Donald Trump drove fear into the heart of the corporate media this weekend. They pretended it was a righteous fear, a patriotic concern for the health of America’s democracy and the good of its people. But the truth is much less noble; their primordial fear is for themselves alone, and what will come of their power, status, and privilege if Trump wins another four years in the White House. Like a wounded animal sensing a predator closing in, they are right to be afraid.

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Trump gave a two-hour speech in New Hampshire on Saturday, where he promised retribution against all of those who hold America back from greatness in his second term.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream,” Trump said to cheers from the crowd.

“The threat from outside forces,” he continued, “is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”

This, of course, produced a cold sweat among the commentariat. How could Trump describe human beings as vermin; doesn’t he know that’s how the Nazis justified the Holocaust? To the media, Trump once again confirmed himself as a Hitlerian figure. Yet his comparison is not far off. What else would you call the orgiastic hive of federal workers who serve no real purpose but to self-perpetuate? Those who do not venture from the shadows except to feed off the scraps of the world they have no true place in? Subverting the will of the people from within, the so-called civil servant is a scavenger hidden deep beneath the halls of power  – a rat personified.

What struck a chord with the media, however, was Trump’s talk of “the threat from within.” The New York Times gasped in fear at the “incendiary and dehumanizing”  language. The Huffington Post extrapolated, predicting a “purge” of the honest, hard-working Americans who dare stand against the Trump regime; the reader is left to imagine what that might entail. Forbes warned that Hitler too had a way to deal with the threats from within. But it was the inimitable Charlies Sykes who spelled it out most clearly Monday morning: Trump will emulate “the world’s authoritarian thugs” and bring “concentration camps” to the American Heartland.

These talking heads do not honestly fear that there will be concentration camps full of good-hearted liberals in Trump’s America. Rather, they know that they, along with the parasitic bureaucracy, will be targeted, exposed, and cast from their vaunted positions. They may genuinely believe they represent a liberal dam against a flood of authoritarian Trumpism, but the fact remains that they are just as purge-happy as any “backward” force they claim to stand against. What they fear is that conservatives will break out of their controlled opposition and begin to fight back in earnest.

Yet the media is right that Trump’s comments are indeed momentous. No matter how corrupt and parasitic the Deep States reveals itself to be, it is quite jarring to the conservative disposition to contemplate fellow Americans the same way one would a foreign enemy. All conservatives want to believe that the promise of America still resonates somewhere in the hearts of all her citizens – that at the end of the day, we are all Americans standing against the barbarians of the world who would tear us down. This is lamentably no longer the world we live in and Trump’s words are true. The barbarians never had to storm the gate because they were already inside.

Making appropriate use of wartime language, Trump rightly put rooting out domestic barbarians as his highest priority. All of our foreign foes pale in comparison to the threat of an insurgent left atop the commanding heights of America, determined to reimagine all that made us great in the first place. China might be eating our lunch, but it is liberal economic dreams that empowered them in the first place. Iran may soon emerge as a nuclear power, but only because the liberal belief in universality convinced us that the mullahs could be trusted to act responsibly, the same as risk-averse Western leaders. The invasion at the Southern border and backwater countries united to displace the American dollar and create a new global order – all made possible by the liberal folly of global justice, and a sense of guilt for historical Western achievement.

These threats all emerged out of the mistakes, naivety, or outright maliciousness of U.S. leadership. Yet those who made have admitted their culpability, let alone paid the price. They remain at the helm and over the decades have only doubled down, embracing their left flank and further insulating themselves from any accountability – even presidential oversight. They will continue unless they are stopped. Until we bring sanity – a moderately patriotic agreement on the good of America and a sense of duty to preserve it – back to the federal government, then nothing else matters, because we’ve already lost.