MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Gormless, formless Kamala just said the quiet part out loud – and proved which campaign is the real threat to democracy

Days to go and there is only one argument Kamala Harris – and her followers in the media – can make: Trump is Hitler.

Or Mussolini, or Stalin, or Pol Pot – take your pick. If Trump is elected, he will build concentration camps, tear up the Constitution, send the military to arrest his political enemies – hell, anyone who didn’t vote for him – and host Putin and Xi in Lincoln’s bedroom, burn the country and throws Rachel Maddow in jail.

Well, most of us could get behind the latter.

Here’s what Maddow said about Trump voters at a forum in Brooklyn in September: “I believe people can change and redemption is possible… I’m always hopeful.”

And the left wonders why so many find them haughty and condescending. If Kamala was smart, she would do what Obama did and reach out to those who disagree, instead of demonizing them.

But she’s not smart. We know this.

During her disastrous town hall on CNN Wednesday night, she gave only one clear and concise answer.

“Do you think,” asked host Anderson Cooper, “Donald Trump is a fascist?”

“Yes, I do,” Kamala said. “Yes, I do.”

You could see it in her eyes: she thought this was her microphone moment. But no one in the audience — largely made up of voters, Cooper said, who were inclined to vote for her anyway — clapped or reacted in kind.

The campaign of ‘joy’ and ‘vibes’ has turned quite dark indeed. Trump-as-Hitler is the left’s new talking point, spoken with grave seriousness to voters who are apparently still too stupid, ignorant, racist or xenophobic to understand it.

Despite having a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren, Trump is a Nazi. His upcoming rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday? Nazi rally.

His tough, full-throated defense of Israel? Leave the best undiscussed.

Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s four-year-old claim that the former president admired Hitler — unearthed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and denied by a Trump spokesman — is also making the rounds, though it begs the question: If Kelly believed that Trump was such a Hitler acolyte, why didn’t he resign immediately?

Why not sound the alarm when it really matters? Could Kelly, who was fired by Trump, get revenge? Nick Ayers, former chief of staff to Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, wrote on X that Kelly’s claims are “patently false.”

The media ignores that. It appears the Nazi drumbeat will continue until Election Day and, if he wins, well beyond.

However, sometimes the mask slips. Take this conversation between MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who went hysterical last week — in both senses of the word — with top Democratic strategist James Carville.

Psaki: “It sounds like you’re saying we need to scare people again because that’s what they need to hear?”

Carville: ‘Yes.’

There it is: the silent part is said out loud.

No serious person really believes that Trump is a threat to democracy – not least when you hear it from a party that staged an internal coup and put forward a candidate who had not earned a single vote.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote two days ago about the left’s misguided Trump-fascist ploy: “Aside from the fact that it’s unnecessary and self-defeating — what kind of voter will be won by being yelled at? – it is also largely wrong.”

Stephens is one of the Times’s token conservatives, but somehow he’s gotten past America’s most woke newsroom.

Even Democratic senators facing re-election in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin are running ads touting their ability to work with Donald Trump. The point is, people can’t be a little fascist or a little racist.

So make no mistake: the left-wing elites laugh at the poor fools who believe this stuff.

It’s actually very sad that a major party candidate is so empty, so devoid of any real opinion, policy or personality, that all she can do is run in opposition. Harris has been campaigning since July and she has yet to define herself.

What is she for? Not just what she believes, but what is the point of Kamala Harris?

Other than pure, vaulting ambition, the answer seems to be nothing. Seeking power for power’s sake seems like a much bigger threat than anything she can bring against Trump.

Here was Harris, in that CNN town hall, responding to a young, serious Habitat for Humanity volunteer who asked what she would do “to ensure that another innocent Palestinian doesn’t die from bombs funded by American taxpayers?”

Oooooh boy. Kamala was not prepared for that. Her eyes slowly closed. She brought her fingers to the bridge of her nose, as if fighting a migraine. A pause, a little salad, and finally “a two-state solution” – so easy, that – and a gentle reminder that Trump is a fascist.

Who would you rather have with the Middle East?

Even Obama’s best doctors can’t cure this patient. Apparently there is no treatment plan that Harris can imbue with authenticity, humor or intelligence. She cannot free herself from her most violent figure of speech, a style that could be used as auditory torture for prisoners of war: ‘We are a people that has ambition. We have ambitions. We have dreams.’

One of those dreams is never hearing this empty nonsense again.

After weeks of preparation, studying, reading, and mock interviews (you’d hope), here’s the best she could do about why the Biden-Harris administration ignored the border crisis for years:

“Well, a lot has been done, but there’s still more to do, Anderson. And, and – I point out things that need to be done, that haven’t been done yet, but need to be done.’

Shouldn’t we be relieved by what has been done?

Anyway, imagine her supervisors backstage, watching and listening to this. No wonder there are leaks from her camp about internal panic. Even David Axelrod, the man who got Obama elected twice, couldn’t defend this stunning failure during CNN’s autopsy.

“Word salad town,” he said.

In response to a question from Carol, professor of political science, who asked Harris which policy she would most like to see implemented by Congress.

Simple, yes? One problem, one solution – even in a dream scenario.

For this purpose gird up your loins.

“Well,” Harris said, “there isn’t just one. I have to be honest with you, Carol. Um, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but let’s, let’s – I think maybe this is part of this, the point that I – the way I think about it is that we have to get past this era’ – here Kamala’s eyes closed , as if she was praying for a convincing answer – “that politics and party politics are delaying what we need to do in terms of progress in our country.”

Carol didn’t seem impressed.

And what about Doug Emhoff? Any decent journalist would have used this town hall to ask questions about Kamala’s husband, who was accused by an ex-girlfriend of violently punching her in the face – in public, outside a top gala, so hard that she turned away – or the nanny, whom he allegedly impregnated during his first marriage and paid $80,000 to go away.

Unfortunately, we had Anderson Cooper, who also refused to tell us whether CNN had vetted these voter questions. Cooper embarrassed himself and his failing network here — just as Maria Shriver, the only other top Dem woman who knows what it’s like to see your husband get the babysitter, told attendees at another town hall in Kamala on Monday that they couldn’t ask candidate any questions.

“Hopefully,” Shriver told the crowd, “I can ask some of the questions that may be on your mind.”

How’s that for a free and open discussion? The purpose of a town hall is for citizens to ask the candidates questions that concern them. Instead, they had Maria Shriver shut them down.

And she called herself a journalist!

No wonder Anderson Cooper, on the other hand, seemed to think he was doing a good job, even when Kamala walked all over him.

“One of the things I specialized in as a prosecutor,” Harris said, “was crimes against women and children.”

There’s the opening: WHAT ABOUT DOUG? What about the women who say he treated them terribly? Does Kamala, as the left so pointedly tells us, believe all women? Or just women that Doug hasn’t dated yet?

When will anyone in the national media grow a spine and ask this dimwitted, shapeless candidate questions about her husband’s accusers?

It won’t be anyone on CNN, that’s for sure. Last week, Scott Jennings, former special assistant to President George W. Bush, dared to raise “some of the questions swirling around Harris’ own husband” before the network’s panel quickly silenced and silenced him.

That’s thought police. That is intellectual fascism.

If there’s one thing Kamala Harris certainly believes in, it’s exactly what she accuses Trump of: taking out perceived enemies, refusing to be honest with the American people, and allowing the media to cover her and her husband. .

So much for the politics of joy.