Though it remains to be seen if former President Donald Trump will actually run again in 2024, some Republicans are warning that he and his supporters remain an existential threat to the United States.

Former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh recently spoke with Chauncey DeVega of Salon, and he made it clear that those on the left need to be aware of the danger posed by the ex-president and his acolytes.

Walsh began by admitting that he was once seduced by Trump’s allure:

I am in a weird position. I was part of TrumpWorld. I was part of the Trump cult — and I got out of the Trump cult. Whenever I have the opportunity, I try to wake up Democrats, and anybody else who will listen, to what the people in TrumpWorld and who are part of that movement are really all about and what we’re really up against. I do not believe that most Democrats and independents really believe it when they say, “We have to defend our democracy.” They do not really understand how close we are right now to losing it all.

That led Walsh to note that “People watching MSNBC or CNN every night hear Rachel [Maddow] and everybody else bemoaning what’s going on. What you have there is a bunch of liberals and other good people just talking to each other.” What’s needed, he continued, is understanding your enemy:

I hear from thousands of Republican voters every single day. If there’s one message that I try to convey to the MSNBC viewers of the world, it is the following: These people, the Trump folks, the Republican voters of today, they would happily burn this country down to get the country they want. They would happily do it. And they tell me that. I don’t think the folks who watch CNN and MSNBC every night really understand that fact.

It’s impossible to dispute that when you consider what took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Those were pro-Trump crowds that attacked the seat of American government and spread their feces on the walls of Congress as they searched for Democrats to use their zip ties on. They chanted about how they wanted to “hang Mike Pence” and were clearly planning to be the first wave of a coup that Trump himself helped set into motion with his speech earlier that day.

Trump and his minions are fascists who pretend to be populists. And as Walsh rightly notes, they will indeed burn it all down if we don’t stop them.

Featured Image Via NBC News