Jan 28, 2026 11:35 AM CT
The Danger of Turning
Americans into Enemies
by
President Donald Trump delivers
remarks in Clive, Iowa, on January 27, 2026. Brendan
Smialowski—AFP/Getty Images
The drift toward authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a bang; it
begins long before the public recognizes the danger. It begins with language:
the slow, deliberate reclassification of fellow citizens as lesser, suspect, or
dangerous. Once a government convinces people that some among them are unworthy
of rights or empathy, the rest becomes frighteningly easy.
We are watching that process unfold in the United States.
Earlier this month, after federal agents shot and
killed Renee Good, senior Trump Administration officials
responded not with the sobriety such a tragedy demands
but with the most incendiary labels they could summon. Homeland Security
Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.”
Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on Noem’s falsehoods,
insisting that Good had been “brainwashed” and was part of a “broader left‑wing
network,” allegations offered without evidence. He described her death as “a
tragedy of her own making,” as though the state bore no responsibility for the
bullets its agents fired.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s warnings about the "enemy within” have become the
organizing frame for his broader political rhetoric. This year, he has vilified
peaceful demonstrators as “thugs” and “paid agitators and insurrectionists.” In doing so,
Trump has redefined dissent not as a civic act, but as an enemy force.
These comments are not isolated outbursts. They reflect a pattern history
warns us to take seriously.
A few weeks later, the
pattern became unmistakable. On Jan. 24, federal agents in Minneapolis shot and
killed Alex Pretti, a 37‑year‑old ICU nurse, during an
immigration enforcement operation. Video from multiple angles shows Pretti filming
officers and helping a woman who had been pushed to the ground. He was pepper‑sprayed,
tackled by several agents, and then shot while on the pavement. Independent
review of the footage indicates that in the moments before he was taken down,
he was holding a phone—not a weapon.
Yet before the facts were known, the administration’s response followed the same script. Noem
again labeled the victim a domestic terrorist. Greg
Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official, claimed—without evidence—that Pretti had arrived to
inflict “maximum damage on individuals” and framed the shooting as a necessary
act of self‑defense. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller escalated the rhetoric further,
calling Pretti “an assassin” and insisting that the protests were part of a
coordinated effort to undermine federal authority. And Vance, abandoning any
pretense of restraint, described the scene as the work of “far-left
agitators,” collapsing the distinction between peaceful witnesses and violent
extremists.
In each case, the message was the same: these were not citizens with
rights; they were enemies.
I have spent decades
working at the intersection of law and human rights, serving as a U.S. Public
Delegate to the United Nations and an appointee to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council. In diplomatic chambers and historical archives, I have seen how regimes
telegraph their intentions. Authoritarian systems rarely begin with mass
repression. They begin by redefining who counts as a threat.
And that is precisely what we are witnessing now. Over the past year, the
administration has repeatedly used the language of extremism to describe
ordinary Americans. During a Chicago immigration raid in October, the
Department of Homeland Security labeled Marimar Martinez, another U.S. citizen
shot by a federal agent, a “domestic terrorist” in an official press release. In both her case and the killings of
Renee Good and Alex Pretti, officials used terminology once reserved for mass‑casualty
attacks to describe unarmed civilians attempting to drive away, film an
encounter, or help a stranger to her feet.
This is not the language of a confident democracy. It is the language of
a government seeking permission: permission to escalate force, evade
accountability, and silence dissent.
A recent academic analysis found that Donald Trump has increasingly
used the word “evil” not to describe foreign adversaries but to condemn
domestic political opponents, journalists, and critics. No modern president has
used the term this way. This is not mere name‑calling; it is moral
delegitimization. It suggests that disagreement with those in power is not just
wrong but wicked.
When leaders describe their critics as “evil,” “radicalized,” or
“terrorists,” they are not trying to win an argument. They are trying to end
one.
The Trump Administration’s language around immigration enforcement
reinforces this point. Officials have warned of “violent efforts to shut down
immigration enforcement” and claimed that “domestic terrorists” are using “extreme views” to obstruct federal operations. These
sweeping assertions, often contradicted by video evidence and eyewitness
accounts, serve a clear purpose: to cast any challenge to federal authority as
inherently illegitimate.
Once dissent becomes synonymous with extremism, the state no longer needs
to justify its actions. It only needs to point.
The rhetorical pattern after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
makes this plain.
When officials insist
that Good was a terrorist, they are not describing what happened. They are
justifying it.
When they claim that Pretti arrived to inflict maximum damage, they are
not offering facts. They are manufacturing a threat.
When they declare that questioning the President’s narrative is
“propaganda” or “anti‑American,” they are not defending the truth. They are
attacking the very idea of accountability.
And when the administration labels its critics and its victims “evil,”
“radicalized,” or part of a “terrorist network,” it is not engaging in
politics. It is engaging in dehumanization.
History shows that once a government normalizes this language, the slide
accelerates. The state becomes both narrator and arbiter of reality. Citizens
become suspects. Violence becomes self‑defense. Democracy becomes optional.
Democratic norms can be fragile. They quickly erode when leaders decide
that some people are no longer entitled to the protections the rest of us take
for granted.
The danger we face is
not only the violence we see in our communities or on video. It is the
narrative that follows: the official insistence that the victim was not a
victim at all, but an enemy of the state.
That is the moment when democracies falter. It is the moment when the
government stops speaking about its citizens as citizens.
We can allow a government to describe ordinary citizens as terrorists, to
treat dissent as extremism, and to use language as a shield for its own abuses.
We can pretend this is normal, or temporary, or harmless.
Or we can recognize what history makes plain: once a government convinces
the public that some people are enemies, it rarely stops there. After all, why
would your enemies' votes matter? Why would their lives matter?
The health of our
republic depends on refusing that premise now, before the vocabulary of
authoritarianism becomes the common tongue of American politics, and before
more names are added to the list.
