I think everyone reading this already knows that Trump is planning to purge the nation of millions of non-citizens. Most people think he’s just going to round up undocumented immigrants (of color, he certainly won’t target any Swedes or Brits who’ve overstayed their visas and are working illegally.) This past weekend he amended that to say that he’s going to deport Haitians who are in the country legally so I think we can assume that he’s not going to stick to any of those pesky legal niceties. He plans to deport millions and millions of foreigners from the “shithole countries” he loathes so much.
But as Philip Bump points out in this piece, and I’ve been writing here non-stop for months, on the stump he’s more and more often targeting “the enemy within” by which he means his political enemies:
“You know, I always say: We have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un, you can say — but that’s — it’s going to be fine. If you have a smart president, no problem,” he said at a rally in Aurora, Colo., that itself was predicated on exaggerated claims about the dangers of immigrants. The bigger problem is “the enemy from within,” he continued. “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”
He reinforced that point in an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, perhaps the single most credulously pro-Trump voice in American media.
“We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries, because if you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily,” Trump said. He insisted that he had done so when in office previously.
“But the thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff,” he said of the California congressman and Senate candidate. He called Schiff “a total sleazebag” and then, explicitly, “the enemy from within.”
Importantly, this came soon after Bartiromo had asked Trump about the risk of violence emerging around the election. She reminded Trump about the purported threat posed by immigrants from China and debunked claims about murderers crossing the border. She mused that “these outside agitators [might] start up on Election Day.”
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroyed our country, by the way, totally destroying our country. The towns, the villages, they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day,” Trump said. “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and 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.”
Trump is not going to be the president on election day so he has no power to call out the National Guard or the Military to quell this imaginary leftist uprising. So no, he’s not talking about that. He’s talking about what he plans to do after the election if he wins. Something like this:
“The president was enraged,” Esper recalled. “He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and ‘us’ meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.
“We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’ … It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air.”
A little reminder of what happened to political enemies in a previous fascist regime:
Given the Nazis’ public aims of destroying the “Marxist” threat in Germany and tearing up the Versailles Treaty, aims that were shared by a majority of the German population, Hitler’s political opponents were the first victims of systematic Nazi persecution.
Various German authorities established the first concentration camps in Germany soon after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. The SS, SA (Storm Troopers), the police and civilian authorities set up hundreds of makeshift “camps” in empty warehouses, factories, and other locations across Germany. The camps served as “temporary” detention centers for political opponents who were incarcerated without trial and under conditions of great cruelty.
The Storm Troopers (SA) established the Oranienburg camp near Berlin in March 1933. The first prisoners were German political prisoners, primarily Communists and Social Democrats. Oranienburg became known for the maltreatment of inmates. Here, the Nazis attempt to undermine the charges of brutality by showing the “normal” prisoner routine. Oranienburg was gradually deactivated, closing by 1935. Most of the other early camps were also closed, to be replaced with larger camps run by the SS.
Ok, ok, it’s ridiculous to compare the two countries. Something like that could never happen here. Of course, people thought it could never happen in Germany either.
It always pays to remember that Hitler was legitimately elected and formed a government with the political establishment which thought it could control him. Yeah.
Here’s JD trying to clean it up but basically endorsing Trump’s call to go after the “far left” and his political enemies.