Over the weekend, Trump rolled out his now-familiar promise to deploy the military against Americans with a chilling, new description of his political opponents: “the enemy from within.”
Now, yet another of Trump’s former administration officials is sounding the alarm on just how seriously we need to take Trump’s promises to his base.
In response to Trump’s weekend remarks to Fox News, his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether he has real concerns about Trump trying to use the “National Guard, the military, against U.S. citizens” if he wins in a few short weeks.
“Yes I do, of course,” Esper said Monday in response to Collins’ question. “Because I lived through that, and I saw over the summer of 2020 where President Trump and those around him wanted to use the National Guard in various capacities in cities such as Chicago and Portland and Seattle.”
As my colleague David Kurtz noted Tuesday morning, Trump had spent the weekend making unhinged promises to his supporters about just how he would quench his thirst for retribution. Perhaps most notable were his remarks to Fox News and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, in which he argued that any chaos on Election Day would come from “radical left lunatics,” not from his supporters, whom he has already primed and prepped to believe any election result that doesn’t put him back in the White House will be stolen, the result of fraud. It was then that he suggested the military should be brought in to deal with his political foes.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” he told Bartiromo when asked about President Biden’s warnings of potential violence on Election Day. “Sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
It’s rhetoric in line with what Trump has been saying for months, as he and his allies threaten to use the military as a form of law enforcement to crack down on Americans if elected — vowing to deploy the military domestically to carry out mass deportations of immigrants, including some who are here legally, and clamp down on anti-Trump political activity while they’re at it. Josh Kovensky has been covering exactly how these promises could and would be carried out for the last several months.
Esper added during his Monday CNN interview that the “good news” was that most of what Trump had wanted to do during his first term was illegal and was avoided because he had aides and advisers cautioning him against such actions, for the most part. Trump “terminated” Esper via Twitter back in November 2020; Esper has said he anticipated his removal after Trump threatened to fire him in June of that year, when he cautioned Trump against using active duty troops to break up street protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
A similar scenario might not be the case during a potential Trump 2.0, as the former president increasingly surrounds himself with extremists who have studied up on how to steamroll through the roadblocks that kept Trump’s most authoritarian instincts in check the first time around.
“I think President Trump has learned, the key is getting people around you who will do your bidding, who will not push back, who will implement what you want to do,” Esper said of his former boss. “And I think he’s talked about that, his acolytes have talked about that, and I think loyalty will be the first litmus test.”
Another former Trump administration top military official recently got even more explicit.
“He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley told the journalist Bob Woodward. “A fascist to the core.”
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Hey donnie
Got my ballot today
Guess who I will not vote for
FIRST!!!
Professor Cat likes to yell at his computer when unasked for images of trump show up.
How else will Trump become a dictator, even for a day, if he doesn’t have the threat of force?
Of course, he will use the National Guard and whatever else he can against US residents and citizens.
Who exactly are these “radical left lunatics”?
I don’t see them.
Anyone that isn’t one of his disciples.
81 million people?
Then Democratic voters are the worst leftists of all time.