Trump Doubles Down on “Enemy Within” Rhetoric in Alarming Threat

On Tuesday morning in Florida, Donald Trump complained again about the “enemy within,” expanding his definition as the crowd around him cheered.

Speaking at an event for the Latino community at his Doral golf club, the former president complained about Israel’s military plans to attack Iran being exposed, either from a leak or from a hack of the Department of Defense.

“Who did that? Can you imagine somebody doing that? That’s the enemy, I guess that maybe is the enemy from within, as I talk about. We have an enemy from within, they hate to talk about it. Could you imagine, could you imagine,” Trump said. The room then broke out into applause.

Over the past week, the former president has repeatedly used the phrase “enemy within” to describe his political opponents, specifically mentioning leading Democrats like Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. And his latest statement shows he has no intention of backing away from the violent rhetoric.

Trump’s former staff, including former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, say that his words are alarming and should not be dismissed. Trump’s comments are more worrying when taken with his recent pronouncement at a faith leaders’ event in North Carolina that only the people he likes should enjoy the right to free speech.

This means that, in the former president’s view, if someone is not on board with his extreme agenda, not only do they not have the right to protest, they are “the enemy within.” Since Trump now claims that “Make America Great Again” means taking the country back to 1798, while slavery was still legal and women couldn’t vote, most of the country would be his enemy.

Donald Trump appeared incredibly out of it during a campaign event with Hispanic voters in Doral, Florida, on Tuesday. 

Trump was joined onstage by U.S. Senator Rick Scott, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and Doral Mayor Christi Farga—only he couldn’t seem to locate Farga, who was sitting just to his left. 

“Where’s Christi? Is she around? Christi? Christi?” Trump asked, looking wildly around for the woman seated next to him.  

“Right here,” Farga said gently. 

“Oh, Christi! Christi, ohhhh my Christi!” Trump said, sighing, as audience members laughed and whooped at his gaffe. Farga had also greeted Trump when he came onstage nearly 40 minutes after the opening speakers had concluded. 

As Trump spoke, he seemed to become untethered from reality, as he clumsily discussed energy policy, claiming that environmentalists actually hate solar energy.

“A solar field the other day that looked like it took up half the desert. I’d never saw anything like it. It’s all steel and glass and wires and … it looks like hell,” Trump said. “And you see rabbits, they get caught in it, and every—you know for the environmentalists, it’s just terrible.

“And what it does to your desert areas, or the areas that you’re putting it in, it’s just crazy,” he continued, adding that he thinks solar panels are OK if they’re on rooftops. 

Trump said he preferred “stuff right under the ground” such as natural gas. The former president has repeatedly said that if he’s elected, he hopes to expand natural gas mining, called hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking, in the United States to create energy independence, increase America’s energy exports, and boost the economy. 

Of course, that would involve cutting key regulations on liquefied natural gas, a highly volatile substance that when mishandled or stored can cause deadly explosions. Not to mention the dangers of fracking itself, which has resulted in reserves of potable groundwater becoming poisoned with chemicals, sometimes so severely that it can become flammable. 

Not only is Trump’s plan for energy independence dangerous, it’s literally a pipe dream. The former president claimed in a speech Monday that he achieved energy independence during his administration and that it was undone by President Joe Biden. That is completely false; the U.S. hasn’t been energy independent for more than 75 years. 

Kamala Harris, who once said she would ban fracking, has since walked back her position. Trump continues to insist that Harris opposes it. While neither candidate opposes fracking, the people actually living on the shale Trump intends to drill into, who remember when fracking first contaminated their water, sure do.  

Trump previously held a rally in Doral, Florida, in July, where he gave a rambling speech that ricocheted from the death penalty and crying mothers to crappy airports and complaints that no one eats bacon anymore. At the time, it was a terrifying, incoherent tirade. Three months later, it would be considered run of the mill for the Republican presidential nominee. Trump doesn’t get better; we all just seem to get used to it. 

Some of the country’s largest grassroots political donors are handing their money over to Republicans—but they don’t seem to be aware of it.

Hundreds of elderly dementia patients are fueling America’s campaign finance system, collectively shelling out millions of dollars to political candidates while they themselves struggle for cash, according to a CNN investigation published Tuesday.

Some patients, lured by the deceptively direct and aggressive automated messaging strategies utilized by political campaigns, felt that they were taking part in a network of political operatives and had a direct line to either Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

“President Trump NEVER does this! He personally tapped YOU to become a MAGA Living Legend!” read one message from the Trump campaign.

“The blunt truth: Kamala is BEHIND, and she’s COUNTING on us!” read a note from Harris’s team.

That presumed and false connection drove the dementia patients to tap into retirement savings in order to contribute six-figure sums to the candidate of their choice, CNN reported. Some even threw themselves into debt over the course of thousands of transactions to politicians they believed they were communicating with directly.

One Baltimore-area victim, an 83-year-old woman whom CNN described as wearing “pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones,” didn’t know she had given Republicans more than $350,000 since 2020.

An 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas was another dementia patient who fell prey to the deception. In September 2022, the unnamed man donated $250 to Ron Johnson’s campaign for Senate over the platform WinRed. But as he was barraged with messages over the next year and a half, the Lone Star senior—who for years had thrifted his clothes and driven an old car in order to save for his retirement—unknowingly made more than 15,000 transactions, amounting to more than $440,000 in donations.

CNN noted that the man’s son had spent weeks trying to “help him get the money back” from WinRed but was only able to secure refunds for a third of his father’s political contributions.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission revealed that WinRed had nearly seven times as many FTC complaints as its Democratic competitor, ActBlue. Trump was the single largest beneficiary of the donations.

The majority of victims identified by CNN were in their eighties and nineties and included veterans, house cleaners, nursing home residents, and widows living alone. Some of the donors had coughed up more cash to politicians than they had paid for their homes.

Donald Trump is either trying to make Pennsylvania sports fans hate him or send cryptic QAnon cues—or perhaps he just needs to hire a proofreader.

In an email to his supporters on Monday night, Trump included a fun typo that caught the attention of many of his critics.

“Working at McDonalds, a town hall, a Stealers [sic] game—no one is working harder than President Trump to Make America Great Again!” the campaign newsletter read.

Trump is trying, and thanks to the typo seriously failing, to paint himself as a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, named for the city’s steel industry (an industry that Trump ultimately harmed through his tariffs in his previous term). He even went as far as to make a strange AI-generated photo of himself sporting the number 47 jersey. Though the number probably is supposed to refer to him being the forty-seventh president, for real fans it brought to mind ex-Steelers player Mel Blount, who endorsed Kamala Harris.

Similarly, Elon Musk caught flack online after trying to root for both the Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Trump’s “Stealers” flub was seized upon by Representative Adam Schiff, who Trump recently threatened, calling him “the enemy within.” The Democratic representative snarkily called the mistake an “authoritarian slip.”

If the typo was in fact an accident, and not a call to “stop the steal,” perhaps Trump should reconsider his call to destroy the Department of Education, which helps make sure the nation’s children learn how to spell.

Reports of glitchy door-knocking canvassing by Elon Musk’s super PAC just got way more real, spelling serious trouble for Donald Trump, who has almost entirely outsourced his door-to-door efforts in battleground states to the billionaire technocrat.

It was previously reported that the app used by Trump and Musk’s canvassers was plagued by design problems and glitches, making it difficult to determine whether employees in swing states were actually doing their jobs. Now it seems that some employees are exploiting the app’s faulty location functions.

A video made by one Nevada-based canvasser with a vendor working with Musk’s America PAC demonstrated for users just how easy it is to fake door-knocks.

The video shows users how a GPS-spoofing app can make it appear as if the user went to the homes of Trump voters. In reality, they didn’t need to go anywhere, and could simply falsify survey responses. The video, which was obtained by The Guardian, has been shared with hundreds of canvassers, but it’s unclear how widespread the spoofing practice actually is.

America PAC and several of its vendors, including Blitz, the vendor operating in Nevada and Arizona, released a joint statement.

“Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” the statement said.

Blitz, the vendor operating in Arizona and Nevada uses a “Quickbooks Workforce” app to monitor the location of its canvassers, two people familiar told The Guardian, but even that can be manipulated by simply turning off location services.

This poses a particular problem in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona. Leaked data from America PAC, also obtained by The Guardian, showed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada last week were flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric that indicates faked door-knocks.

Trump’s allies have been begging him to ditch Musk and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders report that they’ve seen little of the efforts Musk has apparently poured $75 million into over the last few months.