By Joshua Arnold

Remember when a major candidate for the U.S. presidency was nearly assassinated twice, and a chorus of voices momentarily urged everyone to tone down the political rhetoric? That ceasefire is officially over. At a CNN town hall last Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly called former President Donald Trump — get this — a “fascist.” I bet you’ve never heard that one before.

The impulse to restrain violent rhetoric was never going to run through Election Day. In fact, it couldn’t even make it a whole fortnight. But now, the rhetoric has built once again to a white-hot crescendo, as a last-minute media frenzy seeks to squeeze every last possible vote out of The Narrative before vote-counting begins. Now is not a time to discourage political violence, the rationalization goes; there’s an election to win, after all.

According to The Narrative, voters need look no further for proof of Trump’s fascist — even Nazi-like — preferences than his latest rally, an all-day affair in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden (MSG). The connection — obvious only to historians with a magnifying glass and a debilitating case of confirmation bias — is that the wrestling, hockey, basketball, and concert venue was once the site of a pro-Hitler rally in 1939, three years before Joe Biden was born.

That was a sufficient connection for MSNBC to play footage from the 1939 rally along coverage of Trump’s 2024 event, along with a chyron informing viewers, “Trump’s MSG rally comes 85 years after pro-nazi rally at famed arena.” The live commentary held the same note: “that jamboree happening right now — you see it there on your screen — in that place is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally.”

It wasn’t just the far-Left media. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), Harris’s vice presidential running mate, alleged a “direct parallel” between Trump’s rally and “a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” He added, “Don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there. So, look, we said we’re all running like everything’s on the line because it is.”

If Trump’s MSG rally was, subtly, a pro-Nazi event, it chose a strange way of showing it. Israeli flags hung from the rafters. Speakers included businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump’s running mate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who has two children with his Indian wife. Black attendees from Harlem and Bronxville, N.Y. told National Review that all the black people in their circles are planning to vote for Trump. This is hardly the stuff of Aryan supremacy.

The only evidence from the rally the media could use to propel its “racism” narrative were some poor jokes from a little-known insult comic who was booed by the crowd.

But that hasn’t stopped the media from trying, nor from finding political figures eager to assist them in building that narrative. Even Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump after making similar Nazi allegations, suggested on CNN that the Trump rally was “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”

A more neutral interpretation is that the Trump campaign chose MSG as the site of their New York rally because it is a large venue, capable of seating 20,000 attendees. If Trump himself had any mental associations with the site, they probably had more to do with WrestleMania than with American Nazism.

Indeed, more recent political associations with MSG are both bipartisan and mainstream. It has hosted four Democratic National Conventions and one Republican National Convention, including those for Carter (1976), Clinton (1992), and Bush (2004) — three out of the six living former presidents. Was Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939” at his nominating convention? Or is there a double standard at play?

In any event, “Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” admitted a recent email from Future Forward, which The New York Times described as “the leading pro-Harris super PAC.” Future Forward urged the Harris campaign to adjust its messaging to those that play better with focus groups. “Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” they wrote.

Future Forward may be correct that voters would rather hear a candidate talk about what they will accomplish, rather than their opponent’s faults. But the Harris campaign and its allies also perceive correctly that their messages about Harris’s policy agenda are weaker than their messages about Trump’s faults — when they can make them stick.

Trump’s rally in MSG was not the only recent occasion for his opponents to reopen cans of Nazi Smear Sauce that expired eight years ago. Last Tuesday, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published an article suggesting that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” according to Trump’s estranged, former chief-of-staff John Kelly.

Goldberg devoted the majority of the article to Vanessa Guillén, a U.S. Army private of Mexican descent who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood in Texas. In Goldberg’s telling, “Trump became angry” over the cost of funeral arrangements, declaring, “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a [explicit] Mexican!” Goldberg added that Trump ordered White House Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows not to pay.

But there was a problem. Virtually everyone present when these exchanges allegedly took place went on record denying Goldberg’s account, some before the story was published. Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer “emailed me a series of denials,” writing “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie,” said Goldberg. Similarly, he recorded, Meadows “denied having heard Trump make the statement” and “also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.”

Former Trump National Security official Kash Patel added a characterization of events that contradicts the ethnic disdain portrayed by Goldberg. “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice,” he said. “In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

Goldberg published the story anyways, presenting his version of events as factual, without citing his first-hand source. This provoked further denials from those who were actually present. “Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics,” tweeted Guillén’s sister Mayra. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.” Trump official Theo Wold, who was present that day as a translator, was more direct: “The Atlantic hit piece is a lie.” Meadows issued a public denial of the story, and his spokesman Ben Williamson took The Atlantic to task for watering down the denial he issued from Meadows from “Trump ‘absolutely did not say that,’” to he “didn’t hear Trump say it.”

The mainstream media is not known for letting the facts get in the way of a good narrative, even if that should be their primary purpose. Sometimes, it seems that they self-consciously assume the role of the titular villain from “Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed.” So, it’s no wonder that “most people believe the media is biased,” admitted Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in a recent op-ed.

Their ceaseless and unsubstantiated accusations of “Nazi” and “fascist” seem to be hurting their own cause. In a recent focus group of undecided voters in Pennsylvania, one man said that “part of the reason why I’m being pushed towards Trump so strongly is I find that the Democrats and the Left keep going straight to Hitler all the time with everything. … It pushes me away from their position. It’s so hyperbolic that it makes it impossible to have good discussions, and I think it ruins the discourse.” When asked, the other focus group participants also agreed that bringing up Hitler so often is not helpful.

Some partisans may respond by declaring that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy, making the Trump-Hitler comparison apt. But progressives undermine that argument when they smear other politicians, advocating mainstream policy positions, as “fascist.” For instance, left-wing opinion-maker Joy Reid recently declared that standard pro-family positions were “fascist.” When progressives label normal Americans with the same smear they use against Trump, the only effect is to convince normal Americans that Trump is a lot like them.

Following Trump’s MSG rally, a sect of Satmar Hasidic Jews led by Grand Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum endorsed Donald Trump for president. Trump is many things, but a Nazi is not one of them.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.