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By now it’s commonplace to note that Kamala Harris often seems out of her depth, like she’s unsure what to say about policy, or how to explain her past positions, or why she hasn’t already done the things she’s promised to do if she’s elected given that she’s the current vice president.

But on one particular subject she’s been consistent and forceful throughout her campaign. She’s adamant that Donald Trump will destroy America if he’s reelected. And not “destroy” in the sense of enact bad policies, but that he’ll round people up with the military and put them in camps.

She talks about this all the time now. At one point during her Wednesday evening interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, she became visibly upset after Baier played a clip of former President Donald Trump calling out the weaponization of government and the endless investigations and lawfare he’s been subjected to.

The vice president, her voice rising in outrage, jabbed her finger at Baier and said, “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week she told the crowd that former President Donald Trump considers anyone who doesn’t support him to be an enemy of the United States. “He is saying he would use the military to go after them.”

Earlier this week, during an audio town hall with Charlamagne Tha God, Harris claimed without a hint of irony that if Trump is elected he’ll use the Department of Justice “as a weapon against his political enemies,” adding, “You know who does that? Dictators do that.” At one point during the show, she agreed with a caller who said Trump will lock “anyone who doesn’t look white into camps,” replying, “You’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it I think so well.”

That’s just a sampling from this week, but there are many other recent examples. In the waning weeks of the presidential election, Harris has been deploying increasingly extreme rhetoric about Trump and the dangers he poses to the country. Even before Harris seized the Democratic nomination from President Joe Biden, the idea that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was the refrain of the Biden campaign. Harris has taken that theme and run with it.

The purpose of it isn’t just to scare voters into casting their ballot against the former president, or to provoke some unstable would-be assassin into taking a shot at Trump (although some Democrats no doubt see that as a happy by-product of this Trump-as-dictator rhetoric).

Its main purpose is to prime Democrat voters for violent resistance should Trump win in November.

Consider the lopsidedness of the rhetoric between the Trump and Harris campaigns. Trump often makes sweeping (and mostly true) statements about the deep state, about the border and illegal immigration, about crime, about how Harris and the Democrats are destroying the country. But when he uses the phrase “destroying the country,” he’s talking about things like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, rampant inflation and the cost of groceries. These things, he says, are the result of policies Democrats have put in place. If you’re looking for someone to blame, he says, blame Biden and Harris, because all these problems are their fault.

But that’s not what Harris and the Democrats are doing with their rhetoric. They’re not making a case that crime and inflation will be worse under Trump because of his policies. Democrats aren’t really interested in policy.

What they’re doing is pushing a narrative that Trump is going to be a fascist dictator if he wins office and use the powers of the presidency to go after ordinary Americans. That’s an extreme and frankly unhinged position with no basis in reality. You don’t say things like that unless you’re hoping to provoke a strong reaction, and the reaction Democrats are hoping to provoke is violent resistance to a second Trump term.

After all, if you really thought that Trump would order the military and the Justice Department to round up you and your family, wouldn’t you do anything to stop him? Wouldn’t you take to the streets to save your country and thwart the rise of a fascist dictatorship? At least two would-be assassins have taken the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric seriously. Harris is hoping that many more people will between now and Election Day, and respond by rejecting a second Trump term — in the streets, if they must.

There’s a precedent for this that Democrats themselves set four years ago. During the BLM riots in the summer of 2020, Harris herself was out in front egging on the rioters, infamously working to raise bail money for those who had been arrested. Of the protests themselves, she said this in a June 2020 interview with Stephen Colbert: “Everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day … They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.”

Harris and her fellow Democrats knew that the civic unrest unleashed by BLM and Antifa rioters would damage Trump’s reelection campaign, and they did their utmost to amplify the violence and also justify it by claiming the moral high ground. The protesters and rioters were only reacting to systemic injustice, after all, and as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

All of this only makes sense if you understand that Harris isn’t just a bumbling politician but a left-wing radical, and left-wing radicals have no qualms about using violence as a political weapon. If your goal is to seize and wield political power as part of a revolutionary program to transform America, then who cares if a couple neighborhoods here there get burned to the ground in race riots? Who cares if some young women get raped and killed by illegal immigrants, or a handful of apartment complexes get taken over by criminal alien gangs? Those things on their own might be unpleasant or disturbing, but they’re all in the service of a greater goal, which is the re-shaping of American society. So it’s all justified.

What Harris and the Democrats are doing with this line about Trump rounding up Americans and putting them in camps is preparing the ground for massive civic unrest in the event of a Trump victory. The purpose of the unrest would be to cripple Trump’s administration before he even takes office, and to disrupt normal life for so many Americans that they will rue the day they ever voted for Trump.

It’s the hecklers veto on steroids, and it’s exactly what Harris is planning for and hoping to provoke if Trump wins.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.