TEMPE, AZ — TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) — Donald Trump’s allies tried in vain to persuade him to stop venting anger against “enemies within” during the waning days of his campaign. But he kept going.
At rallies and interviews, the former president has become increasingly obsessed with what he believes Americans have harmed or betrayed him. They are worse than America’s foreign enemies, he says. And he has made clear his intention to use federal power, including the military, to pursue them.
“The crazy lunatics we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists — the people who are actually running the country,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin this month. “Those people are more dangerous than the Russians, the Chinese and others. “It is the enemy from within.”
When given the opportunity to hedge, he doubled down.
Fox News’ Howard Kurtz called Trump “the enemy within” in an interview last weekend, saying “that’s a pretty ominous phrase if you’re talking about other Americans.”
President Trump responded, “I think that’s accurate.”
Some of Trump’s former senior aides were so alarmed by his threat to settle personal grievances in the Oval Office that they branded him a fascist. Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, agreed that authoritarian and ultranationalist ideology describes Trump.
“Either you have Donald Trump going through his enemies list, or you have me working for you and checking off my to-do list,” Harris said Thursday in Georgia.
Trump’s critics warn that the guardrails that keep him in check – the aides and government officials who ignored potentially illegal orders or steered him away from problematic ideas – will not exist in a second term.
Some Trump supporters say his stories of revenge are justified or exaggerated.
“He’s already been president, so we already know what kind of president he’s going to be,” Jennifer Wonkey, 57, of St. John’s, Arizona, said ahead of a Trump rally in the Phoenix area on Thursday. Trump’s witty remark about being a dictator “only on day one” was a joke meant to emphasize his commitment to border security, she said.
Trump typically defines his enemies vaguely. The radical left, the communists, the deep state, or simply “them.” However, sometimes we name them ourselves. Here’s a look at some of the Americans Trump has pursued in recent weeks.
Trump’s tussle with Schiff, a Democratic congressman from Los Angeles and the overwhelming frontrunner for the California Senate seat, dates back to when he was in the White House.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee during Trump’s presidency, has been a fierce and omnipresent critic of Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Schiff was also the lead impeachment manager urging senators to remove Trump from office when the House first impeached him.
“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when I look at ‘Cunning Schiff’ and other works, they are to me an internal enemy.” President Trump said on Fox News last weekend. At a rally in California this month, he called Schiff a “sleazebag.”
Schiff said the explosion showed the dangers of Trump being elected a second time.
“We’re seeing a lot of very erratic behavior,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “If you’re a crazy grandpa, a crazy old grandpa, that’s fine, but this is a presidential candidate.”
Schiff said Trump has replaced talented advisers with “complete sycophants,” and that if Trump returns to power, “we will all have to do everything we can to protect our democracy and our institutions.”
The former Speaker of the House led the House to impeach Trump twice and became a barrier to the congressional agenda during his presidency. She has been a vocal critic of him, calling him a threat to democracy and dramatically ripping up the text of his State of the Union address after speaking while sitting behind him.
“I think Nancy Pelosi is the enemy from within,” President Trump said in a Fox interview. “She lied. “She had to protect the Capitol.”
He repeated the proven claim that Pelosi refused to send National Guard troops to protect the Capitol when Trump supporters stormed the building on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the certification of his 2020 election loss.
Journalists have been targets since Trump’s first election campaign, when he branded the mainstream media “fake news.”
His recent anger has been particularly focused on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the highest-rated news show on television.
Trump, who faced criticism earlier this month for refusing to be interviewed for a campaign special, criticized CBS for editing Harris’ answers to questions about Israel. Another CBS show, “Face the Nation,” aired a different part of her answer to the same question.
Editing is a common journalistic practice. Trump also participates in the edited interview.
But he spent weeks trashing the network at his rallies and on social media platforms, threatening to revoke CBS’ broadcast license over what he called “the biggest scandal in broadcasting history.”
At a rally in Arizona on Thursday, Trump repeated his attacks on the media during his 2016 presidential campaign, which shocked the political establishment at the time but did not anchor his recent comments.
“They are enemies of the people. They are,” Trump told the jeering crowd. “I was asked not to say that. I don’t want to say it. And I hope that one day they will no longer be the enemies of the people.”
