Donald Trump blasted Democrats as “dangerous” and “evil” during a Fox News town hall on Wednesday, doubling down on controversial comments about “the enemy from within” he made over the weekend.
Before an all-female audience in Cumming, Georgia, that was pre-recorded on Tuesday, Trump derided Kamala Harris and her allies as “sick,” “evil” and “a feast of sound bites.”
‘They are very dangerous. They are Marxists and communists and fascists,” Trump told Fox News host Harris Faulkner. “They are the threat to democracy.”
In an interview with Charlamagne Tha God on Tuesday, Harris agreed with the radio host’s characterization of Trump as a fascist. Her comments came after Trump was criticized for describing Democrats such as Congressman Adam Schiff as “the enemy from within” in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday.
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“I always say: we have two enemies,” Trump said in the interview. “We have the enemy from without, 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 Monday at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, calling them an example of his unfitness to lead the nation.
“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America,” Harris said at the meeting. “Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is after unchecked power.”
When Trump was asked about those comments on Tuesday, he lashed out at Democrats for their “fake investigations” and “weaponization of the government,” drawing applause from the friendly crowd at Town Hall.
The crowd was quite welcoming to Trump, clapping loudly 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 the lowest level in more than three years.
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Perhaps the most tense moment at the town hall came when Trump was asked about access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Trump said he and his fellow Republicans were “fully in favor” of reliable access to fertility treatments, and praised 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 discussed energy policy, his victory in the 2016 presidential race and Elon Musk. In response to a question about 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 Friday at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed Venezuelan migrants had “contaminated” the city.
According to the Guardian’s presidential poll tracker, Trump currently has a one-point lead over Harris in Georgia, a state that Joe Biden won by 0.2 points (or less than 12,000 votes) in 2020. The first day of early voting set a new record this week, with more than 328,000 people voting in person or by mail.
