Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, denied that a second Trump administration would use the U.S. military against political enemies after former President Donald Trump said this week the military should be used against “the enemy from within” and his campaign compared political foes to terrorists.

“Of course not, of course not,” Vance said when asked by a local TV reporter about Trump’s comments at a campaign event in Pittsburgh on Thursday, calling the question “preposterous.” Supporters in the crowd booed the reporter. 

Vance went on to bemoan the attention paid to the far-right violence of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters in comparison to the 2020 racial justice protests pushing for reform after the police killings of several Black Americans, including George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“What President Trump has said quite directly is that, look, if that ever happens again, if you ever have people who think that they cannot just exercise their First Amendment right, but loot and riot and burn down American cities, we’re going to go after them and go after them hard,” Vance continued. “We do not tolerate that crap in the United States of America.”

In response to a question about potential chaos on Election Day, Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that “the enemy from within” is “more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries” and that the military should be used on “radical left lunatics” if there are any issues on Election Day. He later named Rep. Adam Schiff, who helped lead Democrats’ first impeachment effort of Trump and California’s likely next senator, as among those “lunatics.”

After the interview, which the Harris campaign called “dangerous” and said “should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said “those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat” on the level of an Afghan man arrested this week for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks on Election Day.

“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a Fox News interview on Wednesday night. 

Vance’s defense of his party’s leader comes a day after he definitively said Trump did not lose in 2020, a false claim the Ohio senator has largely avoided making directly.

Lies, false claims and misinformation about Trump’s 2020 election loss spread by the then-president and his allies inspired the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, federal prosecutors have said repeatedly in court filings as they brought charges against more than 1,500 participants in the attack and Trump himself.

More than 570 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, a felony. Leaders of a pro-Trump militia and street gang were found guilty of sedition for their roles in the attack and some received decades in prison. Trump has often said on the campaign trail he would pardon participants in the attack, including those convicted of crimes, calling them “political prisoners” and “hostages.”

During a Univision town hall on Wednesday, Trump described the Capitol attack as “a day of love.”

Special counsel Jack Smith argued in a court filing on Wednesday that Trump was responsible for the attack on the Capitol as he fought an attempt by the former president’s attorneys to get the federal election interference case against him dismissed. 

“The defendant willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C., and then directing them to march to the Capitol to pressure the Vice President and legislators to reject the legitimate certificates and instead rely on the fraudulent electoral certificates,” federal prosecutors wrote in the filing. “Those allegations link the defendant’s actions on January 6 directly to his efforts to corruptly obstruct the certification proceeding.”

Trump’s expression of a desire to use the military against his political enemies also comes days after famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward revealed in a new book that the United States’ former top military officer, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, described the president he served under as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

Milley, a retired four-star Army general, told Woodward that he installed bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home due to death threats he received for his criticism of Trump.

The general was at the helm of the military at a moment in Trump’s administration when the then-president came close to deploying troops against U.S. citizens: during the 2020 protests Vance mentioned on Thursday. In June 2020, Trump publicly threatened to use the military to quell the protests in cities across the country, but his advisers talked him out of it, his former Attorney General Bill Barr later wrote in a book. Trump eventually deployed thousands of National Guardsmen into the streets of Washington and hundreds of federal law enforcement officers from more than a dozen agencies in communities across the country, a 2021 review by the independent, nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office found. 

Since leaving office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to wield federal forces, including the military, against U.S. citizens and to round up and deport millions of immigrants. 

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance’s Democratic rival for the vice presidency, brought up Milley’s comments 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.

Former President Bill 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.’”