Donald Trump broke new ground in his criticisms of Americans last year when the former president released a video in which he 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.”
Months later, in a Veterans Day message, the Republican 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 suggested that he’d identified the United States’ biggest problem: Americans he disliked.
Trump has met the enemy. Evidently, it’s us — or at least a whole lot of us.
The GOP candidate has been leaning into this messaging of late, declaring at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that he considers the Democrats on Vice President Kamala Harris’ team to be “the enemy from within.” Around the same time, at an event in Wisconsin, Trump suggested that his American opponents are “more dangerous” than Russia and China.
On Friday, the Republican added a new word to his talking points, condemning “the enemy from within — all the scum that we have to deal with.”
For those with an eye toward history, Trump is the first White House hopeful to ever refer to his own fellow Americans as “scum.”
That was new, but it wasn’t the most unsettling comment on the subject. The Washington Post reported:
Former president Donald Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday that he is worried about the prospect of unspecified actions by what he dubbed “radical left lunatics” on Election Day, urging that the National Guard or U.S. military be deployed on American soil against those he labeled “the enemy from within.”
In an interview that aired on Fox News, Maria Bartiromo asked Trump whether he was “expecting chaos on Election Day.” As part of the question, she referred to immigrants with criminal records and those on terrorist watch lists.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump replied. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.”
In the next breath, in an apparent reference to Election Day concerns, the Republican concluded, “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard — or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
In context, it appeared that Trump was suggesting the military can, and perhaps should, be used against Americans on American soil.
That’s certainly how the Harris campaign perceived it.
In a written statement, a Harris campaign spokesperson said the former president “is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them. ... What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”
The Associated Press had a related report on this, taking stock of the bigger picture: “During his first term as president, Donald Trump tested the limits of how he could use the military to achieve policy goals. If given a second term, the Republican and his allies are preparing to go much further, reimagining the military as an all-powerful tool to deploy on U.S. soil.”
Those keeping track of Trump’s authoritarian-style agenda have a dramatic new data point to keep in mind.
As for the Republicans criticisms of Americans, 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, was simply 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 to labeling them “the enemy from within” — who might even warrant some kind of military response.
Eight years later, “basket of deplorables” seems almost quaint.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.