What Exactly Did Trump Say About Adam Schiff and Using the Military On ‘The Enemy Within’?

Former President Donald Trump’s interview with Maria Bartiromo on her weekend show, Sunday Morning Futures, grabbed headlines throughout the week as Trump was blasted for using the phrase “enemy within” to describe some on the left, including Rep. Adam Schiff (R-CA). Trump also said that in order to “handle” the “enemy within” he might need to use the National Guard or the U.S. military – the two comments were made at separate moments during the interview.

Trump’s comments have since become a hot topic on the campaign trail as individuals like his former Pentagon chief, Mark Esper, warned they must be taken “seriously” as it is further evidence of Trump’s authoritarian bent and willingness to weaponize government against his critics.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) denied Trump made the comments when asked about them by CNN’s Jake Tapper. Youngkin argued that Trump was not referring to U.S. citizens as the “enemy within,” adding, “I don’t think that he’s referring to elected people in America.”

Fox anchor Bret Baier apologized on Thursday night, saying that when he asked Vice President Kamala Harris to react to the clip during their sitdown interview, he showed the wrong moment to her. Baier’s team showed Trump responding to the backlash during a Fox News town hall on Wednesday as opposed to the actual comment Trump made to Bartiromo, which led to a fiery correction from Harris who has been citing the comment during her rallies.

“I did want to say that I did make a mistake. When I called for a soundbite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview to be tied to the piece from your town hall, Harris, where you asked the former president about ‘the enemy from within.’ It just had the piece about the town hall. Just take a listen to what I meant to roll,” Baier to his panel, which included Fox anchor Harris Faulkner who moderated the Trump town hall.

Here is a full transcript and the clip of that part of Trump’s Bartiromo interview:

Bartiromo: What are you expecting? Joe Biden said he doesn’t think it’s going to be a peaceful Election Day.

Trump: Well, he doesn’t have any idea what’s happening — in all fairness. He spends most of his day sleeping. I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in — and destroying our country and, by the way, totally destroying our country. The towns and villages, they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they have the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think. 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.

Bartiromo: You told me back in February that you were going to rent out Madison Square Garden for a rally. Yeah. And now you’re going to do it at the end of October.

Trump: Not only Madison Square Garden, we’re taking 4 or 5 arenas. We fill them up very fast. As you know, we took where the Islanders play in Long Island.

Some defenders of Trump, like Youngkin, only appeared to address this part of Trump’s remarks to Bartiromo. Although Trump explicitly says the “enemy within” doesn’t refer to “the people that have come in,” many have argued that he was referring solely to migrants or “outside agitators.” Notably, under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the president does not generally have the power to use the military against U.S. citizens domestically – to put down riots. Trump would need to invoke emergency powers, like the Insurrection Act, in order to do so.

Later in the interview, Bartiromo asked Trump what “will you do to guard against the bureaucrats, undermining you? In a second term.”

Trump replied, “Well, I always say so. We have two enemies. 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. Because if you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily. I handled– I got along great with all of them. I handled them. But the thing that’s tougher to handle of these lunatics that we have inside.” He added:

Like Adam Schiff , Adam “Shifty” Schiff, I think of this guy’s going to be a senator. He’s running against a guy that doesn’t understand politics at all. Garvey. But, he was a good baseball player, but he doesn’t understand politics at all. Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff who is a total sleazebag is going to become a senator. But I call him the enemy from within. When you look at the danger he put our country and potentially with Russia with a phony made-up deal that he made up with Hillary and some bad people, you know, that was that started off as an excuse for why she lost an election that a lot of people thought she should have won because the polls indicated she might win. And then she got beaten everywhere virtually.

When you look at that and then they said, ahhh, it was Russia, they use it as an excuse and then the fake news picked it up. And while you’re on this, let’s talk about the single greatest scandal, in my opinion, in broadcast history, 60 Minutes and CBS interviewed Kamala. And she’s incompetent.

Bartiromo addressed the controversy surrounding her Trump interview on her Fox Business show on Thursday. “Trump did not say that he wanted the National Guard against politicians inside. He was referring to the outside agitators from my question,” said Bartiromo, adding:

But he does weave around a lot and he’ll say that to you. He’ll say, ‘Look, I have to weave, I go here, I go there, and then I always come back. Answer your question.’ So maybe it was confusing, but I was not unclear in terms of what he was answering with that answer, I specifically understood what he was talking about. It was outside agitators.

“How did you see it?” she then asked her panelist Michael Balboni, a former New York state rep. “So if anybody in this nation needs to think through what the outside agitator quote is, all they have to do is look to what happened on the campuses across this country last spring, this anti-Israel debates and protests, violent actions that happened on the universities was as a result of agitators from Hamas that are in this country. We know they’re here and they’re stirring up everything,” he replied to agreement from Bartiromo.

Trump has also used the “enemy within” rhetoric in the past and doubled down on it again, also naming Schiff, during OutKick’s Maintaining with Tyrus podcast on Friday, hosted by Fox News contributor Tyrus .

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