This week’s Liberal Media Scream highlights the latest anti-Trump screed from CNN by alarmist Fareed Zakaria in a special about the dangers to U.S. democracy that former President Donald Trump and his followers pose.
In his special, aired Sunday and scheduled again for tonight, he moves quickly to raise the Nazi Germany comparison, and that of madman Adolf Hitler, with the 45th president, who is eyeing a 2024 bid to get his job back.
If Trump “wins the nomination and it’s a close election, we will almost certainly face a constitutional crisis,” Zakaria said in urging Republicans to join more level-headed Democrats to “save American democracy.”
From a CNN Special Report aired Sunday night, The Fight to Save American Democracy, narrated by Zakaria:
FAREED ZAKARIA: Democracy everywhere is under attack. But remember, America has been here before. America has vanquished demagogues before. So how do we do it now? …
The global superpower promoted democracy abroad and proudly embraced it at home. But can America still be Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill?
JON MEACHAM: There’s nothing inevitable about American democracy. This is a fragile, fallible, complicated experiment.
ZAKARIA: That experiment has faltered before. It’s almost failed, only to return triumphant. To understand how that happened, we need to go back almost a century ago.
MEACHAM: It was an existential crisis.
ZAKARIA: The early 1930s. The Great Depression is battering a nearly broken country. …
Just ahead, while America was rising from the ashes of the Depression, in Germany, democracy was losing to a fanatical madman. How did it win here but lose there?
[NEWSREEL OVER VIDEO OF HITLER: The German republic was dead.]
ZAKARIA: A story with a twist that has haunting echoes to the current American crisis. …
Let’s be very clear. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. But Weimar’s death highlights a danger for all democracies, specifically the way conservative elites, determined to keep the Left out of power, align themselves with an anti-democratic demagogue. The story in Germany began with a big lie. After the nation was defeated in World War I, a baseless, right-wing conspiracy theory was born, that the military had not lost in battle but was forced to surrender by traitorous left-wing politicians. …
If the scenarios outlined here come true, Donald Trump runs, wins the nomination, and it’s a close election, we will almost certainly face a constitutional crisis. …
But today for Republicans, party politics trumps institutional loyalty. The real scandal of Jan. 6 is not what happened outside the Capitol alone. It’s what happened inside when a majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the valid results of a presidential election simply to curry favor with Donald Trump.
It is that vote, not the violence, that almost broke the American system. … In particular, Republicans must come to realize they can and should disagree with Democrats vigorously on taxes, regulation, inflation, the environment, whatever they want. But now, they must come together with these same Democrats to preserve a credible and legitimate political system. For all of us, this is the most important political issue right now. Not your views on Iran or inflation or green subsidies. Those can wait. Let’s first save American democracy. I’m Fareed Zakaria. Thanks for watching.
Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “Any ‘journalist’ who says ‘Let’s be very clear, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler,’ is, in fact, saying Donald Trump is very much like Hitler. And, by extension, Trump’s supporters are following the same deluded path which led to Nazi rule. Such apocalyptic fearmongering, painting a significant percent of the public as a threat to democracy, just further proves CNN is more an arm of liberal Democratic Party activists than an impartial news organization.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE SCREAMS.
