Senator JD Vance forcefully defended Donald Trump’s promises to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens in a Sunday interview with CNN, arguing that the media has misconstrued Trump’s repeated threats and warnings about the so-called “enemy within.”
Trump regularly rails against this ill-defined group of “enemies” at rallies and during press interviews, though it isn’t always clear who he’s talking about. At various points—including an October 13 interview with Fox News, when Trump infamously suggested the military could “handle” these domestic enemies—Trump has broadly defined them as “radical-left lunatics” or “very bad people.” At other points, Trump has specified that “the enemy within” includes Democratic lawmakers such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Representative Adam Schiff.
During an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan released last Friday, Trump said “an enemy from within” American politics poses a bigger danger to the country than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But that doesn’t mean Trump would deploy the military against American politicians, Vance insisted in a heated exchange with CNN host Jake Tapper.
Trump’s threat of military force was directed exclusively at hypothetical “far-left lunatics who were rioting,” Vance said. It did not apply to Democratic lawmakers, even though—as Tapper pointed out—Trump has also labeled them the “enemy within.”
“So every time he uses the exact same phrase we assume that he uses the military?” Vance demanded. “I don’t know,” shot back Tapper. “I don’t throw around the term ‘the enemy within.’” Vance went on to say he supported the use of the National Guard against American citizens who riot.
Sunday’s interviews marked Vance’s latest attempt to reframe his running mate’s more incendiary remarks for a middle-of-the-road audience, an unenviable task that has fallen to him more and more often in recent weeks. The campaign has proffered Vance to explain, for instance, Trump’s repeated disparagement of Detroit and his offensive comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.
In other Sunday interviews, Vance also sought to soften Trump’s scathing remarks about NATO and walk back the suggestion that Trump might abolish the federal income tax. And Vance defended Trump against a growing chorus of criticism from his former advisors, including White House chief of staff John Kelly, who last week called Trump an “authoritarian” and said he had fascist tendencies. On both CNN and NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance described Kelly as a disgruntled former employee who—together with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Mike Pence—opposed Trump because he declined to involve the U.S. in unspecified foreign conflicts.
Kelly, whose son was killed by a landmine in Afghanistan in 2010, has never given any public indication that he’s particularly hawkish. Meanwhile, Cheney—who also appeared on CNN Sunday—called Vance’s comments “really stunning attacks.” “I think what we just watched,” she said, “is what it looks like when someone has got to go through just unbelievable contortions to try to find a way to defend the person that JD Vance himself called America’s Hitler.”
