I think it was President Bill Clinton who popularized the term “politics of personal destruction” — and in fairness, his Republican critics heaped plenty of that on him for his Monica Lewinsky dalliances.

But the Democrats are taking that political tactic to an entirely new level with their last-ditch incendiary claims that Donald Trump — a former U.S. president and current presidential candidate — is a fascist, a Hitler-in-waiting, poised to steal our democracy and destroy our nation.

Their accusation has been percolating for a long time. It took shape in September 2022 with President Joe Biden’s weird Philadelphia Independence Hall address to the nation at which Biden, bathed in dramatic red lighting and flanked by armed U.S. Marine Corps guards, warned us of the “semi-fascist” MAGA Republicans. That message meshed with the 18-month Democrat-led House investigation into the January 6 “insurrection” and its prime-time TV performances. Then last week, there was the well-timed release of a New York Times interview with Trump’s former chief of staff, retired USMC General John Kelly, followed by a hastily arranged press briefing by VP Kamala Harris to pass on the alarming news of Kelly’s revelation about Trump’s “fascist leanings.”

That evening, Harris went full Monty on the subject. When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if she believes Trump is a fascist, she answered emphatically, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” She later uttered the word, saying Trump “is a fascist.”

Let’s be clear. Adolf Hitler was a genocidal maniac. He very nearly eradicated the Jewish race. The world war he ignited took tens of millions of lives. Does Harris or anyone in her political circle truly believe that our former U.S. president has even remotely similar inclinations? Of course not. It’s an absurd claim made only for political advantage. And it won’t yield even that.

The voting public knows better for several reasons. Donald Trump is no stranger; he was our president for four years. If anything, his presidency was a model of executive restraint, keeping the peace internationally (not very Hitler-like!) and actively trimming regulatory red tape. In fact, as president, Trump was far less authoritarian than his successor, who has, for example, bypassed Congress and ignored the courts in “forgiving” student loans and effectively mandating the transition to electric vehicles.

Ah, but we’re told to expect Trump to be far more authoritarian in his next term because he promises that he will be — but a quick look behind the curtain shows that to be baseless political blather. Counter to Team Harris’s assertions, Trump has no plans to suspend the Constitution (a ridiculous interpretation of a 2022 Trump tweet that he corrected shortly afterward), nor does he promise to be a “dictator on day one” (a deliberate mischaracterization of Trump’s sarcastic claim that he would emulate Biden’s Day One blizzard of executive orders).

Harris and company also warn us that Trump will be more dangerous next time because we will not be protected by the “guardrails” provided by Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly. Some guardrails. General Milley might have earned his keep if he’d pushed back on President Biden’s foolish direction to rush ahead with the Afghanistan withdrawal and abandon Bagram Airfield. He did not. Instead, now he grumbles, long after the fact, that Trump was the problem executive during his tour as our senior military chief.

The real guardrails that protect our nation from an out-of-control executive were put in place by our Founders: the clear separation of power among our three branches of government that have served us well for 240 years and will be in place to keep a President Trump or a President Harris in line.

Most importantly, the Harris campaign’s “Trump is Hitler” signals are both immediately dangerous and harmful in the long term.

Donald Trump has already survived two assassination attempts. After each of those, there were sober promises on all sides to lower the temperature of our political discourse; now, they are conveniently forgotten. The Democrats’ strident claims that Trump is an unspeakably evil threat to our nation is a chilling invitation to more of the same, encouraging the next hero to earn everlasting fame by taking him down.

Nor will it stop there. The smears have legs and will endure for years. If Trump wins the election, his political opponents’ over-the-top demonization of him will tee up four years of protest, resistance, active opposition, and certain violence. We can anticipate that every Trump action disliked by the Left will be interpreted as fascist behavior, meriting angry protest and civil disobedience.

It is the Democrats who keep wagging their fingers about the importance of peaceful transfer of power. They are correct — but all the while, their election campaign is planting seeds of unrest sure to impede it.