By John Nolte
The corporate media have spent the last decade singling out one man for an unprecedented hate campaign, and on a beautiful Saturday evening in Pennsylvania, that hate campaign almost paid off.
For nearly ten years, the media have lied about this man colluding with Russia to steal a presidential election, lied about him being a unique threat to democracy, lied about him being a rapist, lied about him describing Nazis as “very fine people,” lied about him being a racist, lied about him trashing WWII troops, lied about him launching an insurrection, lied about him wanting to inject bleach into the sick, lied about him putting kids in cages, lied about him assaulting Secret Service agents, and lied about him being the second coming of Adolf Hitler.
The New Republic @newrepublic
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
We unreservedly choose the latter course. And so we have assembled herein some of our leading intellectual historians of fascism; a member of the fourth estate who learned firsthand what the Trump lash feels like; a leading expert on civil-military relations; a great Guatemalan American novelist with a deep understanding of immigrants’ lives; one of our most incisive cultural critics; and a man with all-too-real experience in living under a notorious authoritarian regime. The scenarios they describe are certainly grim. We dare you to say, after reading these pieces, that they are impossible.

These assassination dog whistles — which is how I’ve described them for years — these not-at-all subtle calls from the corporate media for a patriotic American to take the New Hitler out, has finally borne the fruit of a near-political assassination.
When you lie about Donald Trump being the next “George Wallace,” an assassination is what you want.
When you describe Donald Trump as “unmoored” and “unhinged” and “un-American,” an assassination is what you want.
When you describe Donald Trump’s supporters as “Nazis,” an assassination is what you want.
When you tell your viewers that Donald Trump will “execute” his political opponents, an assassination is what you want.
When you tell your viewers that Donald Trump is a dictator, an assassination is what you want.
When a leftist thug attempts to tackle Donald Trump at a rally, and you turn this thug into a media folk hero, an assassination is what you want.
When you defend and champion a play depicting Donald Trump’s gruesome assassination, an assassination is what you want.
When you publicly fantasize on the air about how Donald Trump’s assassination could keep Barack Obama in office, an assassination is what you want.
When you make “jokes” about Donald Trump’s plane crashing, an assassination is what you want.
Ask yourself… What else could the media possibly want other than an assassination? What is a patriotic American supposed to do other than assassinate a “Hitler” and an “un-American dictator” who embraces Nazis and will execute his political opponents? We can’t have the next George Wallace or a full-blown Russian Manchurian Candidate who puts kids in cages and rapes women in the Oval Office—of course, we can’t!
Don’t you understand…?!?
Since he announced his presidency, the corporate media cry of STOP THIS MAN AT ALL COSTS has been a clear, desperate, and (as he overtook Biden in the polls this year) increasingly shrill message backed by billions and billions of corporate dollars.
Just today — TODAY! — the corporate media were calling for Trump’s assassination by claiming that if he won, “this could be our last election.”
No one in the media truly believes that.
No one in the media believes anything listed above.
It is all naked lying and naked fearmongering said for only one reason: to stop Trump at all costs, at any cost, including what we just saw happen.
And what we saw happen was that the corporate media nearly got what it desperately wants above all else — a dead-by-assassination Donald Trump.
***Update: CBS News just shamed Trump for not using his Truth Social statement to call for a lowering of the political temperature. You cannot hate the media enough.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.