When Donald Trump recently started leaning into the idea that millions of Americans — citizens of his own country — should be seen as “the enemy within,” some of the former president’s more sycophantic surrogates tried to suggest the Republican didn’t actually say what he said. Soon after, Trump doubled down, making his perspective clear.
Not only does Trump consider many Americans his “enemy,” he even suggested that the U.S. military could be used against them on domestic soil. Over the weekend, the GOP candidate continued to characterize his political opponents as the “enemy within,” arguing that he sees many Democrats as more dangerous than the United States’ foreign adversaries.
ABC News’ Martha Raddatz asked Gov. Chris Sununu about the comments, and at least initially, the New Hampshire Republican conceded the former president’s rhetoric “should give everyone pause.”
And if the governor had simply stopped there, his response wouldn’t have been especially notable. But in the same “This Week” interview, Sununu went on to say:
Nobody likes that type of stuff and that type of hyperbole. But, let’s look, he was president for four years. Did he go after his political enemies? Did he weaponize the Department of Justice and go after Hillary Clinton? … Of course, he didn’t do that, right?
I’ve heard a few defenses for Trump’s “enemy within” rhetoric, but the governor’s defense is easily the worst because it proved the opposite of his intended point.
To hear Sununu tell it, the former president’s rhetoric about his domestic “enemies” can be shrugged off as “hyperbole” because he didn’t try to weaponize the Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton.
The problem, whether the New Hampshire governor realizes this or not, is that Trump really did try to weaponize the Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton.
We know this, of course, because Trump made no effort to keep this secret. As regular readers know, Trump publicly and privately begged prosecutors to charge Clinton throughout his White House tenure.
Ahead of Election Day 2020 — nearly four years after Clinton’s defeat — the then-Republican president again publicly called for the Democrat’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Barr to prosecute the former secretary of state for reasons unknown. Sununu effectively told a national broadcast audience, “We can trust the arsonist not to follow through on his threats to start a lot of fires. After all, the last time we handed him matches and lighter fluid, he didn’t set anything ablaze, right?” Except it’s not right. The arsonist set a lot of fires. We all saw it happen. I kept the receipts. Sununu asked, “Did he go after his political enemies?” What I don’t understand is why the governor is unaware of the answer to his own question — because Trump absolutely went after his political enemies, over and over again, and he’s vowing to go further in a second term. The New Hampshire Republican was trying to make Trump look better, but he ended up making Trump look worse for anyone who accurately remembers what really happened.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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