A heavily debunked Atlantic hit piece gave Kamala Harris the pretext to justify political violence against former President Donald Trump in a Wednesday afternoon address from the vice president’s official residence in Washington, D.C.

Harris, without an iota of evidence, told the American people that if Trump were to become president again, he would create a dictatorial, Adolf Hitler-esque regime. That exact rhetoric is part of a larger pattern of priming Democrat voters for violent resistance to another Trump presidency. It has been most recently fueled by an Atlantic hit piece that relied on unnamed sources and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, well known for his disdain of Trump, to smear the former president of being a “fascist” and wishing for the kind of generals Hitler had.

“It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds-of-thousands of Americans,” Harris said. “All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.”

Kelly’s allegations about the Hitler comments came, conveniently, five-and-a-half years after they allegedly occurred and just two weeks before a presidential election. To put it bluntly, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., said, “John Kelly is full of sh-t, and I have the receipts.”

Harris’ comments come off the back of what was, for any honest observer, an election interference operation by far-left media outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times intent on helping their Democrat friends in the fourth quarter of the campaign season.

As The Federalist reported, the article from The Atlantic, written by propagandist Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, was a thinly sourced hatchet job discredited, publicly, by actual people who were in the room of the alleged incident. In addition to the claim about Hitler’s generals, it also claimed that Trump used expletives to express his disdain for a slain American service member of Mexican origin, Private Vanessa Guillén, and the payment for her funeral. That claim was debunked by everyone involved, including the Guillén’s sister, Mayra, who said Goldberg’s characterization was “exploiting my sister’s death for politics.”

Even Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary who has been at odds with Trump, said he never heard anything like the comments attributed to Trump in these eleventh-hour hit pieces.

That did not stop Harris from parroting the lies, however. And, to make matters worse, she made the remarks at the official residence of the vice president, Number One Observatory Circle.

“As the unofficial magazine of the ultra-wealthy left, The Atlantic understood the assignment in dressing up years-old claims as though it were brand new,” Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters, told The Federalist. “There is no bottom for an outlet that, as we’ve seen with the pushback from Pvt. Guillen’s family, some Gold Star families mean more to the liberal media than others.”

“This is election interference to the nth power. The Atlantic wants to talk about Donald Trump as a danger to democracy, but the same could be said of Jeffrey Goldberg’s pathetic rag. In the name of long-form journalism, they’ve used their magazine and weekly show on PBS as weapons in its idolatrous hatred of Donald Trump and/or anyone who stands in their way,” Houck added. “The Atlantic, by virtue of being owned by Kamala Harris’s longtime personal friend, Laurene Powell Jobs, should be dismissed in terms of credibility as though they were a hostile foreign actor laundering conspiracy theories.”

Harris continued to fearmonger, saying that a second Trump administration would target judges, journalists, and election officials.

“Let’s be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within. Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify, in his mind, as the enemy within, like judges, like journalists, like non partisan election officials,” Harris continued. She added that a new Trump administration would not have the likes of Kelly there to act as “guardrails” against apparent genocide, or “pursuing the worst impulses.”

“He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States,” Harris said. “In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans ‘the enemy from within,’ and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.”

Trump has only called far-left rioters and looters, akin to the type the country experienced in the 2020 George Floyd riots, “the enemy from within” — and did so in response to the potential for riots if he is again elected in 2024. Those groups, like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, wrought untold billions of dollars in destruction to cities across the country.

“Kamala is showing signs of ‘cornered rat syndrome’ — she’s using an outdated, unbelievable and debunked storyline as a last ditch effort to save her failing campaign. It’s so desperate and pathetic,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told The Federalist. “Kamala has lost this election due to her extremist anti-family policies — including her support for taxpayer funded sex change procedures for not just inmates, but minor children as well. They’ve been calling Trump ‘Hitler’ since he got into politics.”

Regardless, while the fabrications about the Guillén family may appear new, Kelly and Goldberg’s Hitler claims are actually old, but still fake, news. The Hitler hoax may have first appeared in a 2022 edition of The New Yorker, suggesting that the entire concerted effort from The Atlantic and the Harris campaign is a recycled hoax.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.