Will Trump End Elections? Anatomy of a Failed Hoax

Apparently Saul Alinsky has been resurrected and is working as the chief propaganda coordinator for the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.

Following the Saul Alinsky playbook

Alinsky was a 1960s radical who helped shape the strategy for a leftist takeover of the bulwark institutions that for two centuries had protected the American republic from opportunistic would-be dictators.

Alinsky’s goal was to create a guidebook for how leftist radicals could wrest America’s domestic and foreign policy away from conservatives, moderates, and traditional liberals. His 1971 blueprint was called “Rules for Radicals,” and it instructed left-wing activists how to gain power in their communities through a campaign of character assassination, manipulation, and ruthless persistence.

Those three characteristics have been in plain view for the last two weeks as Harris and her surrogates have unleashed a series of attacks on Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance.

In particular, Harris and the left-wing media have adopted two of Alinsky’s rules in order to try to destroy the public image of Trump and Vance. The first is: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” The second rule is “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Calling Trump and Vance “weird”

Both of those can be seen in the push to label Trump and Vance as “weird,” an insult employed by Harris’ running mate Tim Walz when he was auditioning for the job. There is absolutely no response to that insult except to say, “I’m not weird; you are,” and that’s the tactic Trump’s team employed, but it was hopeless. The Democrats picked the target, froze it, and personalized it. Alinsky was right. You can’t counterattack ridicule.

So the best you can hope for is to expose the attack as itself being ridiculous. Vance has tried to do that by pointing out that Walz’s policies such as putting tampons in elementary school boys bathrooms are what’s weird. It might have been an effective counter-tactic when this country had a media that wasn’t thoroughly partisan. But a press corps thrilled to join in regurgitating Democratic Party talking points doesn’t care how weird it is that Tampon Tim can’t tell the difference between boys and girls.

The good news is that Donald Trump is very familiar with the Democrats’ tactic of character assassination. For the past nine years he has been subjected to endless false attacks that aimed to polarize him as first a Russian stooge, then a white supremacist, and finally an enemy of democracy who threatened a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t reelected in 2024. Those attacks have all been exposed as partisan chicanery, but that doesn’t stop his opponents from repeating them every chance they get.

The end-of-elections hoax

Two weeks ago, Democrats and the mainstream media were caught red-handed as they tried to jump-start a new hoax that suggested Trump would cancel future elections if he were elected this year.

The video that played on Sunday morning shows and across the universe of cable news channels for three days at the end of July came from a speech that Trump delivered to the Turning Point Action Believers Summit on Friday, July 26. This clip from CNN typified the way Trump’s words were portrayed, with one commentator saying that “it certainly sounds like a presidential candidate that is determined to shut down the democratic process.”

CBS News reached the same conclusion, saying that on social media there were “some calls of alarm in response to Trump’s comments, expressing concern that they alluded to authoritarianism and could be interpreted as an indication that he would not leave office if he wins the election.”

That’s ridiculous, of course, and if there should be any concern about Trump’s words, it would be about how nonchalantly the media distorted them for the purpose of character assassination.

The part of Trump’s speech that was played or quoted ad infinitum by mainstream media for those three days was this:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

The missing context: what Trump actually said

Twisting those words to suggest Trump was planning “to shut down the democratic process” is just cynical. But if anyone were sincerely alarmed, you’d think that their next step would be to listen to the entire speech where these words were uttered to find out if there was any missing context.

A real journalist would look for answers before running with a hugely damaging and potentially slanderous story. But this episode demonstrates conclusively that there are very few real journalists left in America.

I knew the real meaning of Trump’s words because I had watched the speech live on a streaming channel, but how much work would it take for a highly paid network reporter or anchor to look at the Believers speech after the fact before accusing the former president of plotting to eliminate elections?

If they had, they would have found that, a little over 37 minutes into his speech, Trump explained to his audience that Christians vote in disappointingly low numbers, and if they wanted him to return to the White House, they needed to go out and vote “at least this election.”

Here’s the full quote that I don’t believe was ever played, not once, by any major media outlet:

And by the way, Christians have to vote. You know, I don’t want to scold you, but do you know Christians do not vote proportionately, they don’t vote like they should. They’re not big voters … They have to vote. If they don’t vote, we’re not going to win the election. If you do vote, we’re going to win in a landslide. Too big to rig. We’re gonna win in a landslide. … You know, you have tremendous power, but you just don’t know that. But you have to use that power. Christians are a group that’s known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election, just get us into that beautiful White House. Vote for your congressmen and women. Vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better. This country will be great again like never before. You gotta vote. … This election will be the most important election in the history of our country. We’re going to save our country with this election.

What damage was done

Who knows how much damage the reporting of CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC did to Trump while the “Canceled Elections Hoax” played out from that Friday until Tuesday of the following week? And I don’t expect that we have heard the last of this hoax, any more than we have heard the last of the “Very Fine People Hoax” after seven years.

But there was a sudden and definitive end to the use of the misleading clip on TV news outlets starting that Monday night, July 29. That’s because Laura Ingraham aired an interview with Trump on Fox News where she asked him specifically what he meant by saying that Christians wouldn’t have to vote again in four years.

Trump repeated to Ingraham exactly what he had said in his speech – that Christians tend not to vote in as high numbers as other interest groups – but even Ingraham had a hard time grasping the idea. Certainly she had never watched the video of the entire speech, and apparently neither did anyone on her staff, because she truly seemed to be unsure why Trump had said that he wanted Christians to “vote, just this time.” Even after Trump explained, she still wanted him to reassure her that he didn’t plan to cancel future elections.

Refusal to recognize the context

To be clear, Ingraham is a lawyer by training, not a journalist. Even so, she shamed the real journalists by at least asking the target of the smear to explain himself. But that wouldn’t have even been necessary if anyone in the media had bothered to listen to the Believers speech in the first place.

And even after the Ingraham interview, there were several news articles that simply refused to comprehend Trump’s explanation. The New York Times characterized the interview as Trump declining “to back away from [the] ‘You don’t have to vote again’ line” and saying that he “brushed aside multiple requests to walk back or clarify the statement.”

Wrong. Actually, the New York Times declined to accept Trump’s explanation and tried unsuccessfully to keep the hoax alive. But as we see every day, the real hoax is journalists pretending to be fair and impartial when, in fact, they are just tools of the radical left who have one goal in mind: Target Trump.

Saul Alinsky would be proud.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.