Will the Desperate Anti-Trump Tactics Work?

As Nov. 8 approaches, Democrats and their media allies are more than a little nervous.

GOP nominee Donald Trump is not sinking in the polls. Instead, he is winning Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and North Carolina. Some national polls even show him winning or tied with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“Hollywood will say anything,” said Shirley. “No one is going to give a damn.”

The possibility of a Trump win for the White House is very real, and that has the Democrats and the media-Hollywood complex very nervous. So what is there to do? The answer is simple: Throw the kitchen sink at Trump. Order up an “October surprise,” except make it a daily occurrence, not a monthly event.

Oh, and call Trump “Hitler.” Over and over.

Clinton’s allies in the party and the media have all but taken to the streets to spread such hysteria. Unfortunately for them, there isn’t too much to say about Trump that hasn’t been said.

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Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote on Sept. 2 that the Democrats have been crying wolf for a while about Trump. Mix that in with such presidential battles over the decades, and the voters tune out dire warnings.

“The sad truth is that we conduct the bulk of our political debate in a key of near-hysteria,” Bruni wrote. “And this renders complaints of discrepant urgency, about politicians of different recklessness, into one big, ignorable mush of partisan rancor.”

Yet the Trump-bashers will try. They will try big time.

Already, anti-Trump hysteria has set in. Trump has been called evil and has been compared to Hitler by actor Kirk Douglas.

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And the celebrity endorsements for Clinton have started: “The Avengers” director Joss Whedon has released a silly advertisement with Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson urging people to vote against Trump.

Actor Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda”) blasts Trump in the ad by calling Trump a “racist abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society.”

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On Charlie Rose’s show, U2’s Bono said Trump could be the worst thing to ever happen to America.

And the Dallas Morning News broke tradition and endorsed Clinton, the first time it has endorsed a Democrat since 1940. Unlike celebrities’ stands, the Morning News took a big risk that so far hasn’t paid off: Trump is still doing well — while many Dallas-area Texans have canceled their paper.

One might ask, when did the modern-day kitchen-sink strategy start?

Perhaps the kickoff to the modern kitchen-sink attack was the 1964 TV ad that President Lyndon B. Johnson ran against Republican Barry Goldwater. The famous “Daisy Ad” showed a girl plucking flowers as a countdown could be heard. Then a nuclear blast goes off. The ad was pulled after one day, but the message got through: You can’t trust Goldwater with bombs.

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It was one of the few kitchen-sink attacks that worked. Generally, desperation doesn’t fare well in U.S. elections.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was slipping in the polls. There had already been talk that Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan of California couldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons. But Carter also tried to scare voters at a debate by saying Reagan would cut or destroy Medicare. Reagan famously brushed him off with, “There you go again.”

Carter lost in a landslide.

Eight years later, the Democrats were desperate to end the Reagan era. Vice President George H.W. Bush was the Republican’s 1988 presidential nominee, and Democrats thought they had a good shot.

But as their nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, began to sink in the polls, the attacks on Bush by Dukakis and the media became increasingly desperate.

First, the Democrats unleashed criticism on Bush that his ads on the Massachusetts “furlough” prison program were racist. The Bush ads mentioned, although they did not show, convicted murderer Willie Horton, who raped a woman on furlough. Horton is black.

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In October 1988, The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times then produced ridiculous front-page stories alleging Bush delayed the release of the American hostages held in Iran in 1980. The rationale was that Reagan and Bush did not want Jimmy Carter to get any credit for the release right before the 1980 election. A release of the hostages in Iran right before the 1980 election was what Reagan called Carter’s possible “October surprise.”

The media and the Left went out on a limb in 1988 to resurrect rumors of what Reagan and Bush did to stop this.

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Doyle McManus wrote this for the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 25, 1988: “If this story turns out to be true, it would be the most diabolical intrigue of the century: a secret deal in 1980 between Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to keep 52 American hostages imprisoned in Tehran until that year’s Election Day, thus sealing Reagan’s march to the White House.”

Keep in mind that such an action would be treason. Yet McManus led his story with an odd phrase for a major paper of record: “If this story turns out to be true.”

Truth didn’t matter at this point. All that mattered was taking Bush down a few notches, right before the election. And the media pitched in with the Iranian hostage smear. Republicans working to elect Bush at the time recall the smear well.

“It was to affect the outcome of the election, there is no doubt about it,” said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and a former Republican National Committee aide. “The media hated George H.W. Bush. They hated him. They were merciless.”

Shirley now expects Hollywood to also keep pitching in and helping the Democrats and predominantly liberal media, as they did in 1988.

“Hollywood will say anything,” said Shirley. “No one is going to give a d**n. [Celebrities] are really stupid … Trump has built up his own wall of Teflon.”