After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Attempt One Last ‘Get Trump’ Gambit on Election Day
(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Apart from getting booed by Beyoncé fans and heckled by Hamas supporters, nothing could have been more pathetic than the Kamala Harris campaign’s pivot back to Bidenesque fearmongering in the desperate final stretch of the 2024 election.
The Adolf Hitler trope now being deployed by Democrats is so overwrought that, since 1991, it has had its own special name in online culture: Godwin’s law.
And yes, the eponymous law’s creator, Mike Godwin—a former senior fellow at the R Street Institute and contributing editor at Reason magazine— has often addressed, in response to media inquiries, whether former President Donald Trump deserves a special-exception rider.
“My name gets cited in a lot of these discussions. And of course my ears are burning,” Godwin explained in a 2018 op-ed for the newly neutral Los Angeles Times.
“It hasn’t mattered that I’ve explained GL countless times,” Godwin continued. “Some critics on the left have blamed me for (supposedly) having shut down valid comparisons to the Holocaust or previous atrocities.”
Of course, the problem the Democrats have is that they sought precisely the same carve-out?for many other Republicans: Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and, of course, Dick Cheney. Four have since become staunch Trump critics, and one is now actively campaigning for the Democrats.
“They’ve been saying that about Trump for years,” observed conservative pundit Megyn Kelly during a recent interview with Bill Maher. “They’ve been saying that about Republican candidates for years. … If you are at all center or center-right, you are used to having your candidate of choice completely demonized.”
As Godwin clarified, his law was never intended to suggest that all comparisons to Hitler and the Nazi regime were spurious—only that most were.
Republicans have countered the constant barrage of ad hominem attacks by pointing to the very valid ways in which the Democrats have, themselves, become the party of anti-liberal, authoritarian values, using their Trump Derangement Syndrome as justification to act on their worst impulses by shutting down all criticism and debate, while pursuing a Stalin-inspired “ends justifies the means” approach to politics.
“I saw the party that used to have courageous voices and leaders, calling for peace, now becoming the party of warmongers,” said newly red-pilled Republican Tulsi Gabbard at a rally Saturday in Charlotte, N.C.
“It has become the party of war,” the one-time Democratic presidential candidate added. “It used to be the party of working people.”
INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY
The resulting death spiral has left it in a condition where the Democratic Party, without significant reform, is no longer compatible with the precepts of democracy because its ideas, when it bothers presenting any, are so far on the fringe that they are rejected by the public.
They have, instead, fallen back on astroturfing, gaslighting and importing new voters through a complex ploy that involves simultaneously undermining U.S. border security and election-integrity laws, while actively attacking any efforts by the states to address their negligence.
Although they have set themselves up with the capabilities to steal any election, relying on both traditional ballot-harvesting methods and technological manipulation of equipment, their one vulnerability could be a landslide election in which, given the loss of credibility in the media and many government institutions, the American public outright fails to accept a fraudulent outcome.
While polls still suggest a tight race, many other bellwethers now indicate a potential Trump blowout, at least in the Electoral College.
With Trump notably leading polls in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania, even Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., recently acknowledged the GOP nominee’s strong position to hold the Keystone State, according to a New York Times interview.
Trump need only secure his 2020 states, along with Pennsylvania and Georgia, to reclaim the presidency, with four additional “swing states”—Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada—only bolstering his advantage.
As of Sunday, the latest polling averages from RealClear Politics indicated that Trump had narrow leads in all of them. He had a 0.1% lead nationally.
By contrast, on Oct. 27, 2020, President Joe Biden reflected a 7.4% lead nationally. Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, had a 5.6% advantage.
IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
Trump’s success, moreover, in clinching key minority demographics creates an optical problem for Democrats, who can no longer use the fig leaf of “voting rights” as a pretense to undermine election integrity.
Democrats who disfranchise voters in the black and Hispanic communities now risk losing them permanently and incurring the same level of minority-driven anger and outrage against them that they weaponized against Trump during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
Most worrisome of all for Democrats may be that in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, early voting indicated that more Republicans had turned out as of Friday, Oct. 25, according to Bloomberg. Three other battleground states—Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin—do not track party registration for early voting, suggesting Trump may be leading there, as well.
This trend could further explode the narrative pushed during recent election cycles that Republicans simply waited until Election Day and were bested by Democrats’ early get-out-the-vote initiatives.
If Trump is leading by a notable margin even going into Nov. 5 and Republicans continue to turn out at higher levels, there will be no plausible deniability for Democrats (and some corrupt GOP election officials) to delay releasing the results as they continue to scrounge up late-surfacing ballots in blue enclaves such as Arizona’s Maricopa County and Nevada’s Clark County, both of which have previously pulled last-minute reversals in 2020 and 2022.
Having already tipped their hand to their tactics, all eyes will be watching to see whether they have the temerity to engage in what could be deemed nothing less than a seditious conspiracy.
DESPERATE MEASURES
With all other options exhausted, Democrats’ only hope now may be to drive massive turnout on Election Day itself. But that is a task not easily accomplished. Undoubtedly, they would need some sort of precipitating event to rally any remaining voters to the polls.
What could it be? Here are a few possibilities that they might still pull off with just over a week remaining:
Escalation of war/act of terrorism
“I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams,”’ wrote Abraham Lincoln in a June 1864 letter making his case for reelection.
The axiom has led other presidents, while politically flailing, to try to “wag the dog” by using war as a means to drive patriotic sentiment. In the Biden–Harris regime, while the patriotism may not be present, the anxiety of a foreign attack is still a powerful tool for manipulation.
Both China and Iran have made clear their preference for the current administration—of which Kamala Harris would be, at best, an extension—over Trump’s “America First” presidency. A false flag attack on Ukraine to stir up anti-Russian sentiment is another possibility. Trump has pledged to end the war there even before taking office.
Intel psy-op
We are all too familiar with the intelligence community’s role in fomenting violence at events like the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest and the Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” rally. Perhaps the Harris campaign’s decision to feature them as a focal point in its closing argument is not so much an act of desperation but portention.
There are several signals indicating that there may be a heightened presence of election-meddling FBI operatives and others on-site at polling places, who are specifically tasked with monitoring MAGA. Might the goal be to instigate some sort of unrest during the election as a weapon of mass distraction?
Executive Order 14019
The Biden administration has been abjectly dishonest about many things, but its unusually opaque approach to President Joe Biden’s March 2021 edict has long raised suspicions that it could weaponize the entire federal bureaucracy as a de-facto ballot-harvesting operation for Democrats.
In keeping with the blueprints of anti-American subversive Saul Alinsky, the Left has sought to pre-emptively accuse the Trump campaign of a nefarious plot to reshape the government through talking points about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Yet, Executive Order 14019 could be everything that it accuses Project 2025 of being and then some. The only problem is that the lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell just how Democrats intend to use this.
Presidential death/health crisis
The Democrats and their deep-state allies have failed, thus far, in killing Trump, and to do so now would undoubtedly turn him into one of the greatest martyrs in U.S. history. JD Vance would coast to victory in a landslide, and with trusted college pal Vivek Ramaswamy at his side, he would set up the GOP for generations of political dominance.
Yet, assuming Biden hasn’t been actively trying to torpedo the Harris campaign, he might be persuaded to step aside early due to a health emergency, installing the current veep as the incumbent, which would allow her to finish the final stretch with images being sworn in by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, thereby shoring up the identity politics vote. It would, of course, leave little time for her to actually implement any policies that would sour voters further against her.
Although Biden has recently indicated the need to “lock up” Trump—politically, he claims—Trump shrewdly hinted that he might be open to considering a presidential pardon for Hunter Biden, which could prove to be a powerful bargaining chip.
Nonetheless, there is another president who could similarly stir up superficial sentiment at the last minute. Centenarian Jimmy Carter may, in fact, already be dead.
Barring further proof of life, one might be hard-pressed to believe that Carter—his mouth agape and appearing jaundiced or discolored as he lay in state at his 100th birthday celebration earlier this month—still inhabits this mortal plane.
However, maintaining the illusion is necessary, for now, since he already cast an early ballot for Kamala Harris, which would be invalidated, in theory, if he were to die before Election Day.
Carter’s passing, followed by a prompt cremation, could be announced next Tuesday as voters in Georgia are heading to the polls, throwing in to disarray a must-win state that Trump appears to have locked in.
Literally locking Trump up
This risky move may backfire, as all the earlier lawfare actions taken against Trump only helped to further bolster his popular support due to backlash. Nonetheless, the psychological impact of having their candidate in detention could cast enough doubt to keep some Republicans home, and would certainly motivate Democrats.
As it stands, corrupt New York Judge Juan Merchan has pushed back Trump’s sentencing in his porn-star case to Nov. 26. The GOP leader also still remains under gag order in the D.C. trial led by dubiously appointed special counsel Jack Smith, whom Trump recently called a “scoundrel.”
Smith and his accomplice, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, might unseal additional accusations to bait Trump into a response of some kind that could violate the order and land him in the gulag with countless other Jan. 6 detainees.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.