Trump doubles down on ‘enemy from within’ comments at Fox town hall

Donald Trump attacked Democrats as “dangerous” and “evil” during a Fox News town hall aired on Wednesday, doubling down on his controversial comments about “the enemy from within” made over the weekend.

Before an all-female audience in Cumming, Georgia, that was pre-taped on Tuesday, Trump mocked Kamala Harris and her allies as “sick”, “evil” and “a party of soundbites”.

“They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists,” Trump told the Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner. “They’re the threat to democracy.”

In an interview with Charlamagne Tha God on Tuesday, Harris had agreed with the radio host’s characterization of Trump as a fascist. Her comments came after Trump attracted criticism for describing Democrats like the congressman Adam Schiff as “the enemy from within” in a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday.

“I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said in the interview. “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.”

Harris played Trump’s original comments at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday, pointing to them as an example of his unfitness to lead the nation.

“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America,” Harris said at the rally. “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power.”

Asked about the those comments on Tuesday, Trump lashed out against Democrats over their “phoney investigations” and “weaponization of government”, prompting applause from the friendly town hall audience.

The crowd was quite welcoming to Trump, loudly applauding in response to many of his answers. When asked to raise their hands if they considered the current state of the economy to be good, no hands went up, even though US inflation has now fallen to its lowest rate in more than three years.

Perhaps the most tense moment of the town hall came when Trump was asked about access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) following the reversal of Roe v Wade. Trump said he and fellow Republicans were “totally in favor” of reliable access to fertility treatments, praising himself as “the father of IVF”. And yet, last month, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have ensured access to IVF nationwide.

During the town hall, Trump often went off on tangents about energy policy, his victory in the 2016 presidential race and Elon Musk. Responding to a question on immigration, Trump attacked Harris as “the worst vice-president” in history who was “destroying our country”. He repeated some of the xenophobic arguments he made at a rally on Friday in Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed that Venezuelan migrants had “infected” the city.

According to the Guardian’s presidential polls tracker, Trump is currently one point ahead of Harris in Georgia, a state that Joe Biden won by 0.2 points (or fewer than 12,000 votes) in 2020. The first day of early voting set a new record this week, with more than 328,000 people casting a vote in person or by mail.