During an interview over the weekend, former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, said that the National Guard should consider using force against left-leaning people in the U.S., baselessly alleging that the left would disrupt the accuracy of the 2024 election and describing them as “the enemy from within.”
Trump made the remarks on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program in response to a question about the possibility of foreign influence in the upcoming election. Trump’s answer focused on the domestic scene, arguing, without evidence, that a widespread coalition of leftist voters would rig the election against him.
“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” Trump alleged, not providing any specific names of groups he was referring to. “And I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Trump also said that he didn’t believe his own supporters would engage in such actions, despite the fact that hundreds of his loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol building during the last election cycle in order to disrupt the certification of his election loss to President Joe Biden.
There won’t be violence “from the side that votes for Trump,” the former president claimed.
As an ex-president, Trump no longer has any say over how the U.S’s military branches are used. However, his statement serves as a warning that he may seek to use military force against his perceived political opponents if he returns to the White House.
Trump has not committed to accepting the 2024 election results, saying he will only do so if the outcome is “honest” — likely meaning if he wins. His refusal to accept the results regardless of the outcome has worried a number of political observers, especially in light of his use of authoritarian and fascist language throughout his presidential campaign.
Trump has, for example, promised to be a dictator on his first day in office, vowing to relinquish those unprecedented (and unconstitutional) powers after he enacts his racist immigration policies. He has also pledged to use the same legal concepts that were utilized to create Japanese American internment camps during World War II to enact his mass deportation plans, and has called for a single day of police violence across the U.S. to supposedly quell crime.
Behind the scenes, Trump appears to be preparing to subvert the results of the 2024 presidential election should he lose to Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. According to a report from Rolling Stone, which spoke to four sources close to Trump, the former president plans to claim, once again, that the election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him if Harris is the victor, using the same false claims of fraud in absentee voting that he did four years ago.
Earlier this year, Trump had softened his attacks against mail-in voting, but the Republican Party is still engaging in a multi-state effort to make the voting method, generally used more by Democrats than by GOP voters, harder to utilize. Republican-led lawsuits in various states aim to block votes for a variety of trivial reasons, including if absentee ballots are postmarked by Election Day but arrive late, or if votes include small technical errors, such as a voter forgetting to write the date on them.
“The GOP’s efforts could, if successful, tip the scales against the Democrats,” wrote Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis, in an op-ed for Truthout earlier this month.
“The GOP is throwing spaghetti at the wall with these lawsuits, knowing that most will go nowhere, but hoping that enough will gain traction to cause an unholy mess in at least some swing states.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
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Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
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