Donald Trump declared on Sunday that the way to ensure the 2024 election goes smoothly is to have the United States military used against “people from within” the country whom he has identified as “bad” and “sick”—like California representative Adam Schiff and other “radical-left lunatics.” That should be a deeply shocking, five-alarm statement for the FBI to look into, but in a society that’s experienced eight-plus years of this kind of rhetoric, it barely registers as a blip on the “shit Donald Trump recently said” meter.
Speaking to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, the GOP nominee for president said that when it comes to potential chaos on Election Day, “the bigger problem” is “the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and [are destroying] our country…I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
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Later in the interview, Trump said the “enemy from within” is “more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries,” declaring, “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.” Schiff, of course, is a prominent California Democrat running for Senate, who served as the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial and has therefore been attacked by Trump for years.
Asked to clarify what the ex-president meant in his interview, a campaign spokesperson referred to an Afghan man who was arrested in Oklahoma after being accused by the Justice Department of plotting an Election Day attack in the name of ISIS, with Steven Cheung telling The Washington Post: “President Trump is 100% correct—those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”
Yet in the interview, Trump appeared to be very specifically talking about Americans on the left who simply don’t support him. In addition to Trump’s name-check of Schiff, it’s important to note that Trump has for years applied the phrase “radical left” not to, say, people plotting terrorist attacks, but to the Democratic Party in general. Speaking of Schiff, the ex-president also referred to him as “the enemy from within” during a rally on Saturday in Coachella, California. During the same remarks, he described November 5 as “liberation day” and the United States as an “occupied country.” (For good measure, he also suggested a female heckler would get “the hell knocked out of her.”)
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign said Trump “is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them…. Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one,’ calls for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security. What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”
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