For the third time in a week, former president Donald Trump repeated his charge that Democrats allied against him are “the enemy from within” in an interview with Fox News during which he called the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol “a beautiful thing.”
Trump, in an interview with “Media Buzz” that aired Sunday, referred to Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, both California Democrats, as “bad people” who threaten democracy. Interviewer Howard Kurtz asked, “Are you prepared to say now that you will not use law enforcement to punish or prosecute your political opponents?”
Trump responded, “Excuse me, that’s what they’re using on me.”
In a separate Fox News interview that aired on Oct. 13, Trump said that his foes could be “very easily handled” by the National Guard, or, “if really necessary, by the military.” He repeated the line about the “enemy from within” days later during a Fox News town hall event.
“You call Americans who don’t support you ‘the enemy within.’ That’s a pretty ominous phrase to use about other Americans,” Kurtz noted.
“I think that’s accurate,” Trump replied, before referencing Pelosi and Schiff, two outspoken Trump critics.
“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people,” the former president said. “But when you look at shifty Schiff and some of the others, yeah, they are to me the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.”
Ian Krager, a spokesman for Pelosi, said in a statement that in “talking about turning our military on his political opponents and the American people, Donald Trump is showing once again why his election would be a disaster for our country and our democracy.”
Schiff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately seized upon Trump’s remarks, posting several clips on X to underscore her campaign stump assertion that the former president is “unstable.”
“Even in his Fox News safe space, Donald Trump cannot help but show himself as the unhinged, angry, unstable man that he is — focused on his own petty grievances and tired playbook of division,” the Harris-Walz campaign said in a statement.
Trump, during the interview, criticized Harris as incompetent and a Marxist who is going to “ruin this country.”
He also spoke in glowing terms about the size of his crowd and actions of the mob in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — after which scores were injured, six people were left dead in the aftermath and 1,200 were arrested. Trump described the mob as a small group of people who “peacefully and patriotically” went to the Capitol to “protest a rigged election.”
“There was a beauty to it and a love to it that I’ve never seen before,” he said.
Harris last week criticized Trump for “gaslighting” Americans about the Jan. 6 attack.
The former president on Sunday also dismissed warnings of the danger of a second Trump term from one of his own defense secretaries and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley told author Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” according to Woodward’s new book.
“They were not my cup of tea, they were woke, not great generals,” Trump said Sunday of Milley and former defense secretary Jim Mattis. “I don’t respect them as soldiers. I never did.”
He also refused to back down from his claims he made during his debate with Harris last month that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets — assertions that were quickly debunked by local and state officials.
“I don’t think it’s been debunked at all,” Trump said.
On the Sunday talk shows, Trump surrogates dismissed concerns about his increasingly overheated campaign rhetoric and downplayed his statement that Democrats are the enemy from within.
In an interview with CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) first said Trump was talking about “marauding gangs.” Then, when pressed, Johnson said that he did not believe Trump would actually use the military on his political opponents, as Trump had alleged last week.
“I did not hear President Trump in that clip say he’s going to sic the military on Adam Schiff. That’s not what he’s saying,” Johnson said
Sunday’s Fox interview was conducted at Trump Tower in New York on Saturday, hours before Trump flew to Pennsylvania and made headlines for riffing on the size of the genitals of famed golfer legend Arnold Palmer — he was “all man,” Trump said. The event took place at an airport in Latrobe named after Palmer.