MRC Fights 'Fascism' (Of Trump Being Accurately Described As One)
The Media Research Center regularly melted down over Donald Trump's fascistic tendencies being called out -- even though it has no problem calling George Soros and Joe Biden fascists.
Of all the many critics of Donald Trump, John Kelly — his former White House chief of staff — is arguably the most credible … and that’s why the Media Research Center felt it had to work harder than usual to shout it down. Curtis Houck howled in an Oct. 23 post:
ABC’s Good Morning America went full bore against half the country on Wednesday, going all out with over 10 minutes (10:28) of hyperbolic tailspins eagerly touting as fact wild claims from former White House chief of staff John Kelly that Donald Trump is a fascist, danger to democracy and the American people, and enthralled with Adolf Hitler.
In turn, they hurled nothing but venom toward Trump and his supporters as they were calmly soothed by Vice President Harris’s camp.
Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos — who views defeating Trump as a duty — gushed over the “truly extraordinary breaking news this morning” of Kelly “speaking out with things you have never heard before from someone who has served a president.”
“He says Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist. He says Donald Trump praised Adolf Hitler, demeaned American war heroes, calls Donald Trump a man who would govern like a dictator if allowed,” he added.
Fact-check: Pants on fire. A simple internet search would reveal Kelly first leveled these claims in August 2022 in a book for liberal elitist snobs Peter Baker and Susan Glasser and doubled down in March 2024 to CNN tool and former Obama official Jim Sciutto.
Correspondent Rachel Scott — who has a idolatrous level of hate for Trump — eagerly shared that Kelly has “paint[ed] a picture of a former President and Republican nominee who has no regard for the Constitution or rule of law, warning that he would rule as a dictator if he could” and a “fascist”.
Scott not only invoked Kelly’s tall tales about Hitler, but implied Trump is pining for a genocide: “Kelly describing how Trump would praise Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who orchestrated the systematic murder of six million Jews and caused World War II.”
Houck offered no evidence that Kelly was telling “tall tales,” showing the he has an idolatrous level of hate for Kelly, Scott, and anyone who tells the truth about Trump.
Houck raged further later that day:
Although nowhere near the ten and a half minutes ABC’s Good Morning America cranked out Wednesday seething over (years-old) claims from former White House chief of staff John Kelly that former President Trump is a fascist and Hitler enthusiast, CBS Mornings (2:57) and NBC’s Today (2:58) still spoonfed their viewers with coverage of the “disturbing,” “startling,” and “stark” allegations.
“Startling revelations from a former White House chief of staff who says based on what he witnessed, Donald Trump would rule like a dictator,” announced co-host and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King in the Eye Opener.
CBS co-host Tony Dokoupil moments later called Kelly’s claims to The Atlantic and The New York Times “a blunt warning about former President Donald Trump from someone who knows him very well” that “Trump demands loyalty to himself over the Constitution, repeatedly sought to use the U.S. military against American citizens, and even expressed admiration for Hitler on more than one occasion.”
Trump campaign correspondent Nikole Killion bragged that Trump’s schedule included two events in Georgia, but bragged “those comments from John Kelly…are overshadowing his visit.”
Killion ran through the major hits about fascism, Hitler, and his response to Trump’s “enemy form within” remark. She at least noted, along with a strong denial by the Trump campaign, that Trump had long soured on Kelly and blasted him in August as “one of the dumbest people I’ve ever met” and “a bully.”
[…]
Over on NBC, co-host Savannah Guthrie (falsely) described Kelly’s claims in a tease as “new, disturbing allegations.”
The Kelly segment had to wait since senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson had been granted a day earlier an interview with Harris. Jackson played a number of clips from the cha and sprinkled in other filler about the campaign, including “Obama hitting the campaign trail” with Eminem and delivered a few lines from the latter’s famous track, Lose Yourself.
To her credit, Jackson was the only network correspondent to mention President Biden chanting “lock him up” in reference to wanting to see Trump jailed.
Eventually, Trump campaign correspondent Garrett Haake got his turn, cheering Kelly’s (rehashed) tales as being on tape and made sure to play up Kelly’s credibility to level this “dire warning” about a “fascist” Trump since he’s a Gold Star father.
Tim Graham helped Houck whine about this in his Oct. 23 podcast:
The networks also touted a new New York Times interview of former Trump chief of staff John Kelly. They captured the audio so the clips could air on national TV. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos hyped Kelly “speaking out with things you have never heard before from someone who has served a president.”
As in? “He says Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist. He says Donald Trump praised Adolf Hitler, demeaned American war heroes, calls Donald Trump a man who would govern like a dictator if allowed.”
Fact-check: Pants on fire. Curtis Houck did a simple internet search, which revealed Kelly first leveled these claims in August 2022 in a book for liberal Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, and doubled down in March 2024 to CNN host and former Obama official Jim Sciutto.
Neither Graham nor Houck explained why it matters that Kelly had previously made those statements. Then it was Jorge Bonilla’s turn to whine:
Of course we saw this coming. With Election Day less than two weeks away, the Regime Media are pulling out all the stops, and promoting all manner of questionable stories related to former President Donald Trump in a quest to create a late October Surprise and drag Vice President Kamala Harris over the finish line.
Watch ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir’s breathless introduction to Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce’s report, in yet ANOTHER overwrought minute-long brief that could’ve been its own report[.]
These allegations are in service of the atrocious hit piece in The Atlantic which alleges, per unnamed sources, that Trump claimed to want generals as loyal as Hitler’s, both of which served as the factual bases behind Harris’s statement at her official residence and, ostensibly, her “closing argument” speech next week.
The media firefought the obvious question people ask themselves when hearing shocking allegations conveniently timed for release just before a presidential election: “why now?” In this case, Trump’s “enemy within” remarks were what compelled Kelly to find his nerve after all these years.
Bonilla is never going to ask himself why he refuses to take Kelly’s allegations at face value — he’s supporting a felon and rapist as president, after all, and is not interesting in dealing with that pesky conscience.
Mark Finkelstein took his own shot at the narrative, grumbling over the argument that reporting Kelly’s observations is not a sign of hate:
On CNN’s Wednesday night town hall, Kamala Harris enthusiastically defined Trump as a “fascist.”
And The Atlantic conveniently happened to publish an article in the closing days of the campaign with former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, also using that f-word on Trump, and associating Trump with Hitler.
In the mind of CNN host Kasie Hunt, that doesn’t mean that Kamala’s closing message is “hate Trump!” Definitely not! No way!
[…]
Hunt was trying to support Kamala by noting she was citing John Kelly, because when you really turn on Trump, you’ve really pleased CNN. “I think it’s worth noting that John Kelly, who has devoted his life to service to the country, he lost, lost a child in service of the country, and he was in the room for a considerable amount of time in the Trump administration.”
So, if Kamala’s message isn’t “hate Trump,” just what is Kasie claiming? That Kamala is calling Trump a fascist because she thinks it will make people like him? Spill, Kasie: America wants to know!
Of course, we can thus safely assume that Finkelstein is filled with hatred for Hunt simply for accurately reporting Kelly’s remarks.
Houck raged even more in another morning-TV recap:
On Thursday morning, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC remained enthralled with the tales spun by former White House chief of staff John Kelly about former President Trump as an alleged fascist and supposed Adolf Hitler enthusiast.
ABC’s Good Morning America still led the way with over six minutes (6:08), including a lead-off report from Disney’s in-house North Korean news lady for the Harris regime, Mary Bruce.
She fawned over Harris “ramping up her argument” about Trump with an assist from Kelly. Somehow, Bruce found it within herself to admit Harris spent much of the CNN town hall attacking Trump instead of stating what she’s for.
[…]
CBS Mornings also tried to make hay with Kelly’s media blitz whining to the far-left Atlantic and New York Times, but only gave it about 90 seconds (1:33).
Co-host and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King argued Harris and Trump are engaged in “two very different strategies in these final days” with the former “courting the moderates” by focusing on Trump as a danger to the country with Trump only “focus[ed]…on his own base.”
[…]
As for NBC’s Today, co-host Craig Melvin had to throw in a nod at the start of the show before a lead off segment on the Boeing strike: “Vice President Harris in Pennsylvania last night for a town hall, doubling down on comments from a one-time member of former President Trump’s inner circle calling him a fascist. Meanwhile, Trump at an event in battleground Georgia, looking to flip the script a bit, saying Harris is the threat to democracy. We’ve got it all covered in just a bit.”
Senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson declared “Donald Trump on attack..as former Trump officials and the Harris campaign highlighted why they see him as an existential threat” with Kelly their latest wave of support.
Jackson at least pointed out Harris was so obsessed with the Trump fascism angle that she even urged voters to set aside considering a third party over the war in the Middle East because Trump is that dangerous.
Clay Waters played the old-news narrative in his own post:
News Hour anchor Geoff Bennett segued from the evening’s lead campaign story, much of which was devoted to a New York Times audio interview of Gen. John Kelly, former Trump White House chief of staff and current liberal media military hero of the day. Kelly compared Trump to a fascist based on comments the former president made about Hitler that no one else apparently heard — alleged statements made during a presidency now four years past.
And this is nothing new from Kelly either: Curtis Houck revealed that Kelly first leveled his “Hitler” claims in August 2022 in a book for husband-and-wife reporting team Peter Baker (New York Times) and Susan Glasser (The New Yorker).
Houck was still at it in an Oct. 25 post:
ABC’s Good Morning America not only continued to try and make fetch happen with scaring and shaming voters into voting for Vice President Harris instead of former President Trump with more fawning over former Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s tall tales about his former boss being a fascist and Adolf Hitler enthusiast, but also tried to dial up the gush for Harris “calling on her biggest celebrity supporters” and “promising to put Americans first.”
[…]
After complaining about Trump’s promise to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, Scott went back to the well of Kelly’s partisan posturing, suggesting he’s telling the truth and thus he shouldn’t be questioned because he “served his country for decades” and is a Gold Star father.
[…]
Stephanopoulos even tried to have political director Rick Klein make the argument that Kelly’s (years-old) claims about Trump being a fascist will move the needle for voters toward Harris:
Again, Houck didn’t explain the relevance of complaining Kelly has made these claims before. It’s as if he’s desperately trying to downplay the relevance and gravity of his accusations.
More ‘fascist’ meltdowns
and it was equally upset when others pointed that tendency. Alex Christy huffed in a Sept. 10 post:
MSNBC’s Joy Reid previewed Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris with a wild monologue on Monday’s edition of The ReidOut. For Reid, the “badass” Harris needs to beat the “fascistic” Trump “like he stole something.” Additionally, Reid claimed, without evidence, that the Supreme Court will name Trump the winner of the election even if he loses.
In Reid’s telling of history, 2020 never happened, “And as a backup, he’s counting on his big lie and embedded officials in key states who believe the big lie to simply refuse to certify the election in their states due to claims of so-called fraud by non-white voters. Throwing the election to the Republican-led House of Representatives or to John Roberts and the right-wing Supreme Court majority, both of which would absolutely name Trump as the winner regardless of the popular vote.”
Um, isn’t Reid pointing out that 2020 did, in fact, happen by highlighting the “big lie” about election fraud from Trump and Republicans (and the MRC)? He continued to whine:
Rolling right along, Reid mourned, “Despite how exhausting and deadly the Trump era was, and how it devastated our lives, our psyches, our families, our economy, tens of millions of Americans, our fellow Americans, want to go back to that era. They do not want to move on. They want to go back. It makes no sense to me, and probably not to you either. But that is reality.”
It probably makes no sense to Reid because she never bothered to understand those tens of millions of voters because while ranting about badassery versus fascism may give her audience a cathartic experience, it does not make them more informed.
Clay Waters huffed in a Sept. 23 post:
The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic, the journalistic political roundtable airing every Friday evening on tax-funded PBS, featured Atlantic magazine journalist Caitlin Dickerson accusing Donald Trump of not just racism, but using the rhetoric of “fascist neo-Nazi groups,” for his insistence on enforcing the borders and lowering immigration levels from certain world regions.
This is PBS in fall campaign mode, as in “don’t vote for the neo-Nazi!”
Tim Graham lashed out at Rachel Maddow for invoking the term to describe J.D. Vance in his Oct. 2 column:
On September 30, on the cusp of the vice-presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens Drug Stores dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.
Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are The Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?
Graham then effectively decalred it’s OK for Vance to go fascist at colleges because “you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education.”
When another former Trump administration official used the word to describe Trump, Brad Wilmouth spent an Oct. 16 post having a spasm of Stelter Derangement Syndrome:
Appearing on CNN News Central on Tuesday morning, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter talked up former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley calling Donald Trump a “fascist to the core” in a book by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, and mused over the possibility that Democrat Kamala Harris might try to draw attention to the attack during her interview with Fox News host Bret Baier.
They underlined this on screen: “WOODWARD BOOK: MILLEY CALLED TRUMP ‘FASCIST TO THE CORE.” They loved it.
CNN host Sara Sidner brought up Woodward’s new book, War, as she posed: “You have read Bob Woodward’s new book that is out this morning, and in it, he has this quote where Mark Milley calls Trump a ‘fascist.’ You’ve read the book. Can you put this in some context for us and give us some idea of all that is in the book, named War?“
As much as Wilmouth complained about this, he never proved Milley wrong.
Graham returned for another meltdown in an Oct. 18 post:
The jubilant headline on the front page of Friday’s New York Times was “Democrats Lose Fear of Calling Trump a Fascist.”
Reporter Jonathan Weisman’s first paragraph seemed daft. The F-bomb has “hovered” around Trump since 2015. “But for most top Democrats, it was a provocative term loaded with dread, historical import and potential incitement — best left unsaid.” It was?
Is the Times somehow skipping over Morning Joe and all the other liberals and Democrats who love comparing Trump to Hitler and Mussolini? Then there’s the question of “fact checking.” The “independent fact checkers” aligned with the Democrats never find calling Trump “fascist” or “Hitler” signal this is so accurate it doesn’t need checking.
[…]
Weisman quoted the Washington Examiner finding that Democrats have called Republicans “fascist” since Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. “Fascism is anything Democrats don’t like,” they said. That’s true.
Christy went into comedy cop mode for an Oct. 24 post:
Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly has a habit of being the go-to source for those seeking tantalizing anti-Trump stories, even as other former Trump administration officials who have soured on him cast doubt on them. However, for the men of late night comedy on Wednesday, if an anti-Trump story confirms their pre-existing biases, it must be true.
The latest Kelly story includes allegations Trump praised Adolf Hitler, longs for American generals to be more like Hitler’s, and that Trump himself is a fascist. For CBS’s host of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert, Kelly’s claims were not that surprising, “He also falls into the specific definition of a fascist. So this is less of an ‘October surprise’ and more of an ‘Early autumn no [bleep].’”
[…]
On NBC’s Late Night, host Seth Meyers also claimed not to be surprised by the news, “It’s amazing to hear an exasperated general go through the dictionary definition of fascism and tick off every box for Trump. ‘Is he a fascist?’ ‘Well, he calls his opponents vermin, scum, and the enemy within. Says he wants to round up his critics, and conduct a mass deportation. He talks like a fascist, he acts like a fascist, he’s friends with fascists, he compliments fascists. And the worst thing, he just got a pin that says, ‘I’m a fascist.’”
Fellow NBC host Jimmy Fallon reacted to the news on The Tonight Show by also breaking out his Trump impression, “Some political news, well, guys, the big story today is that Trump’s former White House chief of staff went on record to detail how Trump often said, quote, ‘Hitler did some good things.’ Trump made it worse today when he said, ‘Oops, mein bad.’”
[…]
Over at Comedy Central and The Daily Show, host of the week Michael Kosta also claimed it is obvious that Kelly is correct, “Fascism is a nationalist political movement that builds a cult around an all-powerful leader who vows to protect his loyal subjects from racially inferior “others” and the enemy within. Now that you know that, upon hearing John Kelly calling Trump a fascist, you’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, durrr.’”
Christy served up more grumbling in a Oct. 26 post:
After days of declaring that Donald Trump admires Adolf Hitler and dismissing evidence that his scoop that Trump cursed in a racist manner at the cost of a military funeral was false, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, took his place in the anchor’s chair of PBS’s Washington Week with The Atlantic and declared it is only “allegedly extreme” for Kamala Harris to label Trump a fascist.
Goldberg first needed a definition, and for that he turned to fellow Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, “So, you’re a scholar, among other things, of Soviet communism and authoritarianism generally. What is fascism?”
[…]
If dividing the nations into traitors and non-traitors is a sign of fascism, then a lot of people who went all in on the Russia Collusion narrative have some explaining to do. Another sign of fascism is the belief in an all-powerful state, but that’ll be hard for Trump to enact while also promising to pursue a policy of deregulation and tax cuts.
Waters came back to huff some more in an Oct. 28 post: “Given that members of the Democratic Party or their media colleagues have tarred every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater a ‘fascist’ at some point, isn’t it a bit late for journalists to be finicky about how voters choose to apply the term?” Of course, the MRC and their fellow right-wingers have tarred every Democratic presidential candidate over the past half-century as a communist, so he’s being a bit hypocritical here.
Waters whined again in an Oct. 30 post:
Despite its alleged concern for the decline of civility in politics, the New York Times is actually all in on political slander and name-calling lately — when it’s in the service of defeating Donald Trump. For the second time in under two weeks, the paper reveled in the party’s new tactic of throwing the dirty word “fascist” at Trump to see if it would stick (not that they didn’t do so before but now they’ve turned it up to 11).
The Times thinks the plan is working for Kamala Harris – or at least, the Times now considers it politically expedient to claim it’s working for Harris, under the headline “Harris Aides Hopeful That Casting Trump as a Fascist Could Shift Election.”
The hypocrisy
This is all wildly hypocritical, of course — the MRC didn’t think “fascist” was “dirty” when it was tagging its political enemies with the word. MRC chief Brent Bozell used the word against George Soros in a May 16 post by Luis Cornelio:
Leftist billionaire George Soros is “behind an all-out effort to shut down” free speech in the United States, MRC President Brent Bozell declared on Thursday.
Bozell’s scorching remarks came in response to an MRC report that exposed Soros as one of the financiers of an anti-free speech cartel beseeching Big Tech platforms to censor Americans ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“I think Americans really need to be worried about this man,” Bozell said during an interview on Fox Business’s Varney & Co. “I think he’s the greatest threat to democracy — not just in this country, but worldwide — and the things he’s doing are frightening.”
At the center of Bozell’s warning is a media group’s letter pressuring social media platforms to censor content under the auspice of “implement[ing] election-integrity policies to protect democracy worldwide.”
The letter, which Bozell lambasted for its “really fascistic attitude toward democracy,” was signed by over 200 groups and was led by the Soros-funded media group Free Press (not to be confused with journalist Bari Weiss’s The Free Press).
Bozell is peddling the old, bogus MRC lie that correcting lies and misinformation in the media is “censorship.” He doesn’t explain how, exactly, that is “fascist.”
Christian Baldwin spent a June 7 post ranting about the purported “legal assault that the Biden administration is waging against Elon Musk. The headline? “Free Speech Advocate Takes Aim at This Fascist Move by Biden Admin.” Baldwin provided no specific evidence that any of the regulatory actions against Musk and his companies is in any way “fascist” — even though the MRC-led war against NewsGuard for purely political reasons fits under that same definition of fascism.