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TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) — Donald Trump's allies have tried in vain to persuade him to stop venting his rage against “enemies from within" in the campaign's waning days. But he keeps going.
In his rallies and interviews, the former president is increasingly fixated on the Americans he believes have wronged or betrayed him. They are worse, he says, than foreign adversaries of the United States. And he's made plain his desire to use the power of the federal government, including the military, to go after them.
“The crazy lunatics that we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country,” Trump said this month at a rally in Wisconsin. “Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
When given the opportunity to hedge, he’s doubled down.
Howard Kurtz of Fox News told Trump in an interview last weekend that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.”
“I think it’s accurate,” Trump responded.
The threat to settle personal grievances from the Oval Office has so alarmed some of Trump's former senior aides that they've labeled him a fascist. Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump's Democratic rival, agreed that authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology describes Trump.
“It's either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list,” Harris said Thursday in Georgia.
Trump’s critics warn that the guardrails that kept him in check — aides and government officials who ignored potentially illegal orders or steered him away from problematic ideas — won’t be there in a second term.
Some of Trump's supporters says his talk of vengeance is either justified or hyperbole.
“We already know what kind of president he will be because he already served,” 57-year-old Jennifer Warnke of St. Johns, Arizona, said Thursday before a Trump rally in the Phoenix area. Trump's quip that he would be a dictator only “for day one” was a joke meant to emphasize his commitment to border security, she said.
Trump generally defines his enemies nebulously: The radical left, communists, the deep state or simply “they.” But sometimes he names them directly. Here's a look at some of the Americans Trump has gone after in recent weeks:
Trump's beef with Schiff, a Democratic congressman from Los Angeles and the overwhelming front-runner for California's open Senate seat, goes back to his time in the White House.
As the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee during Trump's presidency, Schiff was a fierce and omnipresent critic of Trump's dealings with foreign leaders, including Russia's Vladimir Putin. Schiff was also the lead impeachment manager urging senators to remove Trump from office the first time the House impeached him.
“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within,” Trump said on Fox News last weekend. At a rally in California this month, he called Schiff a “sleazebag.”
Schiff said the outbursts show the danger of a second Trump presidency.
“We’re seeing a lot of very erratic behavior, which would be OK if it was your crazy grandpa, crazy old grandpa, but this is a candidate for president," Schiff said on MSNBC.
Trump has replaced competent advisers with “utter sycophants,” Schiff said, and if Trump returns to power, "we’re all going to have to do everything we can to defend our democracy and our institutions.”
The former House speaker led the House to impeach Trump twice and was a barrier to his congressional agenda during his presidency. She has been a vocal critic, calling him a threat to democracy and once dramatically ripping the text of his State of the Union speech after she'd sat behind him through the address.
“I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within,” Trump said in the Fox interview. “She lied. She was supposed to protect the Capitol.”
He repeated the debunked claim that Pelosi refused assistance of National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building to try to stop the certification of his 2020 election loss.
Journalists have been Trump targets from his first campaign, when he branded the mainstream media as “fake news.”
Lately his ire has been directed in particular at CBS' “60 Minutes," television's highest-rated news show.
Facing criticism for declining to be interviewed for an election special earlier this month, Trump has lashed out at CBS for editing down Harris' answer to a question about Israel. Another CBS show, “Face the Nation,” aired a different portion of her answer to the same question.
Editing is a common journalistic practice. Trump sits for interviews that are edited as well.
But he has spent weeks savaging the network at his rallies and on his social media platform, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses from CBS over what he called “biggest scandal in broadcast history.”
At a rally Thursday in Arizona, Trump reprised an attack on the media from his 2016 campaign that shocked the political establishment back then but hadn’t been a fixture of his more recent rhetoric.
“They're the enemy of the people. They are,” Trump said to a jeering crowd. “I’ve been asked not to say that. I don’t want to say it. And some day they’re not going to be the enemy of the people, I hope.”