Donald Trump looked to go big in the final full week until Election Day with a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which gave him a large venue (capacity: 19,500) to attract not just a big crowd, but national attention when seven battleground states are in play. During his speech, he drove home his closing arguments in the race to the finish line with his oft-repeated unfounded claims, including that the U.S. is an “occupied country” due to alleged migrants taking over, and he railed on transgender people playing sports.
He also invoked his baseless “enemy from within” claims against the Democrats as well as the press.
Trump made the claim after rambling on about President Joe Biden not being smart and saying his Democratic opponent in the election Vice President Kamala Harris “means nothing,” adding that “She’s purely a vessel. That’s all she is.” He inexplicably said, “she’s becoming more MAGA than those politicians I told you about,” though it’s unclear to whom he was referring.
“We need very smart people. We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party. They’re just vessels,” he said. “In fact, they’re perfect vessels, because they’ll never give them a hard time. They’ll do whatever they want.”
“I know many of them. It’s just this amorphous group of people, but they’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he continued. “And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a salvo — ‘Oh, how can he say’… No, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we’re fighting. These are the people who are doing such harm to our country with their open border policies, record-setting inflation, green new scam, and everything else that they’re doing. But we’re not going to let it happen any longer.”
In a conversation with CNN‘s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning before the rally, Trump’s VP running mate J.D. Vance denied that Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric was referring to the Democratic Party. “He did not say that, Jake,” Vance responded when Tapper asked about Trump’s words. “He said that he was going to send the military after the American people? Show me the quote where he said that.” (During a Fox News town hall earlier this month, Trump specifically pledged to use either the National Guard or the military against “the enemy within,” whom he described as “radical left lunatics.”)
The Democratic Party is not the only “enemy” for Trump. As he’s said many times previously, he also places the press in that camp — a profession whose freedom is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment, in case Trump needs reminding. While in the midst of calling Harris a liar, saying she lied about working at McDonald’s, without any evidence, and claiming she’s said he doesn’t want fracking, without evidence, he went after the press.
“One thing I have been — even the enemy, because they are the enemy — what they’ve said, even that enemy too, and they’re really the enemy. They’re the enemy of the people, the press, they said one thing about me that I consider a great compliment,” he said. “They said this guy is the most consistent person we’ve ever seen, because I’ve been against cars and car factories being taken out of Detroit and being taken out of our manufacturing, of automobiles being taken out of our system, out of our country for years.”
These are far from the first times he’s appeared eager to shut down democracy in pursuit of his openly authoritarian vows and his extreme policy agenda. Among the many examples, on Thursday in Las Vegas, he used similiar “enemy of the people” talk, saying of the media: “they sort of have a death wish.” Following an assassination attempt on him in July, his allies tried to bully Democrats and the media to stop discussing his fascist rhetoric. He’s also recently proposed a fascist plan to deploy military forces against U.S. citizens who oppose him on Election Day, just to name a few. Earlier this week, even his former Chief of Staff John Kelly said the former president fit “into the general definition of fascist.”
Trump’s MSG appearance on Sunday made sense for a man who appears to have dictator ambitions and seems to view himself as some sort of rock star, seeking to be adored by fans, drawing large crowds, and appearing to feed off enthusiasm from attendees, performing better when he gets that. Unfortunately for him, when it comes to the music realm, several rock stars have not felt a mutual kinship with him, sending cease-and-desist letters for him using their music without their approval. Still, he drew the likes of Dr. Phil, Hulk Hogan, and other celebrities to tout him before he took the stage.
The appearance was in the former president and GOP presidential nominee’s hometown, a solidly blue area where he’s been indicted and found liable of sexual abuse and defamation. Trump has been venturing into blue territory for recent stops as the election has drawn closer, though not to great results. At his rally in Coachella Valley in California, Trump threatened to withhold wildfire aid if Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t bend to his whims about the state’s water issues, should he win.
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