If you’re not the enemy now, there’s still time, because he will turn on you, too.
In one of his increasingly unhinged and incoherent rambles masquerading as interviews, Republican nominee for president Donald Trump framed Americans that were not on board with his MAGA agenda and his exercise in manic vanity as “the enemy.” When asked about the migrants he attacks viciously by the hour, he spat, “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people.” These “sick and bad people,” the “enemy within” Trump speaks of “, are around 50% or more of the electorate. They rightly see Trump as a threat to democracy, especially after the attempts to steal the 2020 election culminating in the bloody insurrection of January 6, 2021. They also blanch at his racist, misogynistic rhetoric and the promises to slap inflation-boosting 10% tariffs on every imported good, mass deportations, and the continued support of handing the civil rights of women over to radical right-wing states that strip them. But to Trump, these people are “the enemy.” If you consider Trump’s track-record, this title applies to everyone eventually. Everyone becomes Trump’s “enemy” – friend and foe. Everyone.
To wit: right now, there are dozens of former supporters, members of his cabinet, close confidants, and even his former vice president (of whom he fed to a mob on January 6), who have become “enemies.” So too are the media friendly outlets of the Wall Street Journal and the Drudge Report, that bend over backwards to sane-cleanse his daily hysteria, and even FOX News that was sued a record $787 million perpetuating his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. Trump immediately attacks them all if there is even a scintilla of critique or rebuttal. “Enemies” – all.
There are also dozens of former aids, lawyers, minions, and mouthpieces who have either gone to jail or were disbarred for working with him, many of whom, like former NYC mayor and current crazy man Rudy Giuliani, who has become a bankrupt and desperate shell of a man standing by Trump. When reaches out to Trump weekly for some monetary or even vocal assistance, he is ignored.
The Republican Party, which Trump has gutted and turned into his family Ponzi scheme now run by his daughter-in-law, while funneling donations from hundreds of thousands of lower middle-class people to lawyers to defend his half-dozen ongoing or already convicted civil and criminal cases, is his “enemy.” GOP candidates everywhere are hung out to dry because the Republican National Committee is hoarding cash, while Trump sells watches, bibles, and other junk to pad his pockets. He did no debates during the party’s primary – the only eventual nominee to do so – forcing out top party people to replace them with sycophants as he bashes former party leaders and makes a mockery of its legacy. This is precisely why nearly 10% of Republicans are voting for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
After Nikki Haley, a woman who worked in his administration, left the GOP primary, and saw nearly 25% of the votes still go to her, she at first hesitated to walk the party line and endorse Trump (she has since capitulated), but Trump still humiliates her at every turn and tells her followers he doesn’t need them. Instead of reaching out, bringing in the disaffected and enlarging the GOP tent, he closes ranks to only the most cult-addled amongst him.
And MAGA acolytes? They are the most conned, rejected, and used of any of Trump’s “enemies.” In private, Trump belittles them, as he did when he told the world that even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they would support him – boldly framing his most loyal followers as mindless drones incapable of seeing a murderer as anything less than saintly.
The insults are not just rhetorical. Just this week, The Trump Campaign hosted a rally in Coachella, California, bussing hundreds of people out to the desert, but when the event concluded, Trump abandoned them, as they stood in the dark and cold with no exit. Why? As he has done for nearly half a century, the proposed billionaire Trump refused to pay the bussing company. Meanwhile he sells these poor, misguided fools cheap, garish crap as collector’s items – hundreds of thousands of flags, hats, posters, and other nonsense. Once videos began to emerge late in the summer of many at his diminishing-in-number rallies leaving early, he stood on stage and told them he didn’t need them. “If they leave early, I tell them, ‘Get out. Go home.’”
Even the one thing these suckers care about, Trump has pulled out from under them. He has run on one issue that continues to work for him: immigration. However, this would be less a problem now had he not asked his soon-to-be-humiliated and rejected doormats in Congress to stop the bill. It was a comprehensive, and by all measures an ultra-conservative bill crafted in what the American people crave, a bipartisan manner. Trump killed it, and with it, dozens of Republicans who must go back to their districts and explain why things could be better now, but are not so it can be a continuous Trump Campaign slogan.
The other day when asked by an audience member, a former Trump voter, at a Univision town hall how he could stand there and defend the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 based on his lies, Trump called it “a day of love,” referring to the mob as “we” and the police, five of whom were killed as a result, as “them.” This is your Law and Order, Blue Lives Matter candidate, who abandons law enforcement while he shouts about shutting down the FBI.
Trump has turned on everyone – his family, his closest allies, and his doe-eyed followers, every single time, turning them all into the “enemy within.” If you support Trump, it is only a matter of time before you are counted among the duped, angry, and abandoned. Ask the hundreds of normal citizens turned crazed insurrectionists who are sitting in jail cells right now because of him. Ask the Republican mayors, governors, and attorneys-general who would not commit his crimes in 2020 who he has attacked incessantly and sent flawed candidates to primary them since.
Remember this: No one, I mean, no one agrees 100% with anyone. There will be MAGA people who will argue that Trump should stick to the issues (something he has mocked his own campaign advisors in public for counseling) instead of his off-kilter lunacy, or begged him to stop his angry, middle of the night tweets, or his screaming about American citizens eating pets or kids getting sex-change operations in schools or babies being murdered after birth, or the other completely outrageous insanity he conjures and bleats every hour of every day. If those who support him occasionally wince or try and spin this idiocy, he turns on them like a rabid animal.
Make no mistake, like the thousands of contractors, lawyers, hotel staff, business associates, and fake Trump University victims, the Republican candidate will turn on you at some point. You are the “enemy within,” or you will be very soon. And like his “big, beautiful wall that Mexico will pay for,” releasing his taxes and health records, and repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act with “something much better,” Trump will inevitably fuck you over. That, if anything, is his brand.
Let’s hope this country wakes up one last time to expunge this false god from our body politic before it’s too late and we become his most dangerous and lasting grift, and thus, his latest victims.
All of us are becoming Trump’s “enemy within.”
