A populist tribune, Donald Trump regularly praises a renowned far-right program: three weeks before the presidential election, he denounced an “enemy from within”, authoritarian rhetoric inspired, according to experts, by the history of “fascism” and anti-communism in Europe and the United States.
• Also read: Kamala Harris tries to better mobilize black voters
• Also read: Man arrested with weapons outside Trump rally in California
• Also read: Harris with black voters and Trump in a border state three weeks before the vote
The former Republican president who plans to return to the White House has often expressed his “admiration” for “strong men” such as 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”.
Photo AFP
He went further this weekend.
Asked on Fox News on Sunday about possible “agitators” during the election, he retorted that “the National Guard,” or even “military personnel if necessary,” should be dispatched against an “enemy from within.” whom he did not name.
“Far-left psychos”
While resorting to the military against possible civil unrest would go against the grain of U.S. political history, Mr. Trump has promised to crack down on “very bad people… crazy people, far-left psychos.
The day before, 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 a post as senator, led the congressional investigation during the first procedure ofimpeachment against Donald Trump.
For this 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 that he rules with an iron fist” .
Enough to inspire him if he returned to power.
Photo AFP / GETTY IMAGES
In Pennsylvania, at the end of September, he declared 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 on Monday, 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 Los Angeles in 1992.
“We will come back”
In April 2023, protesting against a possible “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 “.
The Democratic camp of President Joe Biden and his vice-president who replaced him as candidate, Kamala Harris, has long denounced the Republican’s authoritarian rhetoric.
Citing his past statements, Mr.me Harris reiterated on Sunday that the person who said he would “end the Constitution” and “be a dictator on day one” should not become “president of the United States” again.
In his book War, published Tuesday, journalist Bob Woodward quotes former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who served the last year of President Trump, as “a fascist to the core.” » and “the most dangerous person for this country”, according to the New York Times.
In fact, the expression “enemy from within” has strong reminiscences of fascism, Nazism and Francoism, European ideologies which repressed and murdered 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 had been 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 crime out of control” , according to his team.
