Malcolm Nance is different. He was in Ukraine, fighting a war against Russia, when his publisher told him to go home to America to help sell his latest book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Teranged Ideology of the Trump Surgency. “I didn’t want to, but I found out that live shows were conventional,” he says ruefully via Skype from San Francisco, his voice sounding a little hoarse. Nance, a counterterrorism intelligence officer and aggressive media maven, joined the International Territorial Defense Legion of Ukraine in March. He explains that, having spent the previous month there as a military analyst, he felt compelled to defend democracy and could not stand by as innocent civilians faced slaughter. Nance confidently rattles off the names of Ukrainian generals, key battlefields and pieces of military hardware. He is a former Navy SEAL who knew what it was like to be under fire in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he is also a 60-year-old grandfather. Was life on the eastern front scary? He says: “The hairiest of all is artillery. One incident we had at three in the morning – I was tweeting and I guess the Russians didn’t like what I tweeted – when they hit us with extremely large caliber weapons, long range as well, fired from southern Russia to the northeast. They didn’t kill any of us, but they missed us by a hundred yards. Photo: Courtesy of Malcolm Nance “This is a dangerously close hit. The building shook, the ceiling began to collapse. There was a skyscraper nearby and glass was falling everywhere from 10 stories down. We were trying to get them all to the shelter. Our little war puppies, our little battle dogs, panicked – they’re the biggest fireworks you’ve got – but your job is to stay calm.” The international legion is a fighting force of three battalions and several hundred men. He is defending a significant section of the front line and has suffered casualties. When Nance’s presence became public in April, he was told that the Kremlin had denounced him as a mercenary, a soldier of fortune and legionary enemy number one. When a Ukrainian intelligence chief informed him, “Vladimir Putin knows your name now,” Nance replied, “Great!” Having given up a five-figure monthly salary as an expert on the liberal cable news network MSNBC, he earns the same salary as other Ukrainian soldiers: $630 a month. “So I’m definitely not a mercenary. If nothing else, I pay them. I have bought so much equipment, trucks. “I have wonderful donors who have helped us tremendously and we get what we need because it’s faster than the logistics pipeline. In a year, we will get what we need if we wait for the Ukrainian army and the US government, but now we need things now, so we just buy them.” Nance is also donating $100,000 of his book advance to ensure Legionnaires have the equipment they need. The volume’s cover — an ersatz gallows erected outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, with a skull and crossbones flag and the Trump flag nearby — makes it clear that the existential threat to democracy is not limited to Eastern Europe. “I call Ukraine the eastern model in the fight to defend democracy, and the United States is the western wall,” he muses. “The Western Wall is coming down.” In They Want to Kill Americans, Nance argues that the threat from domestic terrorists, the Republican party and former President Donald Trump is even worse than you already think. He argues that a rebellion was underway long before January 6, and that the 74 million people who voted for Trump were by definition hostile to American democracy. In his introduction, Nance describes the book as a warning: the US may again find itself under a wave of terrorist attacks, but this time from within its own borders. A significant number of Americans support, radicalize, arm, and plan to kill their own countrymen to install a dictatorship. To some it will sound like an exaggeration. But dozens of Trump associates who are promoting his lies about the 2020 election and themselves winning the Republican primary are hoping to take control of the electoral machinery in key states. Trump himself recently said he had decided whether he would run for president again in 2024 (take that as a yes). And this week, a survey by medical and public health scientists at the University of California found that one in five US adults, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some cases. “They’re our neighbors and collectively they’re called Titus, which represents the Trump Rebellion in the United States,” says Nance. “The Republican party is a guerilla party, no longer interested in government, but using the levers of power to damage government and destabilize government and reflect the wishes of armed insurgents, militias, and even terrorists. They are the knife in the throat of American democracy.” Trump supporters break through barricades on their way to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 Photo: Amy Harris/Rex/Shutterstock Then, he says, there’s the average Trump voter. “In the Capitol riot, the actual militiamen were a fraction of the people who were there. Forty thousand people showed up on the mall, 10,000 besieged the Capitol and fought the police, and 2,000 stormed the building. Perhaps 10% of them were militiamen. “That means there was a whole rebel wing of average Americans who want to join the violence and intimidate people with their firearms at these rallies and demonstrations.” America’s diverse demographics, underscored in bold by the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, have ignited flames of white supremacy and grievance that have never been extinguished. Trump removed the shackles of politeness and decency and offered the thrill of saying the unspeakable. He removed all the restrictions and said it’s okay to be openly racist, it’s okay to hurt people, it’s okay to get in their face. It’s okay to call an average person just walking down the street or doing their job at the polls “anti-American, not American.” Nance, whose previous books include Defeating Isis, An End to Al-Qaeda and The Terrorists of Iraq, makes a provocative comparison. “The Islamic State has this ideological belief that was very simple: if you’re not in our group, you’re not a Muslim anymore and we can kill you. You are all infidels until you recommit to the variant of Islam: join us, pray as we pray, behave as we behave, support our businesses. “The same thing with the Republican party that is behaving a lot like the Islamic State: ideological purity and creating a state of terror or an insurgency where the country is now being used for what they want. They don’t care about the other 65%.” Joe Biden said he was motivated to run for president by the sight of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. He has given speeches pledging to support democracy against existential threats from China, Russia and domestic extremists. But Nance doesn’t think the president and his allies are rising to the occasion. “They have no urgency now,” he warns. “This is a fire that’s burning and you’re sitting in the truck waiting for the call. Get out and fight the fire. The whole structure can collapse around you. “They have to scream as loud as I do and they have to speak in stern terms like I do. Joe Biden should tell the attorney general – or fire the attorney general and put someone in there – “I’m not going to tell him what to do, but by God he’s going to defend American democracy. You will hold the people to account and this government will hold the people to account and we will not allow this heinous attack on democracy to go into effect.” “But a lot of people there are institutional and they want to go back and try to reach out and be kind to their peers. These people are sharpening knives in the offices of the House and Senate. They are not interested in the political discourse. They plan to seize power or be elected to power and then never leave it again.” The congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 has pointed the finger firmly at Trump and offered numerous hints of premeditation and guilt to prompt the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to prosecute. Photo: St. Martin’s Press Nance, who is Black, continues: “This was a riotous conspiracy. There is a whole article in the constitution for this. They could shut down and engage the Capitol and beat up cops because their skin was their camouflage. Now the whiteness of their skin is the excuse that you can’t hold them accountable, but you can shoot unarmed black people 90 times in the back. “So no, the justice department should make it clear: equal under the law. That whole “Oh well, we can’t do this in the election season” bullshit? They did it for years in the pre-election period. Breaking the law is breaking the law, so we’re holding people accountable.” Earlier this year, comments from Washington were rife with speculation that America, bitterly polarized, loaded with weapons and steeped in a history of violence, could even be plunged into a second civil war. Ever since the Supreme Court decision that overturned a woman’s constitutional rights to an abortion has made the distinction between blue and red states even more concrete. What does Nance think? “If it happens, it won’t be a second civil war. It will be a rebellion, which is a series of…
