If you put that conch shell up to your ear and listen closely, you can hear them. They’re panicking. And they should be panicking.

On this day in 2016, Donald Trump trailed Hillary Clinton in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls by 6.7 points. In 2020, he trailed Joe Biden by 10 points. Today, he trails Kamala Harris by 1.7 points. That’s essentially a tie. And given the historic phenomenon of the “shy” Trump voter — the voter who’s unwilling to tell pollsters that he’s planning to pull the lever for a convicted felon and a twice-impeached “existential threat to our democracy” — it’s not unreasonable to assume that Trump is actually ahead nationally. In the so-called battleground states, where the presidency will be decided, Trump actually leads Harris in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and trails by a third of a point in Wisconsin. So, yes, the Democrats should be panicking. And they are.

We can see a sure sign of this panic when longtime Democrat strategist James Carville starts taking his political talking points from Robert DeNiro. Here’s the vile, foul-mouthed, 81-year-old Trump-deranged De Niro on “The View” back in May:

I don’t understand why people are not taking him seriously, because you read about it historically in other countries that they didn’t take the people seriously. Think of [wait for it!] Hitler and Mussolini. They were fools and clowns. Well, and I hear, some people — I mean, who does not think that this guy is going to do exactly what he says he’s going to do? He’s done it already.“

Indeed, Trump has done it already, if De Niro is referring to Trump’s first four years in office, during which time he kept us out of ruinous wars and delivered economic prosperity. Of course, he wants to paper over Trump’s first term as if it never happened. So does Carville.

"Trump has announced that he will be giving a speech at Madison Square Garden on October 27,” said a bitter Carville on former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki’s show. “Please, Google "Madison Square Garden February 10 1939” and see what happened there. They are telling you exactly what they’re going to do. They are telling you, “We are going to institute a fascist regime.” … The entire Constitution is in jeopardy. The Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas have totally greenlighted the idea that you could use the military to round up your political enemies.“

🚨James Carville perpetuates the same old lies of Trump rallies being Nazi rallies.

"When I said that, I didn’t know that he was going to schedule a rally at Madison Square Garden to make the Nazi rally of 10th February 1939.”

Share to make this go viral pic.twitter.com/Z9BAPOD9Le

— Trent Leisy (@realTrentLeisy) October 14, 2024

Trump isn’t a Nazi, and no sentient American voter believes that he is. I mean, if he really is a proud and ambitious Nazi like Carville says he is, why didn’t he do the Long Knives thing in his first term? And why didn’t he round up all the Jews and start that world war and invade all those other countries?

We’ll grant this to Carville: It’s a clever rhetorical trick, a clever bit of demagoguery, to imply that two entirely unrelated events are actually the same event with an 85-year interregnum. And maybe a few low-information Democrats might fall for it, but they were never inclined toward Trump anyway. What Trump is doing campaigning in Madison Square Garden in deep-blue New York is the same thing he did this past weekend in even deeper-blue California: He’s letting heretofore hopeless Republicans in those states know that their votes matter. In both 2016 and 2020, New York and California accounted for the Democrats’ popular vote victory. If Trump can sweep the battleground states and minimize his losses in those two massive blue states, he might just be able to win the popular vote. And that would suggest not only a historic political victory but also a governing mandate.

I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re talking about the Democrats being in panic mode, and they are. We see it in Carville’s Godwinian warnings; we see it in former president Barack Obama, who was raised by a white mom, patronizingly scolding “the bruthas” for not dutifully falling in line behind Harris, who was raised by an Indian mom; and we see it in Harris herself, who’s gone from talking about “an opportunity economy” and a new way forward to shrieking about Trump not releasing his medical records.

“It makes you wonder,” Harris read from the teleprompter at a Sunday rally in Greenville, North Carolina: “Why does his staff want him to hide away? One must question, one must question — are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”

What’s going on is this: Trump is running circles around Harris on the campaign trail, and he’s winning over the American people. And she and her surrogates seem powerless to stop it.

Desperation, it’s been said, is a stinky cologne.