Trump expands his list of “enemies from within” at Madison Square Garden rally

Donald Trump may already be working on his enemies list.

The former president spent much of his speech at Madison Square Garden on Sunday railing against a now familiar bugbear: supposed “enemies from within” the United States. Trump brought up a long list of people who made his naughty list for the usual reasons the Republican nominee hits on a subject: the thought just popped into his head and he knows it makes his opponents upset. 

At James Dolan’s palace to sub-.500 seasons, Trump expanded his already frighteningly loose definition of enemies to include journalists, political dissenters and an “amorphous” group of people that control the government through “vessels.” 

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them. It is a massive, vicious, crooked radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party,” he said, before diving briefly into a shadow government conspiracy. “They’re just vessels [for]… this amorphous group of people.”

Trump again targeted the press, calling them “the real enemy of the people” while pointing them out in the crowd.

Trump’s divisive and suspicious rhetoric has increasingly worried his opponents in recent weeks, and there’s some reason to believe their right to sweat his growing list of targets. While Republicans have run cover for him in the days since trying to distance the candidate from his words, Trump did suggest calling in the military on political dissenters in the days after his election. 

Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris warned against the petty and paranoiac second term Trump seemed to be promising, saying he would spend his time in office “stewing, plotting revenge, retribution [and] writing out his enemies list.”