The Enemy Within
In my six decades on this planet, I have voted only twice in my life. During the 2008 presidential election, I cast my first ballot for Barack O’Bama, mesmerized by his poetic words and promises. During his two terms in office, I watched his progressive Yes we can dissolve into the same old No we can’t status quo of politics owned by the filthy rich. Banging my head like Chris Farley did after doing something stupid, I was happy to return to my apolitical roots, choosing to live out my citizenship in a far different upside-down kingdom.
Unfortunately my political retreat was short lived. On June 6, 2015, a presidential candidate descended a golden escalator with his messianic promise - I alone can fix it.
In an age when facts are routinely disputed, I believe we can all agree our president suffers from narcissism. For his hard core supporters it means his balls are big enough to take on the deep state. For the rest of us, we suspect some kind of compensation for limp. To measure his vanity, count the times he has begged, coerced, bought, or bullied his name onto everything, from cheap wine bottles to U.S. watches made in China, bankrupt casinos, the first ever FIFA Peace Prize, the John F. Kennedy Arts Center, Navy battleships, AI fighter jets, and a Guinness record number of phallic-shaped buildings, many of his own erection.
He wants Mount Rushmore for his mausoleum, an eternal testimony to how great he was to fix our nation (and probably the world) by himself.
But let’s permit Trump to best express the epic level of his narcissism.
In a series of digital hero images he sold online for $99 a pop, this one is my favorite - a president ripped and dressed in a red-white-and-blue costume, the superhero who has come to fix it. He’d like to know — he has no need for your help.
I alone can fix it.
In 5 simple words, Trump spoke the antithesis of good leadership.
History teaches us that great leaders bring diverse people, skills, and perspectives together across great divides to solve problems. Gandhi, Jesus, Mandela, and Lincoln are a few who come to mind.
Bad leaders divide people into warring camps, pitting one citizen against another, speaking in binary language of us v. them, right v. wrong, good v. evil, following comic book plots that require the creation of mythical villains to defeat, the worst of all the enemy from within.
Call it TDS if you like, but I believe I would suffer the same syndrome if I was about to step barefoot into the path of a black scorpion, tail curled, on November 4, 2016, I cast my second presidential vote — against Donald J. Trump. One booth over, my 18-year-old daughter voted for the first time in her life. After voting for Hilary with enthusiasm, our 18-year-old daughter stayed up late into the night for the projected winner. Tapping timidly and cracking my wife and I’s bedroom door, she whispered like a young girl who just watched The Exorcist for the first time.
Trump won.
I drew a cleansing breath, let out a deep sigh, got out of bed and put my arms around her; I could not find any words of consolation.
After sharing a hug, my daughter smiled and said to me, Look at it this way, I will never forget my first election.
We both laughed at that, even as we braced ourselves for the inevitable chaos about to unfurl. Both of us possess active imaginations, but neither could have predicted the whirlwind disorder of the next 4 years. After surviving two impeachments, a global pandemic, toxic polarization, numerous criminal investigations and protests, the longest recorded government shutdown, 34 felony charges and one spanking from a pornstar later, Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Before Joe Biden was projected the 46th president of the United States, I had never used an emoji in my life, except maybe the middle finger or the turd. Three days after the election, Trump’s defeat projected certain, I texted my daughter a whole string of them, my un-evolved thumbs caught up in the Spirit like they were speaking in tongues.
emojis
Seconds after receiving my text, Annalyse called to set a date for the celebration party.
Just before saying good-bye, we both took a deep breath and said pretty much the same thing at the same time.
Glad that nightmare’s over.
•
Turned out, our national nightmare was just about to turn psychedelic strange.
On January 6, 2012, outgoing President Donald J. Trump rallied core supporters to stop the steal of the 2020 presidential election. Having gone 60 to 0 in court rulings against his claim of a fraudulent election, standing behind bullet proof acrylic, the lame-duck president urged his followers to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and fight like hell to stop the certification of Joe Biden as the new president.
And fight like hell is what many of them did. Armed with a variety of weapons - firearms, knives, tasers, flagpoles, molotov cocktails, crowbars, chemical compounds, tomahawk axes, zip-tied restraints, and a range of blunt force objects, some dressed in military fatigue and bulletproof vests, they violently stormed the Capitol of the United States of America.
For 187 minutes, as the violence unfurled, Trump watched Fox News from a large-screen television in his private dining room just off the Oval Office, reportedly mesmerized, even gleeful. Several times, he rewinded particularly poignant scenes.
As citizens of the United States erected gallows to hang the vice president, smeared feces in Capitol Hill offices, shattered glass windows, terrorized senators into the fetal position, and brutally attacked Capitol Hill police, resulting in injuries to more than 100 officers, 4 of whom would die, the president did nothing but hope and watch.
No official records were discovered of the president placing or receiving calls to the Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, or Homeland Security to coordinate a response to end the violence.
And then things got really weird.
On the first day of Trump’s second term as president on January 20, 2025, he granted blanket clemency to all of the nearly 1600 of the insurrectionists who were convicted, waiting trial or sentencing for offenses related to the January 6 United States Capitol attack. While doing so, he named January 6, 1981, a day of peace and love like tripping at Woodstock only much weirder.
With a gift for gaslighting that Orwell could have never imagined, he asked everyone to just take his word for it.
1984 became prophetic for our time.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
On his first day in office, the 47th president of the United States wanted to remind everyone that he alone could fix it.
When I saw my daughter for the first time after the 2024 presidential election, she didn’t want to talk about the outcome.
How did we get here? she asked with genuine confusion.
I had no answers for my daughter, so I tried to make a joke.
Hey Trump’s first term ended well, right? Maybe we should expect the same to start his second?
Looking at 4 more years of who knew what, neither one of us could fake a laugh.
With a vengeance, Donald Trump didn’t waste much time to continue his war with the enemy within.
Armed with a 992-page agenda for his first 100 days in office named Project 2025, Trump began his second term on January 20th with a vengeance. Setting off like Quixote on his pot belly horse, tilting at windmills in a rush to fix all that’s wrong with our nation by himself.
In some strange way, you’ve got to give it him. By himself alone, he certainly got a lot of shit done.
Through use of executive orders, tariffs, loopholes in the law, Trump issued orders to —
Fire thousands of federal employees, including watchdogs, regulators, and nearly everyone involved with government ethics.
Declare false emergencies for the purpose of engaging military action here and abroad.
Download unlimited private information from United States citizens for future use.
Kill tens of thousands of babies across our globe by ending U.S. government aid.
Sideline Congress, co-opt the Department of Justice, lock-step his party to clear away constitutional obstacles in his way.
Murder alleged drug dealers against international law and protesting United States citizens.
Kill and deport immigrants without due process to places with names like Alligator Alcatraz and other federally funded on-purpose hellholes to show he was willing to do whatever was necessary to get what he needed done, because he was the only one who could.
That’s a lot. A huge burden to bear, especially for a 79-year-old man with a spray-tan hairline, Tim Burton hand bruises, wobbling on two cankled ankles.
And what did the president get for all of this messianic work? Zero gratitude from the enemy within, which he frequently raged about until his orange face turned blue.
•
Trump’s disdain reached a new peak on October 18, 2025, when 7 million people (including my family) took to the streets to peacefully protest his policies at 2,700 events held in every state plus D.C. On the eve of the first protests, Trump posted his prepared response — an AI generated video — on Truth Social. Framed as brilliant satire from his stable genius mind, I watched in horror as the President of the United States took off in a B2 Stealth fighter jet named King Trump with mask askew, oxygen depleted.
I sat in a stunned silence, a rage rising in me after seeing this.
Breaking a 3-week fast from the cesspools of social media, I browsed to the first relevant post and found what I expected —
You snowflakes can’t take a little joke?
Taking a deep breath, aware of my history of enraged posts, I reminded myself to be civil and avoid name calling.
Gosh, I was really hoping for libtard, I responded.
It’s satire, you f—-ing libtard pussy.
•••
Thank you for your kindness and the additional flourish of profanity, I responded. If you don’t mind, could you tell me what struck you most funny about Our Dear Leader’s video?
•••
Oh that’s easy. It’s when the shit began to fall on all you No Kings protestors.
•••
Can I assume you had a big beer belly laugh the moment when streams of diarrhea began to splash onto our woke faces?
•••
Dude, it’s like you are reading my mind.
•••
I searched for a way to respond, ditching — what kind of a sick twisted bastard are you? — to settle on a more humorous line —
Dude, that might not be as hard as you imagine.
Smug in my understated punchline, I set off on a Quixotic mission of my own - to set the record straight. For the next two hours, I repeatedly rage baited and belittled people on a righteous mission to prove that this kind of shit wasn’t funny.
In the middle of my fevered browsing, I was stopped cold in my tracks by a post —
•
That moment was an epiphany for me — an intuitive and terrifying realization that I was the problem with the world too.
Driven by outrage, possessed by a desire to be right, I fell victim to the same kind of hate I was so pissed about - berating fellow citizens, disdaining their thinking, secretly naming them the enemy within.
The word for epiphany in the original Greek means “a manifestation of the divine.” A portal, if you will, between earthly and heavenly kingdoms with polar opposite MOs.
One operates on the evolutionary principle of the survival of the fittest, the rich eating the poor. Hoarding political power at any cost is what matters.
The other flips the script when the Gospels record the life and death of a much different kind of king. In Philippians 2, the Apostle Paul describes Jesus this way -
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
On a cross proclaiming the King of the Jews, on a rocky hill named Golgotha, the last words of Jesus were, It is finished. Golgotha. Derived from Aramaic Golgotha and Latin Calvaria, both translating to "place of the skull".
It is finished by the true king, the only son of Man who could fix it. By giving himself away for the flourishing of his children, he invites us into an invisible, upside-down kingdom operating through love not power, invitation not coercion, spirit transformation not laws of morality. king who literally pours himself out for the prosperity of the other.
Jesus arms outstretched over Jerusalem. You would not. Free will.
Brothers Karamazov. If you were God would you give humans free will, knowing ….
To fix the broken wheel of man’s fall, restore the trinitarian flow of love for the other, Father honoring son honoring Spirit, the Three-in-One God gives himself for the flourishing of his children, inviting us to return to the cycle.
The difference in rule can’t be more stark. Trump and Jesus. Biggest sin was spending so much time in the wrong kingdom. Will continue to protest the division driving our president in his delusion of fixing our nation by himself. But resist the urge to spread gasoline on the fire of hate. Return to the citizenship under the rule of a altogether different kind of king.
After the epiphany inspired by Chesterton’s words, I accepted my responsibility for being what’s wrong with the world by the role I played in turning fellow citizens, friends, family, and neighbors into the enemy within. Browsing social media cesspools - disembodied, anonymous, outraged, and unaccountable - it was and is easy to fall into the rabbit hole, a downward plunge of returning hate with hate, inevitably repeating the history of every earthly kingdom, especially one ruled by a leader recruiting its citizens into a civil war.
The word repent means to turn around and move into a different direction. After praying for forgiveness, I did a 180, counting on the road less travelled to lead me deeper into the kingdom of God, following a king who loves us so much he gets himself nailed to a cross to demonstrate his divine power over death, the last enemy to be destroyed.
Through his death and resurrection, Jesus seeded an invisible, mysterious and strange kingdom where the Spirit moves like the power of the wind with supernatural energy and transforming change. Call it a fool’s hope, delusional thinking, or comic fantasy, I pay allegiance to King Jesus alone, exercising my true citizenship in a kingdom where he frees and empowers me to love God and others, which all the law hangs.