Donald Trump has chillingly suggested sending the military or National Guard after US citizens on Election Day.
The ex-president gave a sit-down interview with Maria Bartiromo, one of the Fox News hosts whose role in pushing Trump’s lies about the 2020 election landed her bosses in the crosshairs of a billion-dollar lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. It was later settled to the tune of $787m.
In the interview, which aired on Sunday, Bartiromo was back on typical form, suggesting that America was headed for possible violence on Election Day due to scores of immigrants supposedly being let in illegally by the Biden administration. That was a debunked conspiracy the Trump team floated in both 2016 and 2020 — the lie that millions of votes for his opponents came from noncitizens.
But Trump took things a step further, denying Bartiromo’s suggestion that those groups would be the “real” problem on Election Day.
That honor, he said, went to the so-called “enemy within.”
“I don’t think [immigrants] are the problem in terms of Election Day,” Trump told Bartiromo. “I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.”
At that point, he suggested a seemingly sinister solution.
“And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” he said.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people who have come in, who are destroying our country.”
It isn’t clear under what circumstances Trump would view it justifiable to call in US troops against his own countrymen.
But his comments mark a baseless attack and a particularly hollow one coming from someone whose supporters violently attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to stop him from being thrown out of office three years ago.
It is perhaps unsurprising, though.
The ex-president, humiliated by his defeat in 2020, has taken to dehumanizing his opponents’ voters whenever possible. At a rally in Dayton, Ohio, in the spring he claimed that Democrats were “not people, in some cases” while onstage with Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.
Many political analysts have speculated that Trump is already laying the groundwork for efforts to contest the election results this year should be be defeated once again, by seeding conspiracies about non-citizens voting and mail-in ballots which he will possibly use in November and December to argue that the results are tainted.
But mail-in voting has not been proven to be signficantly tainted by fraud in any jurisidiction across the US.
Meanwhile, non-citizen voting is already illegal (despite Republican efforts to pass legislation against it in Congress) and does not occur due to existing state and local election systems having safeguards to prevent it. A 2016 analysis found that only 30 instances of non-citizens attempting to vote were reported in the 2016 election cycle across the whole of the US.
“Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” said Ian Sams, a Harris campaign spokesperson. “Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one,’ calls for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security. What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”
Trump’s supporters violently besieged the US Capitol in January 2021, injuring dozens of police officers and forcing lawmakers as well as then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was a top target of their fury, to hide in secure locations around the Capitol complex for hours. Their aim was clear: to prevent a vote in the US Senate that would certify the election results from three months prior.
The attack failed, and Joe Biden was sworn in to office just a few weeks later. In the months and years since the riot, Republicans in Congress and around the country have attempted to misinform and misconstrue the reason and intent of the attack, as well as minimize the extent of the violence that day.