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Most of Donald Trump’s speech in Arizona yesterday — his first such event since being convicted of multiple felonies — was largely unremarkable, though the Republican’s focus on “the enemy from within” warrants extra attention.
“We have the enemy from within, and we have the enemy from the outside,” the former president told attendees at a Turning Point Action event. “And I’m telling you, we are in more danger from the enemy from within. With these lunatics, these fascists, these communists, and we’re going to stop that also.”
This isn’t generally recognized as a staple of Trump’s 2024 message, though it’s quickly becoming one. His comments in Arizona came the same week as a Fox News appearance in which the presumptive GOP nominee said American “scoundrels” are “much more evil” than foreign threats. “We have a problem from within that’s really bad,” the former president added.
This comes on the heels of remarks Trump delivered to the National Religious Broadcasters earlier this year, when he reflected on World War II. “Our country was at war with the enemy, and they wanted to extinguish our way of life forever,” the Republican 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.”
At first blush, this might not seem unusual, since Trump has lashed out like this repeatedly in recent years. But it’s worth pausing to appreciate just how unique his message is: Throughout our history, White House hopefuls haven’t referred to Americans as “evil,” “enemies,” and more dangerous than foreign threats.
And yet, the former president can’t seem to help himself. Circling back to our earlier coverage, it was last year, for example, when Trump 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, 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. Trump has met the enemy. Evidently, it’s us — or at least a whole lot of us.
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 to insisting that Americans he doesn’t like represent a dangerous “enemy.”
Historically, nothing good follows when a politician convinces himself that his domestic foes in his own country are unique, subhuman threats.
I continue to believe there’s an underappreciated patriotism gap that might someday become a problem for the Republican Party’s leader.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.