The American people can always count on Democrats to foster unity and responsible political rhetoric.

Just kidding! Democrats have a knack for doing just the opposite. They cause bitter divisions based on every identity category they can think of or contrive. And they hysterically slap the “Nazi” label on anyone they don’t like, especially Republican presidential candidates. They did it to George W. Bush, John McCain, and even milquetoast Mitt Romney. Heck, Democrats applying the “fascist” label to GOP nominees goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. So of course they’re doing it to Donald Trump.

Technically, “fascist” is the word of the week right now, but it’s all the same. The national socialist villains of the 20th century killed far fewer people than the Marxist socialist villains of the 20th century. Still, because the Nazis used race/ethnicity as a primary sorting method, their evil genocide riles up Western leftists, who then falsely label Nazis “right-wing.” In contrast, leftists rarely raise an eyebrow at the tens of millions killed by the communists.

Yesterday, I wrote about The New York Times quoting General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, as saying that the former president “falls into the general definition of fascist.” (No, he doesn’t.) Kelly’s Trump Derangement Syndrome has him remembering things about his former boss that no one else seems willing to corroborate on the record.

It’s also awfully strange timing. If America was threatened by Trump being a fascist dictator, why didn’t Kelly blow the whistle while, you know, Trump was in the Oval Office? Instead, he waited until two weeks before this election. Odd.

Also yesterday, I noted an article by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic — the same guy who wrote that bogus and anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” story — that likewise relied on Kelly as a smear source to paint Trump as a fascist. By the way, The Atlantic is owned by Democrat megadonor Laurene Powell Jobs, and she’s made no bones about her intent to use the magazine as a platform for left-wing politics, not journalism. Jobs also happens to be good friends with Kamala Harris and Jeffrey Epstein’s “madam,” Ghislaine Maxwell.

Well, lo and behold, no sooner had we published yesterday than Kamala Harris found a podium from which to use the Goldberg/Kelly hit job as the basis for denouncing the man she’s losing to as a fascist. She repeated the charge at a CNN town hall last night, and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed that Joe Biden also thinks Trump is a fascist. That’s an upgrade, I guess, from two years ago when Biden declared Trump’s MAGA movement was actually “semi-fascism.”

From her residence at the Naval Observatory, Harris delivered about three minutes worth of remarks followed by no questions. She called Trump “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and warned that he wouldn’t have “guardrails” like Kelly in a second term. At CNN’s town hall, she said voters care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.” She added that Trump is “dangerous,” saying that Kelly’s comments are “a 9-1-1 call to the American people.”

In 2019, Harris called Kelly “cruel” and “unethical,” but never mind that now.

This whole charade is roll-your-eyes stuff for Americans who are old enough to remember Trump’s first term. Or it should be.

It’s also dangerous. As Trump’s campaign put it, “Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics.”

Moreover, none of the people making such charges are credible sources. First of all, Biden and Harris scream the loudest about “fascism” because they are the ones perpetrating it. One of the hallmarks of fascism is division by race. No one does that “better” than the DEI-obsessed Democrats. Another critical component of national socialism is co-opting private businesses to enact the regime’s agenda. To pick a few examples, consider White House pressure on Facebook for censorship, the federal takeover of the student loan industry — from backing loans to “forgiving” them — or the central planning “necessary” to fight climate change.

Second, as I already noted, Kelly is Trump-deranged, and Goldberg and Jobs are left-wing hacks who are not discernibly different from Harris campaign surrogates.

Need more evidence of that? Look at the opening lines of Goldberg’s smear. He tells of the 2020 murder of “Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, [who] was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas.” That matters in Goldberg’s estimation because he claims Trump was a two-faced villain. While he charmed the family with “a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother,” he was cruel, calloused, and racist behind the scenes. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f***ing Mexican!” Trump allegedly groused before telling Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “Don’t pay it!”

Is that true? The Atlantic cited one anonymous source, but everyone in the room denied it. Meadows told Goldberg that Trump “absolutely did not say that.” Instead, Goldberg reported that Meadows “denied having heard Trump make the statement.”

That lie alone undermines the credibility of Goldberg’s entire piece. Such shoddy “journalism” should be scorned out of the mainstream, but it’s actually typical of the Leftmedia these days.

It wasn’t only Trump’s inner circle who denied it. Guillén’s family did as well. Mayra Guillén chastised The Atlantic for using the death of her sister as political fodder two weeks before an election. “I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics — hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” she posted yesterday. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”

The same question about timing comes into play here. If Trump was such a callous meanie in 2020, why wait until October 2024 to tell people about it?

That was rhetorical.

Ultimately, this whole fiasco is yet another example of what Nancy Pelosi once called a “wrap-up smear.” She projected such tactics onto Republicans, but Democrats are the ones who do it. Here’s how it works: They feed a rumor to the press and then capitalize when a media outlet reports the rumor. Harris supporters told The Atlantic and The New York Times that Trump is a fascist, giving Harris the opening to make a speech and participate in a CNN town hall to express shock and outrage at the media reports, which are spreading far and wide.

Two weeks before the election. How convenient.

The only question now is whether the Leftmedia will report in-kind contributions to her flailing and sinking campaign.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.

(Updated)