Rallying in Durham, N.C., on Thursday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and former President Bill Clinton slammed former President Donald Trump for saying this week that the military should be used on the “enemy within.”
“We got to do what Americans do on this," said Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president. "That rhetoric has no place. That is the language of dictators. That is the language of totalitarianism.”
“We need to go to the polls, clean his clock and win this thing," Walz added.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump, describing the internal enemy, cited “radical left lunatics” and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led Trump’s first impeachment trial. He said the enemy from within is worse than migrants who are “destroying our country” or foreign adversaries such as China and Russia.
“We have some very bad people,” Trump said. “We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big – and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen.”
Harris and has roundly condemned Trump's rhetoric this week, even going as far as to play his comments on video at her rally in Pennsylvania earlier this week.
Walz mentioned comments by retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, who described the president he served under as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” and warned that Trump has grown more authoritarian since he first ran for president in 2016.
“This is not that Trump, even. This is something much more deranged, something much more desperate — maybe to stay out of prison. And with JD Vance there, there are no guardrails around him,” Walz said.
Clinton was campaigning with Walz on Thursday and joked he might be among the people Trump considers the “enemy within,” saying he’d prefer to be in the warmer climate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba over the federal supermax prison in Colorado.
“He’s asserted the right to go after anybody that he thinks, in his wisdom, is a threat,” Clinton said. “The [oath of office for U.S. presidents] says you promise to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And he said, ‘I think I’ll start with domestic. Bring me the army.’”
Clinton has hit the campaign trail in full force in recent days, stumping for Harris in Georgia, a state he won in 1992 that didn't go for a Democrat again until Joe Biden in 2020. Like Walz, Clinton has been campaigning in rural areas with more intimate events, speaking at a church service in Albany, attending a fish fry in Fort Valley and rallying supporters in Columbus – and surprising employees at a McDonald's, a fast food establishment he has a well-known proclivity for.
Harris and Trump have both focused on North Carolina, a state that hasn't gone for Democrats since Barack Obama in 2008, but gave the Republican his narrowest margin of victory of any state in 2020. Trump narrowly clinched the Tar Heel state over Biden by about 75,000 votes.
The Harris campaign has devoted significant resources to flipping the state, and both candidates have visited the state repeatedly in recent weeks.