‘I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics,’ Republican candidate tells Fox’s Maria Bartiromo

“And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” he said.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people who have come in, who are destroying our country.”

It isn’t clear under what circumstances Trump would view it justifiable to call in US troops against his own countrymen.

But his comments mark a baseless attack and a particularly hollow one coming from someone whose supporters violently attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to stop him from being thrown out of office three years ago.


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  • ChronosTriggerWarning@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    “I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics."

    Yeah Don, we know. They even wear a red hat to help identify themselves.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    So that’s how he plans to make the economy better, to force his opposition to leave the country and appropriate their wealth and property. Who did Nazi that coming?

  • Freefall@lemmy.world
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    Soldiers are not obligated to follow unlawful orders…the brass will say “no”.

  • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Oh hey, treason man is yet again announcing publicly that he’s a treasonous piece of shit and that he plans to continue committing treason? Wow, what shocking news. /s

  • nifty@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    This rhetoric is meant for voter intimidation because they know Republicans always lose when Democrats turn out to vote.

    The polls are meaningless because they could be manipulated or manufactured, we don’t know who’s being polled. People just need to cast their vote and not let this be a close election.

    • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
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      I will never express my opinions in places where I can be easily identified unless I am among people I know and trust. I will vote and keep my leftist ideology to myself amongst strangers irl. I rather like living without being bothered.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        There’s no such thing as living without being bothered in an autocratic regime, doesn’t matter who you are. You could be the most ardent supporter and you’d still be shit out of luck for any reason. Stalin used to have his own cabinet members routinely disposed of

        • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          I meant being bothered as in strangers harassing me for my beliefs lol. I live in a grossly red part of my state and I keep a low profile out of what I feel is necessity

          • Shark_Ra_Thanos@lemmy.ml
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            I do too but idgaf and start shit with anyone stupid enough to try with me. I made the religious sign holders leave Pride fest by simply talking absolute fucking nonsense with adamant of a mood. They left shortly thereafter. I was a volunteer for the event wearing the shirt and all.

  • cultsuperstar@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    He rambled on about immigrants at a rally and said election day will be our Liberation Day. Sounds like mass deportation and mass killing of liberals to me.

  • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    idiot has to know he cant do that. the ones that can had better not if they want to keep their stations

  • BigMacHole@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    This is EXACTLY what the Founders Intended! George Washington LITERALLY said that the US Military should be used on US Citizens and that Children should be Gunned Down in School!

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    And polls continue to call the race a tie.

    At some point we have to acknowledge that roughly 30% of our population are just evil, fascist monsters. Having lived in those states, this isn’t a surprise.

    • Raiderkev@lemmy.world
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      I’d say 20% are just absolute morons that watched ancient aliens and garbage like that back in the day then fell for every dumbass psyop conspiracy theory on the Internet. Now they are willfully ignorant of facts and truth.

          • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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            The system in question:

            https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0065

            There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

            The south has a massive advantage in the electoral college because they demanded to be able to launder slave votes.

            • tmyakal@lemm.ee
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              22 minutes ago

              The bigger problem is that the number of seats in the House has been frozen for about a hundred years. Our population exploded, but our number of representatives stayed static, so places with the most people actually get less representation in congress.

              On top of this, the number of electors a state has its equal to the number of representatives that state has in the Senate and the House combined. So more populated states also get underrepresented in the presidential election.

              The Three-Fifths Compromise was absolutely fucked, but it’s not what is deadlocking the House now and its not what is letting a people lose the popular vote and still go on to be president in 21st century elections.

              • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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                7 minutes ago

                If we took away the at large electoral seats, and the senate, that would get us halfway to fixing the representation problem.

                The house would be next, but that’s a more moderate problem compared to the other half.

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Been in their churches, you hear the chorus loud and clear when he talks about ‘taking the country back from the powers of satan and other elitists’. He doesn’t mean Olympic athletes.

  • mkwt@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    This is a reminder to American service members:

    Your oath of allegiance is to the United States, not to Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris. You have a duty to obey lawful orders issued under the authority of the commander in chief. But it is your duty to disobey unlawful orders.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      13 hours ago

      Heritage Foundation: Hold my beer, SCOTUS ASSEMBLE! You know what to do.

      SCOTUS: it’s legal now.

    • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      The oath is actually to the Constitution of the United States. So it’s not even the country or the government but the idea, the founding document.

      • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        Is it the current one, or the originalist one, or the supreme court interpretation one, or the cherry picked and misunderstood one, or?

          • Billiam@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            No, it’s a very serious question. What happens when Trump gives an illegal order, a soldier refuses to obey it, and is arrested? What do you think John Roberts’ SCOTUS will say? You think it’s too far-fetched for a 6-3 ruling saying “Well, the Constitution says that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces therefore there exists no mechanism nor rationale for any member of the armed services to disobey” to happen?

            • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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              Lol, civil war then? Imagine trying to arrest the ones with the guns. I’d imagine a big, although still a minority, chunk of troops would immediately defect and form an insurgency under such actions.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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              5 hours ago

              In a context where the checks and balances and norms around separation of powers and jurisdiction functioned as intended instead of being undermined and co-opted, the SC normally does not intrude into UCMJ matters. But I’m also quite sure that won’t stop the Tribunal of Six, so who fuckin’ knows.

              • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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                3 hours ago

                The Supreme Court already sent us back there.

                The problem is that the current admin that was just given the power, thinks they’ll set a bad example if they actually use it. A more charitable take could be that, maybe they think if they don’t talk about it the orange moron will forget he’ll have the power too (he won’t).

            • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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              Hell, what do people think will happen if, let’s say hypothetically:

              1. Trump organizes a civilian militia to attack the country
              2. Trump actively refuses to order the military to protect people from said militia
              3. Said militia isolate and attempt to murder basically everyone else in the government who can provide those orders

              But nah, that would NEVER happen. And people totally wouldn’t brag about the military waiting to see how things shake out was their god given duty.

              • Billiam@lemmy.world
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                14 hours ago
                1. Trump actively refuses to order the military to protect people from said militia

                Actually, it could be even worse than that. Trump could theoretically order the military to not interfere at all.

              • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                No, they’re saying that any law asking people to disobey the institutions propped up by that same law in case of them being unjust will always ring hollow, because the courts that decide if that point of legitimacy has been reached will be staffed by the very same people you’d be disobeying.

                No court will rule that rebellion against the state is justified. It’s either ‘not legitimate yet, because other options are available’, or it’s too late, because independent courts have been abolished.

    • njm1314@lemmy.world
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      The military has never had any hesitancy at all in murdering American citizens when told to. They will not stand up.

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    He’s crying.

    He’s falling apart and going more batshit as his last-ditch attempt to grab power before crashing permanently.

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    For the millionth time all leftists should be armed. Cannot stress enough how important that is.

    • spyd3r@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      lol, leftists here are doing everything they can to take away the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

      • D1G17AL@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        That type of comment may have gone over well back on reddit but, sir, we are not idiots here. UTTER BULLSHIT, LEFTISTS DO NOT WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. We want that right too. We just don’t want mentally ill people having access to assault weapons with which they can kill many, many people with significantly reduced effort. Someone going on a rampage with a pistol or a shotgun is far less deadly than someone with a long rifle of any type, especially automatic rifles. BULL-FUCKING-SHIT LEFTIST DO NOT WANT TO TAKE THAT RIGHT AWAY.

        • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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          You rant loudly but wrongly about “assault weapons”. The fact is that pistols are used to kill far more people in the USA (and elsewhere) than “assault weapons” and any other kind of rifle. 3% or less of all homicides involve any kind of rifle.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        Military weapons? Yeah. They should be.

        Pistols? Shotguns? Not really. And yes, you can point to more extreme cases of ‘liberals’ who do want to amend the constitution, which is about the same thing as calling anyone even slightly conservative on one issue a fascist.

        • yeather@lemmy.ca
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          4 hours ago

          OMG! The former president is threatening mass violence and possible oppression by using the US Military on the citizens! Oh btw you shouldn’t have a weapon that looks like the one the military uses or shoots faster than those made 100 years ago.

          The AR-15 is not a military weapon, purely civilian. In any case you should be able to own military firearms, the government is not to be trusted.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            An AK is a better fit, lol.

            But (just going with this for a second) I dont see a scenario where even having like an M240 is going to make much of a difference going up against the US military. What do you picture happening, a good honest firefight? At that point homemade bombs and such are your only resort where a pistol wouldn’t work.

            • yeather@lemmy.ca
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              Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam have left the chat. Why is this talking point always used to counter gun rights? It’s objectively not true ans has been proven time and time again. It’s guerilla / asymmetrical warfare, thr gov has to come to you.

              The AKs available to the US consumer are also not weapons of war, they are strictly semi automatic.

              An M240 would be a major upgrade in such a scenario. It would be more effective than a pistol, ideally you would have people with M240s and people making IEDs.

            • catloaf@lemm.ee
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              The US military failed to fight insurgents in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. What makes you think they’d be any better against an insurgency in the US, especially when it’d involve a good portion of people in their own ranks?

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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                You guys are living a fantasy if you think a large chunk of the US population will turn into the Taliban, Viet Cong, Mujahideen or whatever over which party is in the govt and whatever antics you think Trump or Harris get up to.

                We live in a rich, militarized surveillance state. A rifle is not how you fight that.

                • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                  For now. But if you can’t imagine any scenario where an M240 would be useful, you’re very shortsighted. If (and this is a big if) we devolve into civil war, then an armed insurgency is very much on the table. All the tech stuff relies on infrastructure, and stable infrastructure is one of the first things to go.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    It isn’t clear under what circumstances Trump would view it justifiable to call in US troops against his own countrymen.

    Isn’t it though? He would view it justifiable to call them in for literally any reason.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      The media, as usual, talks as if they’re trying to discern his secret, rational plan. Even when he spouts fascist threats of mass oppression and murder, they discuss him as if he’s just another politician with policy proposals. It’s unclear under what circumstances he’d call in troops against Americans because he’s psychologically chaotic, fragile and highly volatile. Anything could trigger him to do so. The only thing that’s consistent is he threatens retribution against immigrants, trans people, Black people, women, and anyone who doesn’t worship him enough.