Populist tribune, Donald Trump regularly praises a renowned far-right program: three weeks before the presidential election, he denounces an “enemy from within”, authoritarian rhetoric inspired according to experts by “fascism” and anti-communism in the European and American history.
The former Republican president, who plans to return to the White House, has often expressed his “admiration” for “strong men” like the Russian Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Xi Jinping or the North Korean Kim Jong Un.
Hoping to be re-elected on November 5, the 78-year-old billionaire continues to paint in black an “America invaded and occupied” by immigrants. Using inflammatory, racist and conspiratorial false information, he called migrants from Latin America or Africa who had come to “poison the blood” of the United States and cause crime to rise as “animals” and “terrorists”.
He went further this weekend.
Asked Sunday on Fox News about possible “agitators” during the election, he retorted that “the National Guard”, or even “military if necessary”, should be dispatched against an “internal enemy” that he did not name.
– “Far-left psychos” –
While the use of the army against possible civil unrest would go against the grain of the political history of the United States, Mr. Trump promised to repress “crazy people, far-left psychos”.
While campaigning in California, he attacked the elected representative to the House of Representatives of this Democratic state, Adam Schiff: a “trash”, a “sick person”, among “the worst people who are enemies from within”.
Mr. Schiff, who is running for senator, led the Congressional investigation during the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.
For the tycoon who entered politics in 2015, who has shaken up American democracy and who wants to “imprison” his opponents, the “enemy within is more dangerous than China, Russia”.
Donald Trump also reiterated that Chinese President Xi was “a tough guy, a very smart guy (…) a brilliant guy who has 1.4 billion people whom he rules with an iron fist.”
Enough to inspire him if he returned to power.
He declared at the end of September at a meeting in Pennsylvania that in the event of a “really violent day, a really hard time”, he would appeal “with one word” to the police so that “this stops immediately” .
According to public television PBS, re-elected Donald Trump could have a number of foreigners expelled under a law of 1798 (Alien Enemies Act) and suppress unrest thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1807 allowing the deployment of soldiers against American citizens.
President George HW Bush used it during riots in 1992 in Los Angeles.
– “Dictator from day one” –
In April 2023, rebelling against a hypothetical “massive electoral fraud” in November, Donald Trump warned: to “all the far-left Democrats, socialists, Marxists and communists, weak and pathetic, who are killing our nation, we will return “.
Democratic President Joe Biden and his vice-president who replaced him as candidate, Kamala Harris, have long denounced the authoritarian rhetoric of their opponent who had threatened to be “a dictator on the first day” of his inauguration.
Monday evening in Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris warned that “a second Trump term would put America at enormous risk” because the man “is increasingly unstable and unbalanced, seeking unchecked power.”
In his book “War” which comes out Tuesday, journalist Bob Woodward quotes former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who served in the last year of the Trump presidency: he is, according to him, “a fascist until ‘to the bone’ and ‘the most dangerous person for this country’.
In fact, the expression “enemy from within” has strong reminiscences with fascism, Nazism, Francoism, European ideologies responsible for the death of millions of Jews, foreigners, opponents, resistance fighters and members of a ” fifth column”, historians point out.
This also refers to McCarthyism, an anti-communist witch hunt by an American senator in the 1950s.
And before entering the war at the end of 1941, the United States was shaken by the Nazi lobby German American Bund bringing together 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York on February 20, 1939.
It is in this legendary room that Donald Trump will gather his supporters on October 27 to denounce “the influx of more than 210,000 migrants into New York (…) which has cost ten billion dollars and out-of-control crime.” according to his team.
