Molly Jong-Fast on why living in a blue state won't save you
"If we are the 'enemy within,' that means we go to the camps too."
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Donald Trump often asks prospective voters, “What do you have to lose?” The answer, to hear Molly Jong-Fast tell it, is quite a bit — and that goes for everyone.
“Trump is telling us all about his potential plans: internment camps, going after his enemies foreign and domestic, including, presumably, journalists,” she recently wrote in Vanity Fair. “Will I be one of them? Will he clamp down on the free press? Will he take away the licenses from networks he deems insufficiently supportive of his presidency?”
Jong-Fast lives in New York City, but being in a blue state might not spare you. Trump isn’t hiding that he plans to abuse his power by weaponizing the federal government against his foes in unprecedented ways, and this time there will be no guardrails.
We connected with Jong-Fast to talk about her aforementioned Vanity Fair piece (“We All Have a Lot to Lose if Trump Wins Again”) and about how Trump’s efforts to go after after his “enemies within” might unfold.
“He wants to do concentration camps. Where is he going to put these concentration camps?” she said. “Say you have a strong governor. Perhaps that governor says ‘you can’t deport people from my state.’ But then Trump could say, ‘I’m going to put the camps on federal land.’ Those lands don’t belong to the states.”
“We might not be jailed right away, but we won’t have a country that protects us anymore,” she added later. “We will be people sort of without a state.”
A transcript of Jong-Fast’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson