JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In his third run for the White House, former President Donald Trump is once again delivering a closing message that promises a stronger economy and a strong border. But mixed in that is a darker message, with a lot of anger and promises of revenge and retribution, calling political opponents the, quote, "enemy within." NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez has this report on the evolution of Trump's closing argument.
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DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much. Thank you.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: At an extremely late final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, back in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump called for a middle-class rebellion before turning to his bread-and-butter issue.
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TRUMP: I just want to ask you one question, if you don't mind, at 1 o'clock in the morning.
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TRUMP: Who is going to pay for the wall?
ORDOÑEZ: Four years later, soon after recovering from COVID, Trump returned to Grand Rapids, where he minimized the dangers of the pandemic and complained about the investigations against him.
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TRUMP: We've worked very hard in four years. We've been hit by fake investigations, fake scandals, fake impeachments. We've had - we've had so many things that - the witch hunt. I call it the witch hunt.
ORDOÑEZ: But now, ahead of his third trip to Grand Rapids, his rhetoric has turned even darker, and it's more focused on domestic enemies. This weekend, he said he wouldn't mind if reporters were shot and doubled-down on suggestions that Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney should have to face gunfire in combat.
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TRUMP: And if you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn't have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye.
ORDOÑEZ: Let me just say that emotions are always high at the end of a campaign. Candidates on both sides are known to push the limits. But Trump's violent imagery and focus on domestic enemies, while thrilling supporters, has political scholars drawing comparisons to former strongmen of the past.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: I hear a lot of echoes of Mussolini's fascism in Trump's rhetoric.
ORDOÑEZ: Jennifer Mercieca is a professor at Texas A&M University who studies political rhetoric. She says Trump's language has intensified, and so have his promises. She notes several top military national security officials who worked in the Trump administration have raised similar concerns, including his former chief of staff, who said Trump meets the definition of a fascist.
MERCIECA: These are people who worked with him closely. They know exactly what Trump is like because they were the ones that protected the rule of law in democracy in America when Trump was trying to violate those things.
ORDOÑEZ: The Trump campaign says that concerns about fascism are overblown and Biden and Harris are the real threat to democracy. They call these attacks dishonest attempts to discredit conservatives and their ideas. That's certainly how many of Trump's supporters feel.
PETER FABRI: It's nonsense. I'm the man on the street. We're in small town America, rural America, and it hurts, OK? The message doesn't resonate positively with me at all. It's negative.
ORDOÑEZ: Peter Fabri is a retired Cadillac designer. He says the accusations are an attempt by the Democrats to distract from a lack of policy solutions. He and his wife also run a small business in northern Michigan, which he says did well under Trump, but never fully recovered after COVID. He blames the Biden-Harris administration.
FABRI: So those four years of Trump brought prosperity, and we were able to make money and put money in the bank. And then followed by the COVID and the four years with the Biden-Harris administration, we didn't make any money. We've been struggling.
ORDOÑEZ: And some Republican strategists, like Alex Conant, say don't let Trump's rhetoric distract from the policies.
ALEX CONANT: And when you look at his core platform, it's lower taxes. It's more restrictions on immigrations. It's stronger national defense.
ORDOÑEZ: Conant, who helped lead Senator Marco Rubio's presidential campaign back in 2016, says the policy platform looks a lot like Mitt Romney's in 2012.
CONANT: This is a very traditional conservative campaign, just with Donald Trump's more extremist rhetoric, which makes it different.
ORDOÑEZ: But that's when Trump stays on script. And when he closes out his campaign tonight in Grand Rapids for a third time, whether he stays on script or veers off may determine whether he distracts from his own final message.
Franco Ordoñez, NPR News, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
(SOUNDBITE OF QUINCY JONES SONG, "I NEVER HAS SEEN SNOW") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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