Donald Trump has always had the most astonishing gift for hyperbole and bluster, which gets him in perennial trouble with the humorless and diabolically partisan mainstream media. The latest pronouncement that has them in hysterics is the use of the phrase “the enemy from within.”

Trump’s October 13 interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo had one particular exchange that Democrats are raging about:

Bartiromo: “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 because he spends most of his days sleeping. I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within — not even the people that have come in and [are] destroying our country. By the way, totally destroying our country. The towns, the villages — they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they’re 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 it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military because they can’t let that happen.”

Trump went on to use the phrase “the enemy within” several more times in other Fox News interviews last week.

The propagandists at The Washington Post, ABC News, and CNN are already churning out how this is indicative of a dictator. They accuse Trump of wanting to use the military to go after his political opponents and specifically targeting former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff with this “inflammatory rhetoric.” The New York Times names General Mark A. Milley as another potential Trump target.

All these bogeyman accusations are the fever dreams of demented partisan hacks.

Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately seized upon this narrative to rehash the old chestnut that Trump is a deranged, power-hungry dictator who should be kept away from the White House at all costs. They ranted, “Even in his Fox News safe space, Donald Trump cannot help but show himself as the unhinged, angry, unstable man that he is — focused on his own petty grievances and tired playbook of division.”

This projection is rich coming from the campaign that divides its own constituents into identity boxes (see “White Dudes for Harris”) and deploys former President Barack Obama to call black men unmanly for not wanting to vote for Harris. Democrats don’t know what a man or a woman even is.

It’s also rich coming from a party whose current standard-bearer stood before a red backlit background flanked by two Marines and who had the gall to call half the country an “extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights” because “they just don’t respect the rule of law.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board also points out that Harris — like the rest of her propagandists — is making mountains out of a molehill. “Ms. Harris is making much of Mr. Trump’s comments,” the editors write, adding, “It was a typically grandiose and self-defeating statement, but when we asked about it Thursday in an interview, Mr. Trump made clear after some rambling that he was talking about destructive riots. He said he’d ‘certainly not [use force] against my opponents — it’s against civil unrest.’”

This clarification is obvious to anyone with half a brain, but that might be too much to expect from Democrats.

It’s also worth noting that the majority of the political violence in recent years has come from nutjobs on the left side of the political spectrum. From the George Floyd “Summer of Rage” to the two assassination attempts against Trump to the pro-Hamas ignoramuses on college campuses, it’s the radical leftists who are happy to cause as much violence as they can get away with perpetrating.