Donald Trump made another threat against Democrats, Republicans and independents who don’t vote for him, and other perceived enemies by asserting that U.S. military should, presumably, attack all of them with force after the election.
I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within… Sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.
Donald Trump
Trump’s escalating rhetoric is notable for many reasons, but most of all because he took a break from standard denigration of undocumented immigrants to broaden the “attack lens” to anyone seen as disloyal to his violent cult.
As Bess Levin notes in Vanity Fair, Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who led the prosecution in Trump’s first of two impeachments, was squarely in the disgraced Republican’s crosshairs.
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.’)
“This kind of terminology is the terminology of dictators,” author and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted in an interview. “Trump has been doing anti-immigrant rhetoric since 2015: keeping people out and militarizing the border. But now, it’s the ‘Enemy from within.’ And that ‘enemy’ can be anywhere from the Heartland to Aurora or Springfield.”
