The Enemy Within
What most stuns me about our divided nation is everyone knowing how much the system sucks and still going all in on politics.
To me, asking politicians to create transforming change is like asking drunken toddlers to engineer a fusion bomb. You know nothing good will come from it and fear ending up with something far worse
In my six decades on the planet, I have voted only twice in my life. The first, during the 2008 presidential election, casting my first ballot for Barack O’Bama. Mesmerized by his words of Yes we can, it took two terms for me to see the orator’s hopeful words sink into the same sludge of No we can’t.
Convinced of a completely broken system, I skedaddled back to my apolitical world, banging my head like Chris Farley did after doing something stupid. Lesson learned, I said to myself, and swore to never vote again, choosing to live as a citizen of a kingdom under a far different rule.
My escape from politics was short-lived. On June 6, 2015, Donald J. Trump descended on a golden escalator in the Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name with a promise –
I alone can fix it.
Name a former previous president who had the balls and madness to claim such a thing.
If that doesn’t convince you of his level of narcissism, try counting the number of times he has either bought, begged or bullied his name onto a Guinness Record of phallic building, Mount Rushmore, coerced institution, sports coliseum, battleship, smarmy product, or the first-ever FIFA peace prize.
I alone can fix it. In 5 simple words, Trump spoke the antithesis of good leadership. History teaches us great leaders bring diverse people, skills, and perspectives together across great divides to solve problems. Gandhi, Jesus, Mandela, and Lincoln, a few that come to my mind.
Bad leaders divide people into warring camps, pitting one citizen against another. By speaking in simple binary language of us v. them, right v. wrong, good v. evil, following comic book plots, they create an enemy within to go to war with.
Trump’s crippling narcissism perhaps best takes shape in his own imagination - the ripped red-white-and-blue-with-gold-belt superhero, NFT digital image available online for $99 a pop.
On November 8, 2016, my daughter voted in her first election. Having watched election results well into the night, she knocked quietly on my wife and I’s bedroom door.
Trump won, she whispered quietly like a young woman in shock.
I got out of bed, put my arms around her, and tried to console her.
At least you'll remember your first presidential election, I told her as we both forced a laugh.
Truth was, I didn’t have much evidence to offer that things were not as bad as we feared. If Trump really believed that he alone could fix it, he had no choice but to create a fictional enemy from within, one posing a much greater threat to our nation than China, Russia, Climate Change, or immigrants eating our cats and dogs.
To those who could not see his superhero cape blowing in the wind, he nicknamed the dems — the lunatic left, the woke, God-hating socialists, trans, Antifa, and Muslim lovers. As the inevitable failures stacked up in his first term, Trump needed an enemy within to take the blame and fight a war. By his accounting, more than half of the American citizens became the enemy within - obstacles to be dealt with, not citizens he swore to serve.
After 4 years of chaos, two impeachments, a global pandemic, losing the presidential election in 2020, Trump went to real war with the enemy within — storming the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, building gallows, smearing shit, hurling rocks, curling senators into fetal positions, and injuring more 100 Capitol police officers.
And then the damnedest thing happened.
Following two impeachments, a slew of trials, investigations of mishandling classified documents and leading an insurrection, 34 felony fraud charges, two assassination attempts, and one naughty spanking with Forbes magazine by a porn star, Trump somehow secured a second term as President of the United States.
After my daughter voted on November 5, 2024 — equally for Hilary Clinton as against Trump — she called to express her confusion —
How could this happen in our country?
Clueless for an answer, I thought a little humor might help.
Hey, his first term ended well, why should we not expect the same of his second.?
Neither of us laughed.
•
A short time after his second term began, during a MAGA rally, Donald Trump formally named the enemy within, declaring his disdain for them.
Armed with a 992-page agenda for his first 100 days in office named Project 2025, Trump set off like Quioxte on his ass, tilting at windmills on his way to fixing the nation by himself.
Even the Never-Trumpers got to toot the man’s horn a little, no matter how horrible that sounds —
The man got historic amounts of shit done.
Through use of executive orders, tariffs, loopholes in the law, Trump alone ordered —
Thousands of federal employees, including watchdogs, regulators, and anyone involved with government ethics fired.
Declared false emergencies and real wars to engage military action here and abroad.
Downloaded unlimited private information from United States citizens for future use.
Killed tens of thousands of babies and AIDS victims across our globe by ending US government aid.
Sidelined Congress, co-opted the Department of Justice, lockstepped his party, all in an effort to clear away the obstacles and kryptonite from his messianic path.
Murdered alleged drug dealers in international waters and deported immigrants without due process to places with names like Alligator Alcatraz and other federally funded on-purpose hellholes to show he could do whatever he wanted because he alone can fix it.
I mean think about it. That’s a lot of shit to get done by a man with a spray tan hairline, a Tim Burton hand bruise, and cankled ankles, don’t you think?
And what did the president get for all of this messianic work? A cross to carry of zero gratitude from the enemy within, which he raged about again and again 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 2700 events held in every state plus DC. On the eve of the protests, Trump posted his response — an AI generated video — on Truth Social. Framed as brilliant satire from his stable genius mind, I watched in horror the President of the United States pilot a B2 Stealth fighter jet named King Trump, mask askew, oxygen depleted, bomb bay doors opened, chunky-style brown liquid diarrhea falling from the sky on American Citizens exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
After viewing, I sat in a stunned silence, a septic rage rising in me.
This kind of shit ain’t funny, I growled to myself, and set off on a Quixotic mission of my own.
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 too many mad posts, I remind myself to be civil and avoid name calling.
Gosh, I was really hoping for libtard, I respond.
•••
It’s satire, you f—ing libtard pussy.
•••
Thank you for your kindness and the additional flourish of profanity, I respond. 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 think.
Smug in my understated punchline, I browsed similar posts for the next hour, repeatedly rage baiting and subtly belittling people in order to set the record straight.
In the middle of my fevered browsing, I was stopped cold in my tracks by a post —
•
In the original Greek, the word epiphany means “manifestation of the divine.”
It’s been my experience, an epiphany is like a portal opening between heavenly and earthly kingdoms, and hearing God’s laugh spill through. In my own self righteous mission to set the record straight, driven by outrage, it suddenly struck me I was the problem with the world, as well. Possessed by a desire to be right, I fell victim to the same kind of hate I was so steamed about., baiting and berating fellow citizens, naming them in my mind the enemy within.
It took the great Chesterton to remind me that the enemy within consistently manifests itself in them and rarely us, or him or her, and almost never me.
If each of us fail to take responsibility for being what’s wrong with the world, we will never share a responsibility to solve problems together.
Locked in his narcissism, it’s exactly what Trump fails to see.
In a very real sense, the president’s focus on an enemy within has some merit. The man just can’t, for the life of him, go far enough within. Self aggrandizing delusions hide the path to his soul, and the responsibility every leader bears.
If he alone knows how to fix the nation, Trump reasons, how could the fault lie with anyone other than the enemy within?
In many ways watching Trump’s AI generated video was similar to watching a real video of Stephen Miller, an inner circle Trump advisor. Following a tearful Erika Kirk forgiving the man who killed her husband, Miller gave an incongruent speech declaring war on anyone who disagrees with their righteous warriors.
This kind of shit is not funny. It’s outrageous. Viral in speed and toxicity, the hate spreads in disembodied information silos, anonymous echo chambers of ignorance and arrogance, the disdain spirals down and out of social media cesspools to infect our nation with hatred.
In my mind, I can hear the objections — what about O’Bama, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hilary Clinton’s emails, and on and on?
What about-ing is not what I’m writing about.
It’s about Trump, our current president, commander-in-chief, and leader of the free world, a man who deliberately divides our nation, proclaiming war on an imaginary enemy within, igniting battles between fellow American citizens, neighbors, friends, and family, all of us living with a strange malaise, a deep sadness settled in the pit of the stomach, the acid of hate.
It’s about all of us, how we citizens — left, right, and center — allow a president to recruit us into battle with one another instead of fighting together to heal the wounds and solve the problems that afflict us.
It’s about the united states, not the divided.
But mostly it’s about me, how easily I fall into the temptation to disdain a person instead of his or her actions, passing it along to others in my outrage, becoming the problem with the world myself.
•
As I’ve already stated, I place little hope in any kind of political kingdom ushering in any real change. In my mind, the best we can expect of a government is to keep us from killing or hurting others, protect all of our rights, and defend our nation from real enemies.
As a follower of Christ, my citizenry belongs in another kind of kingdom under the rule of an altogether strange king.
In Philippians 2, the Apostle Paul describes Jesus —
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!
I seek to live in a kingdom where war, vengeance, denial, and cruelty, exercised in the coercion of power, are trumped by peace, forgiveness, confession, and sacrificial service in the reign of God’s love poured out for the prosperity of citizens of his kingdom. Call it a fool’s hope, delusional thinking, or fantasy dream, but Jesus remains for me the only king I care to follow, the only one to whom I give my sole allegiance.