The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 15, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Over the weekend, JD Vance actually tried to argue that Donald Trump will not target his political enemies if he’s reelected president. Amusingly enough, at around the same time, Trump was in the process of confirming the opposite point, declaring flatly that he’ll use the military to target the “enemy within.” What’s striking about all this is that Trump regularly says, day after day, right in plain sight at his rallies, that in a second term he plans to target a whole range of enemies of MAGA, and doesn’t bother disguising how grotesquely he plans to abuse presidential power to do so. Politico reporter Myah Ward has written a great new piece looking unflinchingly at what Trump has been saying at these rallies. We invited her on to talk about how blatant he’s being about what his second term intentions really are. Thanks for coming on, Myah.
Myah Ward: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Trump said on Fox News on Sunday. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people that have come in and [destroyed] our country. By the way, totally destroying our country. The towns, the villages, they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they are a problem, in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem [is] the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.
Sargent: Myah, I think the key thing here is that he makes a distinction between migrants who are entering the country and other enemies who are already here. That means a domestic enemy. He’s threatening to use the National Guard or the military on a domestic enemy, isn’t he?
Ward: Yes. It’s interesting because it’s hard to know exactly when he started using this “enemy from within” rhetoric. I’m sure we could track it down if we went through all of these rallies. It’s definitely been a while because we do have to remember that he started using phrases like vermin to talk about his political opponents last year. But to your point, he is getting more blatant about what he’s talking about here, what he wants to do. I really focused my attention in the last month of rallies and how he’s been talking about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and migrants in Aurora, Colorado. That’s where I really picked up, but if you look back to even these rallies, that phrase the enemy from within is something he’s used to talk about liberals, “the radical left” as he describes it.
I was talking with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU who studies fascism, and she noted that he uses it to describe the left, as we saw this weekend, but [that] it’s also been something he’s used to capture migrants as well. We heard him say in Aurora that he will be the “protector” for women and that, when he was president, there were no wars, no terrorism and people weren’t pouring into the country. He basically said, There are outside enemies like Russia, like China, but if you have a good president, I’ll be able to handle that. The bigger enemy is the enemy from within. That’s what we saw him talk about on Fox, when he essentially suggested about bringing the military in to handle this when asked about potential violence on Election Day.
Sargent: In your piece, you watched approximately 20 Trump rallies and speeches and you came away really struck by the overt use of racism to demonize migrants and so forth. You guys used “racist” in the headline, which is frankly a rarity from the mainstream media, unfortunately. But you guys went there and rightly so, and more power to you. You quoted experts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat really likening this to Nazi rally rhetoric. Can you talk about that comparison, the demonization of migrants, the Nazi overtones of that? What did you pick up along those lines?
Ward: It’s the language he used. I went through all of these rallies and pulled pieces of these transcripts where he was talking about migrants. His campaign really says … he’s talking just about illegal immigrants. There is some truth to that, in some of his speeches. It is important to note that there is a problem here. Americans are concerned about the border, they are concerned about illegal immigration. That is why we are seeing both presidential candidates talk about this. But the way he talks about this is really escalating. It’s different than 2016. Even in his opening speech for launching his campaign, he talked about immigrants from Mexico—and we often heard him described these people as “rapists” and “criminals”—but now he’s getting very specific. He talks in this language of saying, They’re going to cut your throat, they are conquering and taking over cities. They’re taking over housing. They’re taking over your schools.
Sargent: Myah, just to speak to your point about the escalation, I don’t think in 2016, correct me if I’m wrong, he said things like migrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.” That takes it to another level of depicting migrants as contaminating the ethnic makeup of the United States, which is really, really, really beyond the pale. One thing I find really striking about your report as well is the naked promises to abuse power, to unleash the force of the state not just on migrants, but on a whole range of unnamed enemies. As you pointed out, he’s actually started to use the phrase enemy within a lot more deliberately lately. It really is something he seems to pronounce and stress heavily. He knows it’s going to get a reaction, a positive one from his supporters. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Can you talk about this side of his rallies, not the migrant side, but the promises to abuse power on the enemy?
Ward: Yeah, it struck me ... I’m going bring up Ruth again because some of the stuff that she was talking about that didn’t make it into that story. She was talking about how this “enemy from within” rhetoric is what scares her the most because from where she sits and what she studies, it is fascist rhetoric. It is reminiscent of military dictatorships—the one she mentioned in our conversation was Pinochet, who was the dictator of Chile—and this idea that they turn the military on the people because the enemy is within. Then just a few days after I speak with her, he’s not only talking about an “enemy from within” at his rally, he takes it a step further in that Fox News interview.
Sargent: Let’s go over to JD Vance for a second. On ABC News, he said this.
Martha Raddatz (audio voiceover): Would Donald Trump go after his political opponent? He suggested that in the past.
JD Vance (audio voiceover): Martha, he was president for four years and he didn’t go after his political opponents. You know who did go after her political opponents? Kamala Harris, who has tried to arrest everything from pro-life activists to her political opponents.…
Raddatz (audio voiceover): He said those people who cheated will be prosecuted.
Vance: … and used the Department of Justice as a weapon against people. Well, he said that people who violated our election laws will be prosecuted. I think that’s the administration of law. He didn’t say people were going to go to jail because they disagree with me.
Sargent: Myah, there’s a lot of distortions there. Trump actually did try to prosecute enemies in his first term. He is now being prosecuted and keeping with the rule of law based on evidence. Judges are presiding over it. And Trump has suggested he’d prosecute elections officials without cause. Put that aside, how does what Vance said in a big-picture way square with what you’ve seen of Trump having looked so closely at his day-to-day conduct and interactions with his supporters and crowds? In a very broad sense, JD Vance is just offering an incredibly sanitized picture, isn’t he?
Ward: JD Vance has really had to play this role this entire campaign. We really saw that during the vice presidential debate where he was the one who delivered the message that Trump and his campaign and other Republicans—other Republicans in particular—want to hear from the former president. But it’s the same situation. Then Trump goes out on the trail and it’s not matching with what JD Vance is saying, with some of his other campaign officials are saying [about] what he means, what his intent is. And to your point, this isn’t new. We do remember his obsession with prosecuting Hillary Clinton, investigating Joe Biden. Then there was that call after he lost the 2020 election, ahead of January 6, where he called Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, and basically asking him to find votes. And in that call, he threatened criminal consequences. This is something we have seen before, but I think the question now is, and what is really sending off alarm bells is: How big is this enemy from within that he’s talking about right now?
Sargent: And people don’t really realize that, for him to do this with DOJ, it wouldn’t actually require all that much. We had a cover story on this in The New Republic this month, people should check that out. But the threat to prosecute ... he wouldn’t actually have to go through with that full threat because prosecuting requires the complicity or the acquiescence of judges and juries, grand juries, and things like that. He could just have his attorney general signal down to people down the chain that they should just take a look at this person or take a look at that person who pissed him off and some ambitious U.S. attorney might decide to do that. An investigation, by itself, is an incredibly harassing thing even if it doesn’t result in a prosecution, and it’s really really likely that we’d see a lot of that.
Ward: We saw so many reports about these conversations the last time he was in office taking place behind the scenes. It’s so striking now that everything he’s saying, he’s putting it right out there in the open, and people are fully expecting something like that to continue if he wins the White House again.
Sargent: Right. He’s raising his supporters’ expectations for that. Such a critical point, which brings me to another thing. What’s interesting about Vance trying to clean this up, or “sane-washing” it as the new jargon has it, is that Vance seems to know that threatening to unleash the state on unnamed domestic enemies is actually politically problematic in winning swing voters and so forth. It’s not clear to me that Trump thinks that. My guess is that Trump thinks there’s a latent MAGA majority out there that will get energized and activated by these threats and will privately go into the voting booth and vote for persecution of the enemy. What’s your sense of what he really believes about this, the politics of this, from watching him at his rallies?
Ward: I do think that he’s talking this way for a reason. He believes that he won in 2016 by instilling fear, particularly around the immigration issue, and that this resonates with a bloc of voters that he believes will turn out for him. But I think that it continues to speak to this divide in the Republican Party. You have Trump and his strategy, and then you have people like JD Vance. We saw it in his last administration as well, these divides inside the White House about how to handle something. We now have former administration officials who are out against Donald Trump and say that he is not fit for a second term in office. So it’s just going to continue to show this fracture in the party and what its path is going to be going forward.
Sargent: That fracture is really important. In fact, it brings up the fact that JD Vance is there and Mike Pence is not, precisely because Pence wouldn’t carry out Trump’s demands to violate the Constitution on his behalf. We saw over and over in the last couple of weeks: JD Vance will not say that Trump lost the 2020 election. And he has repeatedly said that he would have done what Pence would not have, which is basically Vance saying, I would put Trump above the Constitution and the law. That’s really one of the main reasons Trump chose him. So it becomes particularly ironic for Vance to be saying, Well, Trump won’t go after his enemies. He would never do anything like that, when Vance knows that in order to audition for the vice presidential running mate slot, he had to promise to put Trump above the law.
Ward: If you think back to the vice presidential debate, Vance had a strong performance. A lot of people walked away thinking that he was better on the stage than Walz was. But again, [on] that last question about January 6 and if Trump won the 2020 election, his unwillingness to answer said a lot. It ended up being a moment that dominated headlines in a debate that a lot of people felt that he won.
Sargent: Right. He should have walked away with something like a clean win, but that moment at the end gave Democrats this clip that they can use over and over and over, which they are actually doing.
Ward: The Harris campaign immediately seized on it. It was the moment that they were saying was the most important moment of the debate. Not something their candidate said or anything about policy, but what Vance said in that answer.
Sargent: So it’s doubly funny, I think, for Vance to be out there trying to clean up Trump’s comments about threatening to prosecute people when Vance knows better than just about anyone alive what Trump expects of his consiglieres and so forth. I want to wrap this up by getting at a through line here between the Fox News interview and what you saw at these rallies. The connecting link is that he’s making the threats explicit. He is saying explicitly ... he’s running on an overt series of threats of authoritarian violence and abuses of power. “Fascism” in the words of the historian you interviewed, “Nazism” in the words of another. We’re not going to debate whether those terms are right here, but what we do know is that he’s running clearly and explicitly on a promise to target an internal enemy of some kind. I wanted to ask you, how do his followers react to that at these rallies, do you think?
Ward: I interviewed a number of supporters, and I believe it was on January 5 of this year. So it was right before the anniversary of January 6. And they don’t believe that it happened. They don’t believe that it was an important moment in our history. Those supporters, they do buy into what he is saying, whether it is about immigrants, the radical left. There’s a lot of truth in how polarized some of these voters are, but I do think, back to how we started this discussion, it’s worth noting that this is not necessarily new from Donald Trump. This is messaging that we have heard from him for almost 10 years now, but we are seeing an escalation. It’s not using the word dog whistle to describe how he originally talked at the start of his campaign in 2015. [That] doesn’t seem like the right word. I guess we could go with bullhorn or something, but regardless, we are seeing this escalation. He is being more explicit, talking about these ideas, priming his supporters on the campaign trail.
Sargent: Can I ask: When he goes out there and just says it on Fox News—to some degree that’s aimed at his core supporters because it’s on Fox, but he knows that every news outlet is going to pick it up—he’s showing that he thinks that he can win while campaigning on a platform of overt authoritarian threats and violence, right?
Ward: That is the impression a lot of people would have, that he believes that that is the winning message. But there are concerns—and this is why Democrats are using the things he says against him. Think about the Nikki Haley voters who did not want to vote for Donald Trump, think about the independent voters who are on the fence, those voters who turned away from Trump in 2020. These are not the types of things a candidate would be saying if they were hoping to bring in these voters. Then on the flip side, you have the Harris campaign really targeting Republicans. They’re targeting independents and trying to pull in those people who have decided, I can’t vote for Donald Trump again. So that is the concern that a lot of Republicans have too. They want Trump to focus to talk about immigration, to talk about the border, to talk about the economy, and to leave out the inflammatory rhetoric that could turn off some of these swing voters.
Sargent: To your point, Dan Pfeiffer interviewed Senior Harris Advisor David Plouffe on one of the Crooked Media podcasts. A critical point that Plouffe made was that their internal data is showing surprising strength with Republican-leaning independents. Now, if that’s the case, it sure looks to me like Trump is just saying, I don’t give a crap. I don’t need them to win.
Ward: It does feel that way. That is the calculation that the Harris campaign is making. Also that is a calculation that if you talk to some Republicans, they believe that it’s the wrong one.
Sargent: And I think it is the wrong one. I don’t think that that means he’ll lose super close, but that is certainly not helping him in any way I can see. Myah Ward, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Ward: Thank you.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some great new content we have up at tnr.com: Jacob Bacharach arguing that it’s time for us to stop trying to understand the white rural voter, and Michael Tomasky making the case that the media really has only three weeks left to learn how to tell the full truth about Trump. We’ll see you all tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.