Speaking to his Madison Square Garden rally this evening, Donald Trump revived his attack on Democrats as “the enemy from within,” despite efforts earlier in the day by his running mate, JD Vance, to try to clarify what he actually meant.
“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat party,” Trump told the crowd. “They’re just vessels. In fact, they’re perfect vessels, because they’ll never give them a hard time. They’ll do whatever they want.”
Trump added, “I know many of them. 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…They’ve done every bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”
In a Fox News interview last week, Trump suggested using the military to handle the “enemy from within” on Election Day, as he railed against “far left lunatics.” He later said that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were examples of the “enemy from within.”
Earlier in the day, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and claimed that Trump was talking about using the military to handle those who rioted.
Another guest, Liz Cheney, responded to Vance’s comments and told CNN, “What we just watched is what it looks like when someone has got to go through just unbelievable contortions to try to find a way to defend the person that J.D. Vance himself called America’s Hitler.”
Last week, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, spoke out in an interview with The New York Times, saying that he was disturbed by the former president’s “enemy within” remarks. He told of moments when Trump praised Adolf Hitler, and said that the former president “falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Trump’s rally rivaled the Republican National Convention in the number of MAGA stars who appeared, including Hulk Hogan and Tucker Carlson. Unlike the RNC, First Lady Melania Trump made remarks, as Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr.
But the event also was notable for its extreme and even racist rhetoric, including remarks made by a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who said that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage” and talked of he and a Black friend having “carved watermelons” together.
He also said of Latinos, “They love making babies, too. Just know that they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”
Trump’s remarks were carried by the major cable news networks, but CNN and MSNBC eventually cut away.