Donald Trump’s latest turn toward fascist rhetoric appears to have left one CNN anchor struggling to pick her jaw up off the floor.

On Monday’s broadcast of the network’s This Morning show, Kasie Hunt appeared to repeatedly stammer and pause while discussing with panelists the Republican candidate’s growing tendency in recent days to refer to his political opponents as “the enemy within.”

“He’s saying that these people should be handled by the National Guard or the military. Um… what…? I mean, I think we’ve learned a lot about whether or not we should believe Trump when he says things, which is to say he is to be… He is to be believed, um…” she said, seemingly struggling to find a way of delving into the alarming new rhetorical pattern.

“We’re at the point where he’s saying ‘I’m going to use the National Guard and the military to take my political enemies out of the country’?” she eventually said with an apparent tone of disbelief.

Panelist Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, swiftly swung to Trump’s defense. “The way I took it was that obviously, as we know, there were riots in the wake of 2020. There’s also riots on Inauguration Day, small others,” he said. “It’s much, much smaller scale in D.C. and 2018 and 2017. I took it as [the] National Guard and military putting those down and controlling those, which I am totally fine with.”

Fellow panelist, former Biden comms aide Meghan Hayes, was, however, having none of it. “I think that [it’s] funny to watch Trump surrogates twist themselves into pretzels,” she shot back. “I think people know what his character is and this is to be expected. I don’t think he’s saying anything that he doesn’t believe to be true and that he wouldn’t actually do it if he could do it.”

Trump’s use of the phrase “the enemy within” recalls the title of a 1950 speech by Senator Joseph McCarthy, in which the infamous architect of the Second Red Scare used an apocryphal quote from President Abraham Lincoln to justify his rampant persecution of left-wing public and political figures throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.

It follows hot on the heels of other allegations of fascist overtones to Trump’s activities on the campaign trail. On Sunday, former Democratic strategist James Carville accused Donald Trump of willfully emulating the rhetoric and sentiments of the Third Reich in recent comments, as well as mimicking a notorious 1939 US Nazi rally with his choice of Madison Square Garden as a pre-election rally venue.