Democratic presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks as an image of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump appears on screen during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., on Oct. 14.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
Over the past week, Donald Trump has characterized his political opponents as “the enemy from within,” described them as “evil” and suggested using military forces against U.S. citizens.
Such rhetoric has reignited accusations that the former president is planning an authoritarian crackdown if he returns to the White House and returned questions about the functioning of American democracy to the centre of the campaign as it enters its final weeks.
“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” Mr. Trump said in a Fox News interview at the start of the week, in response to a question about potential problems on election day, Nov. 5. “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.”
The Republican nominee referred multiple times to “the enemy from within,” whom he also called “lunatics that we have inside.” Such people are “more dangerous than China, Russia,” he said.
At different points in the interview, he suggested government bureaucrats and Adam Schiff, the California congressman who played a leading role in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, were examples of the “enemy.”
Vice-President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, seized on the comments at a rally in the key swing state of Pennsylvania the next day. Playing clips of the interview on a jumbotron, she described Mr. Trump as “increasingly unstable and unhinged” and “out for unchecked power.”
“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will the enemy, an enemy of our country,” she said. “He is saying that he would use the military to go after them.”
The tone was a return to President Joe Biden’s dire warnings earlier this year that Mr. Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. Ms. Harris largely jettisoned such messaging when she replaced him at the top of the ticket over the summer. Instead, she and her surrogates have preferred to mock Mr. Trump as “unserious” and “weird.”
At his own event in Pennsylvania that same day, the former president doubled down. “They are so bad and, frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’ve weaponized our elections.” In another Fox interview on Wednesday, Mr. Trump referred to the Democrats as “the enemy from within.” On Friday, he appeared again on the network to label Ms. Harris “a radical left lunatic.”
Such language fits a pattern for Mr. Trump. His opponents, meanwhile, have vacillated on how to respond as voters have appeared to become inured to rhetoric that once would have been far outside the political mainstream.
Last year, Mr. Trump called his opposition “vermin” in a speech and, in an interview, mused that he would be “a dictator” for one day when he first returned to office. Earlier this month, he said migrants commit murder because “it’s in their genes” and “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” He continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election, whose result he tried to overturn, was rigged, and has called Jan. 6 rioters “patriots.”
He is also running on a platform of replacing swaths of civil servants with political loyalists and rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants.
Mr. Biden’s attempts to characterize Mr. Trump as a would-be dictator did not appear to get him the sort of traction with voters this time around as similar warnings before the previous election. When Ms. Harris took over in July, her more light-hearted tone and focus on other issues – including abortion, the economy and the border – appeared to generate social-media enthusiasm and a poll bounce. But two and a half weeks from the election, she and Mr. Trump are statistically tied in most polls.
A survey released this week suggested one reason Mr. Trump is continuing down this path: a majority of his supporters agree with it. The poll by the Brookings Institution think tank and the Public Religion Research Institute found that 34 per cent of voters, including 61 per cent of Republicans, judged one of Mr. Trump’s most incendiary lines last year – that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” – to be correct.
“That language is straight out of Mein Kampf,” Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, said at a presentation on the poll. “This kind of ‘poisoning the blood,’ it’s Nazi rhetoric.”
Mark Esper, a former defence secretary who served under Mr. Trump, told CNN that he took Mr. Trump’s threats to deploy the military domestically seriously. He pointed to the George Floyd protests of 2020 when Mr. Trump wanted to use the National Guard to shut down the demonstrations.
“His inclination is to use the military in these situations, whereas my view is that’s a bad role for the military,” he said.
Retired general Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, described the former president in a book released earlier this month as a “fascist.”
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” Mr. Milley said in War by journalist Bob Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”