Trump Goes Full Dictator With Threat to Turn Military on U.S. Citizens

With less than 30 days on the clock, Donald Trump’s full attention is geared toward Election Day. But the specifics of his vision are veering into dangerous territory.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee claimed that the real Election Day issue is the “enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said, deflecting Bartiromo’s baseless suggestion that Chinese immigrants in the country—or rapists—would interfere in the outcome of the election. “Not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country.

“We have some very bad people,” Trump continued. “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, because they can’t let that happen.”

It’s not the first time Trump—or his allies—have threatened military action in order to achieve their goals.

Last week, Steve Bannon’s temporary War Room substitute host Natalie Winters vowed that Trump’s postelection retribution tour will involve prosecuting his enemies for treason, including some members of his former administration, such as retired U.S. Army general and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.

And Trump himself has leveraged the authoritarian rhetoric before, as well. Speaking with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro in September 2020, Trump warned that he would use force against Democrats if they chose to protest in the streets following his potential win on Election Day.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want,” Trump said at the time, according to Politico.

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” he continued. “We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Of course, Trump did not send in the military to rein in the insurrection—carried out by his own followers after he lost.

Thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters reportedly found themselves stranded Saturday night after the former president’s rally in Coachella, California.

Attendees were bussed roughly five miles from parking to the venue at Calhoun Ranch, where Trump delivered a rambling 80-minute speech in scorching desert heat, during which several attendees required emergency medical attention. 

During his speech, Trump made several wild remarks against the state and its residents. He vowed to withhold aid from California if Governor Gavin Newsom didn’t comply with his demands to upend water conservation in the state. 

Once the day’s speeches were over, rallygoers found themselves stranded in the dark without enough buses to carry them back to their cars, according to The Independent. 

“This isn’t normal,” said one attendee, in a video on X shared by the account BlueDream. 

“Apparently the buses are no longer coming, or at least, there used to be like 20 buses when we were being brought here, but now there’s only like three buses operating, and it’s an absolute …” the speaker sighed as he walked past the large crowd waiting by the road. “It’s just chaos. Absolute chaos. All of us are stranded here. Everyone’s stranded here.”

One rally attendee, Wesley Johnson, took to X to detail the chaos and confusion two hours after the rally had concluded, when he and other rallygoers still waited to be assisted. 

“Parking lot is a two-hour walk. Countless elderly stranded here and can’t walk anymore. No restroom facilities accessible anymore,” he wrote.

Johnson eventually deleted his X posts about the incident, writing that “I was hoping some help would come from it, but all it did was cause drama.”

He explained that bus drivers told him they had difficulties finding places to refuel in the area and that some had become stranded themselves. “They and the Sheriffs were all just as confused as we were,” Johnson wrote. “My story stands, but the drama got out of hand.”

The Riverside sheriff’s office referred The New Republic’s questions about the logistics of the event, which included the shuttle buses, to Trump’s campaign team. 

In a post on Truth Social after the disastrous rally, Trump falsely claimed that “100,000” people attended his rally. The permit for the event revealed that the rally only had a capacity for 15,000.   

Before Trump’s rally began, a man was arrested at a security checkpoint outside the venue, carrying a shotgun, a loaded handgun, ammunition, and several fake passports.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has once again evoked Nazi rhetoric.

At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, the Republican presidential nominee weaponized violent and dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, referring to them as the “enemy from within” while advocating for harsher criminal punishments for the vulnerable demographic, including promising the death penalty.

“But I protect you from outside enemies. But you know I always say, we have the outside enemies, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un … if you have a smart president it’s no problem,” Trump said. “It’s the enemy from within.

“All the scum we have to deal with that hate our country,” he continued. “That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.… Everyday Americans like Cindy are living in fear all because Kamala Harris decided to empty the slums and prison cells of Caracas, and many other places. Happening all over the world.”

That is, on its face, untrue. But according to Trump, that (falsely) means crime is down in the rest of the world as a result.

“Every country, you know, prison populations all over the world are down. Crime all over the world is down. Because they take the world’s criminals, gang members, drug dealers, and they deposit them into the United States. Bus after bus after bus,” Trump said to a cacophony of boos from the crowd of his supporters.

The world’s prison population has, statistically, gone up by more than 25 percent since the year 2000, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“They took the criminals out of Caracas, and they put them along your border, and they said if you ever come back, we’re going to kill you,” Trump said.

“Think of that!” he continued. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

At that, one person in the crowd shouted, “Kill them!”

In the same speech, Trump called for the expeditious “removal of these savage gangs,” promising that, if elected, he would appoint “elite squads” to conduct mass deportations. He also vowed to enforce the death penalty for “any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”

Last year, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that immediately echoed Adolf Hitler’s fascistic rhetoric designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin,” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”

Donald Trump invented some more fanfiction about the presidential election Friday, imagining a world where Kamala Harris was replaced as the Democratic candidate.

During a scattered anti-immigrant rant at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, Trump seemed particularly out of it as he cascaded from one subject to another, turning suddenly back to his complaint that Harris should not have replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

“She shouldn’t be the one who was chosen anyway, because she is, in fact, by the way they chose her, a threat to democracy,” Trump said.

“And just in case you didn’t know it: Biden … hates her,” Trump shouted.

“I believe there is a small possibility—very small, like 1 percent—there is a 1 percent possibility he hates her more than he hates Donald Trump. I think he hates her,” he rambled.

“He went way, way down. And I thought it was over. And then—it’s like a fighter—then they put a new person in, her. And we don’t know anything about her. We have to—and now we learned, and now the people are learning, and she’s crashing like a rock,” Trump babbled.

The former president had clearly lost his train of thought before perking up again.

“Uh oh! I just thought. Just a thought—from a very brilliant mind—they might want to put a third person in tha—oh, no!

“Please be nice to Kamala, to my people, I’m telling,” Trump said incoherently, implying that she might exit the race if they were too hard on her. (This would be impossible, as both parties have passed the deadline to change their ticket lineup.) “Everybody that’s on the Trump team, be—be nice to Kamala! Because they’re going to put in a third person.

“Let’s see, who are they gonna put in next?” Trump asked the crowd, which shouted names in reply.

“They keep saying ‘Hillary,’” Trump said, feigning shock. “Hillary’s coming! Hillary’s back!”

Trump went on to whine that Hillary Clinton had “serious Trump Derangement Syndrome,” because she still speaks about the 2016 presidential election, which Trump had already talked about during his speech that day. “She talks about it all the time,” he whined.

Then Trump actually tried to brag about how outrageously off-topic his rant had become.

“Isn’t it fun. Isn’t it nice—cause I haven’t looked at these stupid things in about 15 minutes—isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t need a teleprompter? Isn’t that nice?” he asked.

If anything, Trump’s winding speech should be a warning about the risks of not using a teleprompter.

Despite the fact that his state is still recovering from Hurricane Helene, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper was forced to use his time to debunk misinformation spread by Donald Trump Friday afternoon.

Trump posted on Truth Social earlier on Friday that Cooper, along with “Democrats in Washington,” were blocking aid from coming into the state to help people in need, including President Biden and Kamala Harris, saying, “It’s all over the place—A HORRIBLE SITUATION.

“I will make it up to everyone when we take Office on January 20th. HOLD ON, I’M COMING!” Trump’s post read, showing that the post wasn’t so much about aid as it was about scaring up votes in North Carolina.

Cooper responded on X with a screenshot of Trump’s post, pointing out that it was “a flat out lie.”

“We’re working with all partners around the clock to get help to people. Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories have hurt the morale of first responders and people who lost everything, helped scam artists and put government and rescue workers in danger,” Cooper said.

Trump has been pushing the conspiracy that Democrats are hurting Republicans by withholding aid since Hurricane Helene struck the southeastern U.S. in late September. But his rhetoric has ended up hurting his supporters and some of the people hit hardest by the storm, as many people have stopped requesting badly needed help from the government.

Trump on Friday also hinted at the far-right conspiracy that the federal government is controlling the weather. Some local Republicans have pushed back against these lies, including Representative Chuck Edwards, and President Biden has also called out the “onslaught of lies.”

But Trump and other Republicans keep repeating the false claims because they see political opportunity in them, no matter how often they are debunked or how many people are put at risk. With the election less than a month away, Cooper and other leaders not only have to deal with logistical problems with hurricane aid but also human obstacles led by Trump.