Trump Is Still Embarrassing His Defenders

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 28, 2024

 

Donald Trump has been pretty clear about who he was talking about when he mused about the “enemy from within” and how “easily” they could be “handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

 

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within,” he said in an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, “radical Left lunatics.” In the following days, Trump identified some of the Democratic lawmakers he lumped into that category. “When you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within,” the former president said of Democratic congressman (and likely future California senator) Adam Schiff. “I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within,” Trump added, blaming the former House speaker for the violence that unfolded on January 6, 2021. He places special counsel prosecutor Jack Smith among the ranks of the “mentally deranged” who should be “thrown out of the country.” And so on.

 

Again, it’s all rather cut and dried. But a straightforward interpretation of the former president’s vengeful ruminations is politically inauspicious for the Trump campaign. So, his allies and surrogates have embarked on a familiar effort to convince the voting public that a sophisticated analysis of Trump’s remarks must disregard what he actually said and defer to a process of divination that culminates in a more banal interpretation.

 

That’s what Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance attempted to pull off in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

 

“He did not say that, Jake,” Vance roared with exasperation after Tapper characterized Trump’s remarks as wanting “to use the military to go after the enemy within, which is the American people.”

 

“He said he was going to send the military after the American people? Show me the quote where he said that,” Vance demanded. “He said, ‘far-left lunatics,’” the Ohio senator added. “He’s talking about the people rioting after the election.”

 

Vance argued that it was necessary to parse Trump’s remarks to distinguish the internal enemies against whom he would deploy the armed forces and those who would be spared that heavy-handedness. “He said that he wanted to use the military to go after far-left lunatics who were rioting. He also called them the enemy from within,” Vance posited. “He separately — in a totally different context, in a totally different conversation — said that Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi were threats to this country.”

 

Just because Trump “uses the exact same phrase” to describe these two categories of subversive fifth columnists, Vance concluded, that does not necessarily suggest that he would use the same tools to extirpate them from American public life. “Donald Trump never said ‘Americans’ writ large,” Vance closed.

 

Not exactly encouraging stuff. But, as spin goes, Vance turned in a serviceable performance. And yet, his boss just won’t play along. Hours after the interview aired, Donald Trump took to the stage at a rally in Madison Square Garden to reaffirm that his remarks should be taken both literally and seriously.

 

There, Trump denounced the “massive, vicious, crooked, radical Left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party.” “It’s just this amorphous group of people. But they’re smart, and they’re vicious. And we have to defeat them. And when I say, ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy,” the former president added. “They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are, indeed, the enemy from within.”

 

Trump’s defenders will take solace insofar as the former president had the presence of mind to say that his objective is to “defeat” Democrats, presumably at the ballot box rather than at bayonet point. But Trump made it as plain as he possibly could that, in his mind, the forces that make up “the enemy from within” are composed of his political opponents.