Trump is outdoing himself during the 2024 campaign’s final weeks, belching threats and spreading conspiracies. He demonstrated as president what he’s capable of, not least in separating migrant families and inciting an insurrection. Dozens of former advisers have told us that he’d have committed other dangerous, even illegal acts — including ordering troops into the streets, authorized to shoot protesters in the legs — but for the aides’ resistance.
Such resistance likely will not come from sycophants a reelected Trump would appoint. He tells us so. At the Detroit Economic Club last week, Trump acknowledged that as a political novice in the White House, he relied on staffers who often wouldn’t fulfill his wishes. “I now know the game a little better,” he warned.
Which makes his comments Sunday on Fox News about militarily countering “the enemy from within” — that is, Democrats — all the more chilling. Trump told interviewer Maria Bartiromo that he isn’t worried about Election Day chaos from his supporters or foreigners but from “radical left lunatics.” Never fear, he said: “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
Fortunately Trump won’t be president on election day. Still, as former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN, “I think we should take those words seriously.” It was Esper who had to deal with Trump’s desire to fire into crowds at racial justice protests in 2020. “I lived through that,” Esper said. Trump’s “inclination is to use the military in these situations.”
On Fox, Trump similarly responded when Bartiromo leadingly asked how he’d deal with “the bureaucrats undermining you” in a second term. His answer: “We have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within is, in my opinion, more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
He cited one example: the man he childishly calls Adam “Shifty” Schiff, the Burbank congressman who was a leader in the House impeachments of Trump and its Jan. 6 committee and is a sure bet to be elected California’s next senator, as Trump himself said. “A total sleazebag,” Trump lied.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Trump’s nasty name-check revived death threats against Schiff. The long list of his “enemies” who have had to get security includes VIPs such as former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley (Trump once said the retired general should be executed for treason), and average Americans such as 2020 election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in Georgia. “How evil,” Freeman tearfully said in federal court about Trump’s slanders.
He keeps up the incitement. In Aurora on Friday, Trump lied that Vice President Kamala Harris, “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World” and “has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
He’s vowed to use wartime powers to deport millions. “Getting them out will be a bloody story,” Trump said last month in Mosinee, Wis.
Believe him.
Willful delusion about what Trump has done and what he could do if reelected — as he keeps promising, loud and proud — is idiocy in 2024.