Former President Donald Trump called Democrats who opposed and investigated him “enemies from within” in an interview aired Sunday, calling them more dangerous than America’s major foreign enemies such as Russia and China. said.
President Trump specifically pointed to Adam Schiff, a California congressman and Senate Democratic candidate who was the lead prosecutor in the then-president’s first Senate impeachment trial, saying, “We, like Adam Schiff, He named the people he called “lunatics.”
President Trump tries to undermine him in a potential second term with host Maria Bartiromo in a prerecorded interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” Questions were asked about how to deal with bureaucrats who may
“As I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said. “We have an enemy without, and then we have an enemy from within. The enemy from China is more dangerous than China, Russia, Russia,” he added. all these countries. ”
Trump added that a “smart president” could deal with external enemies “pretty easily,” but “the harder ones to deal with are the lunatics inside of us like Adam Schiff.”
“I call him the enemy from within,” he added.
As the 2024 presidential election enters its final weeks, Republican candidates are increasingly criminalizing those who oppose them, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and saying that speech critical of them or their policies is illegal. are beginning to be labeled as such. good.
President Trump’s comments Sunday echoed remarks he made Saturday night at a rally in Coachella, Calif., in which he called Schiff “crazy Schiff” and “the enemy from within.”
“He came up with the Russia hoax. … He’s a sick man,” President Trump said.
In response to a request for comment from NBC News on Sunday, Schiff’s campaign pointed to a series of tweets that Democratic lawmakers posted Saturday night in response to President Trump’s rally remarks.
“Yet another pointless tirade against me, filled with disgusting insults and lies about voting places, this time in my home state of California. Seriously, Donald. Why are you so obsessed with me? Will you?” Schiff wrote.
The former president has a long-standing rivalry with Schiff, dating back to the congressman serving as one of the impeachment managers during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. Trump often calls the congressman a “weirdo” in posts on Truth Social, claiming: He improperly investigated President Trump’s ties to Russia during the impeachment inquiry.
House Republicans also joined in Trump’s anger at Schiff, who is leading in the California Senate race with Republican former baseball player Steve Garvey.
In 2023, House Republicans accused Schiff on the House floor of lying about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. Mueller’s report found no clear coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the election.
“When you look at the false and fabricated deals he made with Hillary and some of the bad guys, potentially putting our country at risk with Russia…that’s why she lost the election. “It started as an excuse,” Trump added on Sunday, “and a lot of people thought she should have won.”
Asked about the upcoming election, Trump sought to play down concerns that a 2020-like turmoil could happen again, as President Joe Biden expressed earlier this month.
“No, I don’t think so. Not from the side of voting for Trump,” the former president said, adding that any problems surrounding the election were not the fault of outside agitators or foreign countries.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within…We have some very bad people, some sick people, some crazy people on the radical left,” he said.
President Trump said any unrest “should be very easily dealt with by the National Guard if necessary, or by the military if it’s really necessary, because they can’t allow that to happen.”
The National Guard’s response to the January 6th attack on the Capitol was famously delayed for several hours, in part because President Trump did not request the National Guard to be deployed on the day of the riot.
