Rash: Take Trump’s threats literally and seriously

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In the 2016 campaign, a now-famous phrase posited that institutions (including the press) took then-candidate Donald Trump “literally, but not seriously” while supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.”

In the 2024 campaign, everyone should take the former president seriously and literally regarding his rhetoric about “the enemy from within.”

That’s the label Trump used in an Oct. 13 Fox News interview when asked about potential Election Day “chaos” from “outside agitators” like those on the terrorist watchlist or migrants who had committed crimes. “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump responded, which he said includes “sick people, radical left lunatics.” It “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

The words worsened: “The enemy within,” Trump said of some of his fellow Americans, “is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries” (nations, notably, that have formed an authoritarian axis to more cohesively challenge the U.S.). He even name-checked Rep. Adam Schiff (likely to soon be a senator) and later, at a rally, “the Pelosis,” referring to the former House speaker and her husband, who was assaulted with a hammer in an ideologically inspired attack in 2022.

Americans should take these threats to use the military against U.S. citizens “seriously,” Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN. Esper, the kind of responsible leader likely to be weeded out during another Trump term, said that 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. And I think he’s talked about that, his acolytes have talked about that, and I think loyalty will be the first litmus test.”

Like Esper, former Marine general and Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley would also not pass that litmus test; their loyalty is to the Constitution and the country.

Trump, Milley is quoted as saying in Bob Woodward’s new book “War,” is “the most dangerous person to this country” and is “fascist to the core.” And Kelly told the New York Times that Trump told him that Hitler “did some good things” and that the former president “certainly falls into the general direction of fascist, for sure.”

Most GOP lawmakers and conservative commentators claim that fascism has become a facile charge, especially after Trump later partly walked back his comments. But for some authorities on authoritarianism the historical echoes reverberate.

“If your aim is an authoritarian aim — to divide the country so much that people feel their safety is threatened — it’s not enough to keep people out; the threat has to be within,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism and propaganda.

Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” said that Trump’s rhetoric is “not just about polarization. Polarization is a divided country, but we could still agree to disagree. Authoritarians need you, especially before an election, to get into a state of what I call ‘survivalism,’ where it’s me or you and only one of us will survive, because the enemy is so primitive, so criminal, and it could be anywhere.”

Anywhere like Springfield, Ohio, or Aurora, Colo., two cities cited by Trump — erroneously — for particularly pernicious impacts of immigration. But it’s not just the outsider, but insiders, especially political and media ones, including at least 15 instances when he’s threatened broadcast licenses because of unfavorable campaign coverage. (Because networks aren’t licensed but affiliates are, a Trump-era FCC might target individual stations.)

Other institutions and individuals essential to civil society are also vulnerable. Since planning his campaign in 2022, Trump has “issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents,” according to an NPR report.

Added Ben-Ghiat: “Every type of authority in this country, whether it’s scientific or certainly anybody who operates on a fact-based basis, empirical, verifiable — journalists, prosecutors, judges, academics like me, scientists — everybody has to be discredited as part of the ‘deep state’ or partisan or political, and in that way they get ordinary people to not just turn against you, but they won’t even receive what they have to say.”

Ronald Krebs, a University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight University Professor whose scholarship includes books on national security and civil-military relations, said that “democracies can very often die not in a coup, which is how we typically imagine this, in a single blow, but rather a series of blows that essentially eviscerate the checks and balances on leaders.”

Krebs listed Hungary’s Viktor Orban, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump as leaders “who have sought to undermine the various institutions that mediate between the putative people in whose name they claim to speak and the outputs of government, and thereby essentially convert competitive democracies into electoral authoritarian regimes.”

Given “all the evidence — four years of Trump in the Oval Office and then January 6th,” Krebs concluded, “it is shocking to me that there are still people who continue to think that we should take Donald Trump seriously but not literally.”