By targeting the 'enemy within,' Trump reinforces his authoritarian rhetoric

Photo: Spencer Platt Agence France-Presse Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on October 14, 2024

Nicolas Revise – Agence France-Presse in New York

Published at 1:34 p.m.

• United States

A populist tribune, Donald Trump regularly touts a program deemed far-right: three weeks before the presidential election, he denounces an “enemy within,” authoritarian rhetoric inspired, according to experts, by “fascism” and anticommunism in European and American history.

The former Republican president, who plans to return to the White House, has often expressed his “admiration” for “strong men” such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

Hoping to be re-elected on November 5, the 78-year-old billionaire has constantly painted a negative picture of an “America invaded and occupied” by immigrants. Using incendiary, racist and conspiratorial false information, he called migrants from Latin America and Africa who came to “poison the blood” of the United States and increase crime “animals” and “terrorists.”

He went further this weekend.

Asked Sunday on Fox News about possible “agitators” during the election, he retorted that “the National Guard,” or even “military forces if necessary,” should be dispatched against an “enemy within” that he did not name.

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“Far-left lunatics”

While using the military to combat civil unrest would run counter to the political history of the United States, Mr. Trump has promised to crack down on “crazy people, lunatics on the far left.”

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Campaigning in California, he attacked the Democratic representative for the House of Representatives of this state, Adam Schiff: a “scumbag,” a “sick person,” among “the worst people who are enemies within.”

Mr. Schiff, who is running for senator, led the congressional investigation into the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.

For the tycoon who entered politics in 2015, who has shaken up American democracy and wants to “imprison” his opponents, the “enemy within is more dangerous than China, Russia.”

Donald Trump has also reiterated that Chinese President Xi is “a tough guy, a very smart guy […] a brilliant guy who has 1.4 billion people that he rules with an iron fist.”

Enough to inspire him if he returns to power.

He declared at the end of September at a rally in Pennsylvania that in the event of a “really violent day, really tough hours,” he would “send a word” to the police so that “it stops immediately.”

According to public television PBS, Donald Trump, if re-elected, could expel many foreigners under a 1798 law (Alien Enemies Act) and suppress unrest using the Insurrection Act of 1998. 1807 allowing the deployment of military personnel against American citizens.

President George H.W. Bush had used it during riots in 1992 in Los Angeles.

“Dictator on the first day”

In April 2023, protesting against a hypothetical “massive electoral fraud” in November, Donald Trump had warned: to “all the weak and pathetic far-left Democrats, socialists, Marxists and communists, who are killing our nation, we will come back.”

Democratic President Joe Biden and his vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, have long denounced the authoritarian rhetoric of their opponent, who had threatened to be “a dictator on day one” of his inauguration.

On Monday evening in Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris warned that “a second Trump term would pose a huge risk to America” because the man “is increasingly unstable and unbalanced, seeking power without control”.

In his book Warwhich appears today, October 15, journalist Bob Woodward quotes former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who served in the last year of the Trump presidency: he is, according to him, “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

Indeed, the expression “enemy within” has strong reminiscences with fascism, Nazism, Francoism, European ideologies responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, foreigners, opponents, resistance fighters and members of a “fifth column,” historians point out.

It also refers to McCarthyism, an anti-communist witch hunt by a US senator in the 1950s.

And before entering At war in late 1941, the United States had been shaken by the Nazi lobby German American Bund gathering 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York on February 20, 1939.

It is in this legendary room that Donald Trump will gather his supporters on October 27 to denounce “the influx of more than 210,000 migrants to New York […] which has cost ten billion dollars and out-of-control crime,” according to his team.