Trump sends military against US citizens on election day and calls “radical left-wing lunatics” and “the enemy from within.”

Donald Trump has shockingly suggested sending the military or National Guard after US citizens on Election Day.

The ex-president gave a sit-down interview with Maria Bartiromo, one of the Fox News hosts whose role in spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election put her bosses in the crosshairs of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. The amount was later settled at $787 million.

In the interview, which aired on Sunday, Bartiromo was back to his usual form, suggesting that America is headed for possible violence on Election Day because the Biden administration has allegedly admitted large numbers of immigrants illegally. This was a debunked conspiracy that the Trump team spread in both 2016 and 2020 – that millions of votes for his opponents came from non-citizens.

But Trump went a step further, denying Bartiromo’s claim that these groups would be the “real” problem on Election Day.

That honor, he said, belonged to the so-called “enemy within.”

“I don’t believe [immigrants] “The problem is with Election Day in mind,” Trump told Bartiromo. “I think the bigger problem is the people on the inside. We have some very bad people, sick people, radical left-wing lunatics.”

At this point he suggested a seemingly sinister solution.

“And it should be easily handled by the National Guard if necessary or by the military if really necessary,” he said.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy within. Not even the people who came in and are destroying our country.”

It is unclear under what circumstances Trump would consider it justified to use US troops against his own compatriots.

But his comments represent an unfounded and particularly hollow attack from someone whose supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol three years ago to prevent him from being thrown out of office.

However, it is perhaps not surprising.

The ex-president, humiliated by his defeat in 2020, has made it his mission to dehumanize his opponents’ voters whenever possible. At a rally in Dayton, Ohio, in the spring, he claimed that Democrats are “not human in some cases” while on stage with Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.

Many political analysts have speculated that Trump is already laying the groundwork for efforts to challenge the election results this year to fail again by sowing conspiracies about non-citizens voting and mail-in ballots he may send in November and December will be used to argue that the results are distorted.

However, there has been no evidence in any country in the US that postal voting is subject to significant fraud.

Meanwhile, non-citizen voting is already illegal (despite Republican efforts to pass legislation against it in Congress) and does not occur because existing state and local election systems have safeguards in place to prevent it. A 2016 analysis found that only 30 cases of attempted voting by non-citizens were reported in the entire United States during the 2016 election cycle.

“Donald Trump suggests that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he says he would use the military against them,” said Ian Sams, a Harris campaign spokesman. “Given his vow to be a dictator on day one, calling for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution, and planning to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power when he returns to office, this should worry every American, who cares about his freedom and safety. What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and his return to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”

Trump’s supporters violently laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, injuring dozens of police officers and forcing lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence, a prime target of their anger, to hide for hours in secure locations around the Capitol complex. Their goal was clear: to prevent a vote in the US Senate that would confirm three months of election results.

The attack failed and Joe Biden was sworn into office just weeks later. In the months and years since the insurrection, Republicans in Congress and across the country have sought to misinform and misinterpret the cause and intent of the attack and to downplay the extent of the violence that day.