The President Is on a Mission to Destroy the ‘Enemy From Within’

“We have two enemies,” Trump declared last October. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”

Trump’s carefully calculated claim serves to justify his administration’s assault on government, American values and core traditions since he took office on Jan. 20.

Trump’s success in demonizing liberals and Democrats — casting the left as a grave threat to a substantial segment of the electorate — has proved crucial to his decision to turn regulatory and prosecutorial power into an instruments of revenge.

The threat posed by “the enemy from within” has proved to be the key mobilizing concept underpinning the MAGA movement and the intellectual structure that hard-right conservatives have pieced together to provide the means of attack.

The enemy, in this paradigm, is Democrats, liberals and everyone left of center, expanding beyond ideology to encompass huge swaths of the federal government and of the immigrant population, legal and illegal.

The theme of the enemy resonated on the right in the wake of Trump’s defeat in 2020.

Glenn Ellmers, a research fellow at the Claremont Institute, claimed in his March 2021 essay “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough,” that

Who are the remaining Americans?