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In the 2016 campaign, a now-famous phrase posited that institutions (including the press) took then-candidate Donald Trump “literally, but not seriously” while supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.”
In the 2024 campaign, everyone should take the former president seriously and literally regarding his rhetoric about “the enemy from within.”
That’s the label Trump used in an Oct. 13 Fox News interview when asked about potential Election Day “chaos” from “outside agitators” like those on the terrorist watchlist or migrants who had committed crimes. “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump responded, which he said includes “sick people, radical left lunatics.” It “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
The words worsened: “The enemy within,” Trump said of some of his fellow Americans, “is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries” (nations, notably, that have formed an authoritarian axis to more cohesively challenge the U.S.). He even name-checked Rep. Adam Schiff (likely to soon be a senator) and later, at a rally, “the Pelosis,” referring to the former House speaker and her husband, who was assaulted with a hammer in an ideologically inspired attack in 2022.
Americans should take these threats to use the military against U.S. citizens “seriously,” Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN. Esper, the kind of responsible leader likely to be weeded out during another Trump term, said that Trump has learned “the key is getting people around you who will do your bidding, who will not push back, who will implement what you want to do. And I think he’s talked about that, his acolytes have talked about that, and I think loyalty will be the first litmus test.”
Like Esper, former Marine general and Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley would also not pass that litmus test; their loyalty is to the Constitution and the country.
