The Enemy Within

Kicking off a yearlong celebration of America’s 250^th anniversary, President Donald Trump spoke at a rally on July 3, 2025. Congress had just passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump was especially excited. A “new golden age of America,” he believed, had begun.

He walked on stage to the cheers of a raucous crowd and saw a sea of red, white, and blue. It looked more like a MAGA political rally than the kickoff of a taxpayer-funded effort to commemorate the country’s independence. Trump rambled for over an hour. The lies piled up like the bodies in an Alexander Gardner photograph.

Trump told the crowd that the Democrats did not vote for his bill, because they hate him. “But I hate them too”, he said to the faithful. “You know that. I hate them, I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

With those words, the President of the United States had drawn a line in the sand. His people were the true patriots. The others were enemies, and that included some white people.

As the country grapples with the murder of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minnesota, with the lingering image of the officer shooting Renee Good at point blank range, and with the photograph of five year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, with his blue rabbit hat and spider-man backpack, stolen from his family and used as bait by ICE, I mention Trump’s speech, because it reveals something at the heart of what we are seeing and what people – white people – are experiencing in Minnesota.

The people who are protesting ICE in the Twin Cities are seen by MAGA as traitors who pose an imminent threat to the nation. And this is critical to understand, because, for MAGA, ICE fights on the frontlines of an existential battle for the soul of the nation.

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Of course, there is the panic and terror around the demographic shifts: the browning of America threatens the idea of the country as a white Republic. But those demographic shifts are aided and abetted by “white liberal elites” who are willing to give the country away as they look down on ordinary white people and signal their virtue. These are the folks advocating for transgender rights, who insist on announcing their pronouns, and who want to take away our guns and red meat. These are the enemies who have conspired with the great replacement and who threaten, along with the darker peoples of the world, to destroy Western civilization.

I am not being hyperbolic.

Trump’s rhetoric of “the enemy within” has played a critical part in rallying his base. In October 2024, he called Democrats and others who opposed him “the enemy from within.” On Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” he said, “I always say, 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.” These are “the lunatics” on the inside that are tougher to handle.

In this interview Adam Schiff and the Democrats that sought to hold him accountable stood in as examples of the internal enemies that concerned him. Today, those enemies are the likes of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and those who join them in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul to protect their neighbors from the cruelty of ICE. They are agitators and domestic terrorists hell-bent on destroying America.

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Two days after Trump expressed his hatred for Democrats in Iowa, Vice President J.D. Vance echoed the sentiment. During a speech at the Claremont Institute, a MAGA think tank, Vance declared, “they hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president….”

That hatred justifies their own.

Even in a moment of grace, the battle lines remain clear. In her eulogy for her husband, Erika Kirk urged the audience not to succumb to hate. But even as she said “the answer to hate is not hate,” she was clear: “Always love. Love for our enemies. Love for those who persecute us.” They are enemies, still.

Such talk makes it easier to stomach the horrors of ICE. It sets the stage for the adoring crowd to become, in the blink of an eye, the blood-thirsty mob. Or, minimally, it allows for those who see the cruelty and death to justify it all.

I cannot help but think of moments in the history of the country when courageous white people dared to come to the aid of a fugitive slave or stood alongside Black farmers in the deep South or marched for freedom. How they found themselves in the crosshairs. Brutalized by the Klan or ostracized by white citizens councils or left dead behind the steering wheel of a car or beaten until the last breath escaped their lungs.

These were white victims of those who thought of themselves as defending the very life of the country. They terrorized and killed Black people indiscriminately. And these same people turned a venomous rage upon those who they deemed as traitors.

They donned their Klan robes or hid behind the respectability of organizations. But, today, those who have deemed their fellows traitors carry the power of the state. The most powerful politician on earth has declared them enemies. And we have witnessed what that declaration has unleashed.

You are now fighting, not just for your neighbors and your community (this isn’t a charitable gesture), but for the country. Understand that for MAGA, the moment you engage the battle, you have been exiled, and with that decision comes danger.

You are in an existential battle for the soul of the nation.

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