city of Aspen proper, but the rural gentry thwarted his attempted coup. Nonetheless, Thompson was determined to take this energy and these lessons over to the presidential campaign. And unlike almost every national correspondent, this would only be a one-year gig, meaning that Thompson could freely burn bridges (“the last thing I cared about was long-term connections on Capitol Hill”).
If politics is property, political journalism is about acquiring a set of keys. It helped that Thompson had a gambler’s intuition and bet on George McGovern to win the Democratic nomination. When he first rented a two-story brick house on the wrong side of Rock Creek Park in December of ’71, McGovern was considered a far-left longshot given no chance of winning the Democratic nomination by members of the D.C. press club. “He’d be a fine president,” they say, “but of course he can’t possibly win.” For Thompson, the South Dakota senator was “the only candidate in either party worth voting for."
McGovern began as a single issue candidate: He’d end the Vietnam War immediately and offer amnesty to draft dodgers. Then the decorated ex-World War II bomber pilot would chop the military budget.
After the ’68 convention, McGovern had helped rewrite the Democratic primary rules to make the process more inclusive and diverse. And this awareness helped him build a meticulously organized grassroots movement to bypass the party machine. As soon as McGovern’s victory seemed believable, Warren Beatty started throwing benefit fundraisers. A Simon and Garfunkel reunion sold out Madison Square Garden for McGovern. Even the Dead did a show in support. I can’t find the tape, but I’m sure it didn’t do much to alter his perception as the “amnesty, acid, and abortion” candidate.
A half-century before politicians bragged about pop star Instagram endorsements, McGovern was the first to leverage celebrity co-signs in search of the “youth vote.” Rolling Stone was still considered subversive when the idea actually meant something. And with the publication of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas in the summer of ’72, Thompson was rapidly becoming one of the most famous writers in America, at a time when America actually had famous writers. The circumstances helped broker access to McGovern and his inner circle—as much as they could trust a reporter who claimed that one of his main opponents (Humphrey) was on an “exotic brand of speed known as wallot.”
In McGovern, Thompson identified with that integral part of any worthwhile writer: self-damaging, unequivocal honesty. But from the beginning of the campaign, he was aware what an Achilles' heel this was.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/thompson-on-the-campaign-trail
Will the "Trump is Hitler" theme backfire for Kamala Harris when the anti-semitic wing of the Democratic Party believes it and votes Republican?
Brilliant writing by Jeff Weiss in the Back Pages! Thacker & Taibbi showing us investigative journalism still lives, bless those guys for calling out the 'red coats' return. As for attacks on Trump, the' boy who cried wolf' applies. Our Establishment only needed to tell the truth half the time, and we wouldn't be in place where 1/2 the citizenry doubts a large portion of what the MSM now states, and especially in an election year.