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Opinion|Their Target Is ‘the Very Core of Modern American Liberalism’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/opinion/trump-vought-musk-second-term.html
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Guest Essay
Feb. 11, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
“We have two enemies,” Donald Trump declared last October. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
Trump’s carefully calculated claim serves to justify his administration’s assault on government, American values and core traditions since he took office on Jan. 20.
Trump’s success in demonizing liberals and Democrats — casting the left as a grave threat to a substantial segment of the electorate — has proved crucial to his decision to turn regulatory and prosecutorial powers into instruments of revenge.
The threat posed by “the enemy from within” has proved to be the key mobilizing concept underpinning the MAGA movement and the intellectual structure that hard-right conservatives have pieced together to provide the means of attack.
The enemy, in this paradigm, is Democrats, liberals and everyone left of center, expanding beyond ideology to encompass huge swaths of the federal government and of the immigrant population, legal and illegal.
The theme of the enemy resonated on the right in the wake of Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Glenn Ellmers, a research fellow at the Claremont Institute, claimed in his March 2021 essay “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough”:
Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term. I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country are aliens and will probably never assimilate to our language and culture — politically as well as legally. The many native-born people — some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower — may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.
Who are the remaining Americans?
