Vice President Kamala Harris has been unsubtle of late in her outreach to independent and disaffected Republican voters. With this in mind, it wasn’t too surprising that the Democratic presidential nominee agreed to an interview on Fox News.

Harris must’ve known she was taking a risk. Between the network’s role in Republican politics and host Bret Baier’s highly controversial background, it was obvious before the interview began that the vice president was walking into unfriendly terrain.

Those who were concerned that Harris wouldn’t get a fair shake were quickly vindicated. Those who predicted that Baier would effectively end up debating the Democratic candidate were right, too. In one especially important exchange, the Fox anchor shifted the conversation to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about “the enemy within” — at which point Baier aired a selectively edited excerpt that left out the most important part.

I can appreciate why the former president’s supporters and those aligned with this 2024 candidacy would try to clean up this particular mess. After all, with roughly three weeks remaining in the election cycle, Trump condemned millions of Americans — citizens of his own country — as “the enemy within,” at one point even suggesting that the U.S. military could be used against them.

To be sure, some Trump surrogates have tried to diffuse the controversy — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, I’m looking in your direction — pretending that the former president didn’t say what he actually said.

But it was against this backdrop that Trump returned to Fox News for a town hall, and as NBC News reported, he doubled down on the comments that sparked the controversy in the first place.

Former President Donald Trump doubled down Tuesday on his remarks over the weekend referring to Democrats as the “enemy from within.” During a taped town hall of all-women voters in Cumming, Georgia, with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, the host asked Trump about his “enemy from within” comment, which he made during the network’s “Sunday Morning Futures” this past weekend.

In fact, when Fox’s Harris Faulkner gave Trump an opportunity to walk back the “enemy within” rhetoric, he did the opposite.

“It is the enemy from within and they’re very dangerous. They are Marxists and communists and fascists,” the Republican said, referring to his domestic political opponents. “And they say, I use a guy like Adam Schiff, because they made up the Russia Russia Russia hoax. It took two years to solve the problem. Absolutely nothing was done wrong, etc. etc.

“They are dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are the Pelosis, these people, they are so sick and they are so evil.”

That wasn’t the clip Baier aired during the Harris interview, but that’s what Trump said — out loud and on camera.

So to recap, (a) Trump sees many Americans as “evil” and “the enemy within”; (b) he’s still lying about his Russia scandal; and (c) the former president just stepped on the toes of every partisan ally who claimed “the enemy within” comments weren’t really directed at his fellow citizens of his own country.