Donald Trump’s latest speech to the National Religious Broadcasters included some odd rhetoric. At one point, for example, the former president seemed to take credit for making Israel the capital of Israel. He also appeared to connect special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which didn’t make sense.
But a Washington Post report highlighted what was arguably the most important part of the Republican’s remarks.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump further ratcheted up his inflammatory language against Americans who oppose him politically by likening them to the foreign enemies that the United States fought in World War II. In a speech on Thursday to the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, the former president drew a direct connection between the battles during that organization’s founding in 1944 and his current campaign to win back the White House.
“Our country was at war with the enemy, and they wanted to extinguish our way of life forever,” Trump said, adding, “This time, the greatest threat is not from the outside of our country, I really believe this. It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous.”
Part of the GOP candidate’s message of late has focused on criticizing the United States and its institutions. This week, for example, Trump accused the U.S. of being filled with “crooked” politicians and home to a corrupt judicial system. He went on conclude that the United States is a “nation in decline.”
The disparaging remarks came on the heels of related rhetoric from his post-presidency, including an October 2022 message in which Trump argued that the United States is “Rigged, Crooked, and Evil.”
But his remarks to the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) served as a timely reminder: The Republican doesn’t just have a problem with the country, he also has a problem with many of its citizens.
Trump has met the enemy. Evidently, it’s us — or at least a whole lot of us.
For the former president, this is a point he’s returned to more than once. Eleven months ago, for example, he released a video in which Trump argued, among other things, “[T]he greatest threat to Western Civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, U.S.A.-hating people that represent us.”
More recently, in a Veterans Day message, Trump not only referred to many Americans as “vermin” — phrasing that echoed Hitler and Mussolini — he concluded, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”
In other words, The former president believes he’s identified the United States’ biggest problem: Americans he doesn’t like.
As regular readers may recall, in September 2016, Hillary Clinton delivered remarks in which she took aim at Trump’s radicalized base. To be “grossly generalistic,” she said, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’”
More specifically, Clinton lamented the fact that so much of Trump’s core support is “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamaphobic” — an assessment that’s stood up pretty well to further scrutiny.
Nevertheless, Republicans became obsessed with the line, and the media soon followed. I’ll confess that I never fully understood why this became a furious point of contention, but the conventional wisdom was that Clinton had gone too far: Criticizing rival politicians is fine, but criticizing Americans, even bigoted Americans, is beyond the pale for someone seeking the nation’s highest office.
Trump, meanwhile, has gone from describing many Americans as “evil” to condemning them as “vermin” to equating them with the foreign enemies that the United States fought in World War II.
I continue to believe there’s an underappreciated patriotism gap that might someday become a problem for the Republican Party’s leader.