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The Trump-Hitler story is a psyop.

I mean that literally, not figuratively. It’s a military-grade, multistage psychological operation, engineered to reenergize demoralized Kamala Harris supporters and — through stigmatization — reduce turnout among Donald Trump supporters. Here’s how it works.

Step One: Payload

The most important component of any weapons system is the payload — that is, the material that actually detonates and causes explosive damage. In a psyop, the payload is generally a narrative. In the case of this psyop, the narrative is that Trump is a fascist, a Hitler sympathizer, and an outright Nazi.

If your initial reaction here is to laugh at how trite and cliched this is, you’re not wrong. You would think, after eight years of trying to will this fake narrative into existence ex nihilo (“Don’t you folks get that he’s literally Hitler?!”), the Democrats and their media allies would eventually have moved on. But there are two reasons why they’ve exhumed this beaten and dead horse, and why they did so just 14 days before the election.

First, they’re desperate. Harris is falling in the polls, and, in particular, she has forfeited a meaningful level of support among Latinos, black men, and Arab-Americans. With white Americans breaking for Trump more heavily than ever before, the Harris campaign can’t afford even the slightest of shifts in voting patterns among swing-state minority demographics.

Second, unfortunately, the fictitious Nazi claim, on the margins, is effective. Most Americans, burned out on nearly a decade of continuous media hoaxes (from “very fine people on both sides” to injecting bleach to the origins of Covid to Hunter Biden’s laptop), will see through it and immediately disregard it. Remember, though, that just a handful of swing states will decide this election; even more specifically, members of the aforementioned minority groups will likely be the fulcrum within those states.

If, by calling Trump a fascist, the Harris campaign and the media can motivate even a small number of these people to get off the fence and support Harris, and if they can also demoralize a small number of would-be Trump voters in the same states to stay home on Election Day, it could make all the difference.

Step Two: The Launch Vehicle

A weapon is no good if it can’t be delivered to its intended target. In the case of this operation, the first stage of the launch vehicle was The New York Times and The Atlantic, which published their stories within hours of each other.

Ask yourself, what are the odds that two prominent news outlets, both of which are highly friendly to the Democrat establishment but which are (notionally) independent from one another, would publish two separate articles with the same narrative, within hours of each other on a date exactly two weeks before the election? Exactly.

Step Three: Chain Reaction

The New York Times and The Atlantic offer credibility for the narrative’s nucleus, but what they can’t offer is widespread distribution. Americans get their news from a range of sources that is wider than ever, and — as much as it might offend those who took out $200,000 in student loans to attend Columbia J-school — most of them don’t turn to the so-called paper of record or to a once-great literary magazine intellectually bankrupted by the widow of the guy who invented the iPhone.

Fortunately for the orchestrators of our psyop, though, if there’s one thing the media hate even more than Donald Trump, it’s missing out on all the clicks and impressions from a hot story. Within hours of the two original articles going live (within minutes, in some cases), virtually every other corporate publication released a derivative article that summarized the salacious claims in the source articles.

By the end of the day Tuesday, there were hundreds of such releases, from CNN, NBC/MSNBC/CNBC, ABC, CBS, Newsweek, Axios, Business Insider, the HuffPost, NPR, and just about any other publication one could name. These derivative articles don’t merely disseminate the narrative’s DNA further, but they also serve to reinforce it and provide it (false) legitimacy, creating the unjustified impression that dozens of outlets have looked into this, rather than just two.

When Americans open up Facebook and see countless articles from countless different sources all saying the same thing, they become far more susceptible to the narrative, even if they might otherwise be skeptical. The sheer volume of logos and headlines overwhelms the mind’s natural hesitation to question propaganda. It’s devious, but it works. And the people who engineer missions like this know it.

Step Four: Iterate and Perpetuate

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris read a statement decrying Trump’s supposed fascism. Then she regurgitated these claims in her televised town hall later that night. President Joe Biden’s team doubled down too. In doing this, they essentially rebooted the news cycle for the narrative, providing it with fresh life and keeping it front and center in the media.

If you’re getting a sense that the media focus comes in waves, it’s because it does (and, like everything else here, it’s deliberate and methodical). In the first 24 hours, the focus is on the original claims in the two source articles. In the subsequent 48 hours, once the original story starts to go stale, the media focus pivots to the reaction from prominent opponents of Trump, thereby creating another news cycle to reinforce the narrative.

Thereafter, the media will launch yet another wave of news, this one focused on interviewing historians (all of whom will, conveniently, summarize the numerous and convenient parallels between Trump and the fascists of old), swing-state voters (all of whom, conveniently, will claim that Trump’s newly unveiled love of Hitler convinced them to get off the fence and support Harris), and even so-called Trump supporters who have now decided not to vote for him. The goal is to keep the narrative in front of the audience for as long as possible, giving it time and space to metastasize further and continue corroding support for Trump.

Step Five: Launch Another Payload

We have 12 days until the election. If you think this is the last payload the Harris campaign and the media will launch into the discourse, you have far more faith in their decency than I do.

Expect at least two more of these over the next two weeks, one of which is already centering on ridiculous sexual misconduct claims and the second of which, if I can hazard a guess, will focus on Trump’s business history. Just remember: If it looks like a psyop, walks like a psyop, and quacks like a psyop, it’s probably a psyop.

Remain vigilant, keep your spirits high, and, most importantly, VOTE.

Robert Sterling is an investor, entrepreneur, and business advisor. Robert is the founder of EV Partners, an M&A and financial advisory firm. After serving as a signals intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps, Robert worked in various M&A roles at Koch Industries and Cargill, America’s largest private companies. He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington and an MBA from Pepperdine University. Robert can be found on Twitter at @RobertMSterling.