On October 13, appearing on “Sunday Morning Futures,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo, the 45th President and current Republican nominee for President Donald Trump said the following:
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
He further described these “enemies from within” as “liberals,” “radical liberals,” “radical leftists,” “communists,” and “fascists.” Trump’s inclusion of “fascists” was no doubt representation for his base.
Or on the other hand, maybe he has no clue what any of these political labels actually mean. You be the judge.
The above is a preface to a disclosure that I now make. I am one of those “enemies from within.” While I am a “liberal,” I am no “radical liberal,” or a “radical leftist,” or a “communist,” although someone did call me a communist in 1970. More about that below.
As I understand the way Trump misuses his terms, I have been an “enemy from within” for 60 years.
God, it feels so good to finally come out of the closet!
What did I do to qualify for the label “enemy from within?” Let’s take a look.
As a high school student, I supported Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy for the presidency. He clearly opposed any entanglement in Vietnam, promoted the expansion of Social Security benefits, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
By 1968, Johnson got us mired in Vietnam, the promises of the War on Poverty were not being realized, and virulent racism and de facto discrimination remained in the north and south. Violence became more the norm rather than the exception in our politics.
I actively supported Robert Kennedy (the father, definitely not the son) who I believed – and still believe – was the last best hope to bring all the fragmented political constituencies together. And he was closing in on the democratic nomination when he was shot and killed.
Some of us, including me, drifted to McCarthy’s campaign. Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey won the nomination.
Richard Nixon won the election. He doubled down on the war, ignored the civil rights progress begun under Johnson, finished off the War on Poverty, catered to southern whites with his Southern strategy, promoted a bully version of law and order, and in the end trashed the constitution.
Any of this sound familiar?
In 1969-70, I engaged in two campus debates on the war (I took the antiwar/anti-draft position).
In 1970, I was at a party when one of the party attendees, a woman who was once a waitress at Lester Maddox’s chicken restaurant in Atlanta, decided to confront me on the war. She belligerently attacked my position and having nowhere else to go called me a communist. Charming.
In 1972, I went to work at two relics of the War on Poverty, both Community Action Programs. I was an organizer and neighborhood center manager, focusing on enforcing the city’s minimum housing standards and working out a system of free lunches for low-income school kids.
In 1974, after leaving the agency, I served as chair of a neighborhood council and served on the Board of Directors of the agency I left. That lasted for about a year due to the agency transitioning from a community-based organizing and referral model to a delivery of direct services model.
In 1980, I ran for the democratic nomination for Congress from Rhode Island’s second district. This may surprise some people but as baseball manager Casey Stengel would often say when somebody questioned one of his comments, “you can look it up.” Given my vote total, you may need to squint when you find it.
My platform was 1) campaign finance reform and public funding of federal campaigns; 2) development of alternative energy sources; 3) Medicare providing prescription medicine benefits; and 4) programs to aid low-income Rhode Islanders. Obviously, there was more but these four issues were the pillars of my campaign.
I lost. And it was an epic beatdown. But as history has shown, I wasn’t wrong.
In 1982, I embarked on a teaching career, teaching history, government, economics, and a street law class to high school students. More calling than career, I thought I could help students appreciate our history and systems of government and law so at minimum they would soon become aware citizens ready to take their place in society.
I’ll leave it to others to comment on and critique my teaching performance. It was a challenging and often an exciting time, one I hope provided value to others. Looking back at my approach to teaching facts I don’t think I’d have been a good fit currently in the public schools of Florida, or Louisiana, or Kansas for that matter.
In 1997, I earned my Juris Doctor degree and embarked on using my newly earned skills in service to others. I was a member of the Bar of two states and the Rhode Island federal district court. As I write this, I am no longer a member of any Bar. I’m retired.
In 2006, I decided to run for the state senate. After all, isn’t that what lawyers do? And guess what happened? Right, I lost. But I was motivated to run because of what I saw as policies that favored to wealthy at the expense of the many. I supported marriage equality, and a woman’s right to autonomy over her body. My senate district was becoming increasingly diverse, and I wanted to meet their needs. I thought we could provide better and more effective services to all those in need.
A positive outcome of my loss was that I accepted an offer to write a “political” column for a local newspaper. I think I was the token liberal on the paper. At any rate, I kept the column until 2012. You could probably find those columns on the Internet Archive when they’re back up and running! If not, there’s always the WayBack site.
(As an aside, although I was the “liberal” columnist I managed to irritate democrats and republicans alike.)
While an attorney in private practice, I would take clients who had little to no money to spend on an attorney. I’d either give them a deep discount on their fee, or I’d take a matter pro bono. I couldn’t and didn’t turn anyone away because they couldn’t pay my normal rates for services. I even made house calls.
In 2008, I formed a non-profit legal services organization to provide pro bono or low bono civil legal services to low-income Rhode Islanders. We were aggressive, providing on-site services at 10 separate locations through the state.
Thanks to those who worked with me we made the lives of disadvantaged, marginalized people a little more gentle. We didn’t “solve” the problem of the paucity of legal services for the poor, nor did we intend to do so. All we tried to do was work with others to help those in need.
In 2020 I published a book about the reasons I formed this LSO, the struggles to keep the LSO functioning, and the surprising political indifference, sometimes hostility, and subtle resistance not just from the legislature, or the private Bar, but also from the judiciary itself.
It was the opposition from what I labeled Institutional Law – an informal coalition of legal entities dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
I was especially upset that, unlike most states, Rhode Island failed to establish an Access To Justice Commission. In July and August 2017, the local news website GoLocalProv published two of my pieces that pointedly asked why there was no such Commission.
In 2020, I also started my own blog, geoffschoos.com, and continued to raise this issue. To date I’ve yet to receive an answer, but we now have an Access To Justice Office that primarily aids judges in hearing cases that involve litigants with discreet needs (e.g., interpreters, people who could sign for the hearing impaired, etc.). Cleverly or cynically named, this is in no shape or form an ATJ Commission. To the Judiciary, particularly the Chief Justice, we see you.
Since beginning my blog, I have written critiques of various SCOTUS decisions, particularly the Heller, McDonald, Bruen cases (gun issues), Dobbs (abortion), and Trump (presidential immunity) to name a few.
I won’t go into the services provided over the past 25 years to non-profit organizations I assisted and participated in.
By now you might be wondering about the point of this piece. What makes me and my efforts to actively serve others special? Or speaking out on public issues? Or dissenting against public decisions ostensibly made in my name?
Let me be clear and please read this carefully. Answer: absolutely nothing. There is nothing unique or remarkable about my story. Mine is like thousands in my state and millions throughout the country who lend their efforts and raise their voices in support or opposition of the myriad number of issues confronting all of us.
For my part, I always felt that I could have done more, that I should have done better. I did not write this as a vanity piece. That’s not me.
I write this because of the terminology that Trump uses to describe his political opponents. “Enemy,” let that sink in. What do we do to enemies? Control them. Vanquish them. Imprison them. If necessary, obliterate them.
What I did I was as a citizen, trying to make my little piece of the world better than I found it. Clearly some of this runs counter to what others might think is good. And that’s as it should be in a functional democracy. As citizens, we join together in good faith and with good will to achieve consensus as to how to move forward together.
We know that Donald Trump’s self-centered world view is antithetical to what many of us value. Not just programmatically but also politically, a second Trump presidency would punish those who have the temerity to publicly dissent.
But it’s not just Trump I’m worried about. He’s nothing more than an empty vessel for those who prop him up. It’s those who seek power over principle. It’s those who stand by in fear while protecting Trump. It’s those who wrote Project 2025. These are the people who scare me.
I’ve written before and I write again: this year, it doesn’t matter what you think about issues. All that matters in this election is the preservation of our democracy. If we preserve our democracy, after November 5 we can go back to wrestling over issues.
When I ran for Congress in 1980, I warned that the flood of money into our political process would corrupt our politics and threaten our democracy. Given how this played out I underestimated the threat. Look at it like this, by the end of August nearly $4 billon dollars have been contributed and spent in the presidential election alone. And that’s the reported amount.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, authoritarian, and wannabe Bond villain, has formed his own PAC, given it $75 million, and is now running patently false ads against Harris. This guy literally has the money to burn democracy down.
Musk isn’t the only tech bro who’s jumped on the Trump Train. Peter Thiel, PayPal’s gift to the universe, spent a cool $30 million to make the author of Hillbilly Elegy a United States Senator. And that senator is now the Republican nominee for vice president.
The Heritage Foundation, always a conservative “think tank,” has gone full-fledged authoritarian with its publication of Project 2025. Written by 100s of former (and soon to be future?) Trump administration officials, this is an authoritarian (fascist?) wish/todo list. These guys are literally saying the quiet part aloud, and then denying they said or wrote anything.
And Trump is amplifying his authoritarian agenda. Recently he said that he could use the National Guard and the American military (Posse Comitatus be damned?) against radicals and leftists, you know, the enemies of the state. He called out Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as examples of those “enemies” he has in mind. Why? Because these two. and many others, actively and openly oppose the actions of Donald Trump.
But here’s the thing. If Trump and his acolytes and his self-anointed “patriots” can go after Schiff and Pelosi, what would hold them back from coming after you or me? After the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, nothing. All he needs to do is surround himself with henchmen willing to do his bidding. Clearly there’s no shortage of henchmen ready to sign up.
One needn’t be a public opponent to this Trump Regime. A person could be apolitical and be targeted for living a life deemed inappropriate by Project 2025. Or merely be a woman to be given a ticket to the new dystopian version of Gilead, a place named Trumplandia.
Don’t believe me? Then read citizens’ accounts of life in Germany in 1933 and 1934. If history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s doing a surprisingly decent job of imitating the past.
The election of Donald Trump will erode the foundations of our democracy. It will make it more difficult to engage in activities that I and many others in the past engaged in. The democracy that allowed us to do what we did will be transformed into something else.
We know this because we saw it during Trump’s presidency.
We know this because we saw the thousands he called to Washington and then incited to storm the Capitol to overturn a free and fair election.
We know this because of what he freely says.
We know this because given the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, there is little to hold Trump in check.
We know this because we see some of the people who back him.
We know this because he turned a proud political party into his personal cult, ready to do his bidding.
Donald Trump, with the support of those bent to his whims, has over the past 9 years debased our institutions, our form of government, and the rule of law all of which have supported our American democracy.
We ignore this threat at our peril. To those who say that Trump, while president, didn’t behave as the authoritarian that I and others claim he will, I say this – he tried and failed. But he along with his supporters, his enablers, his apologists, and his sycophants learned.
They will not make the same mistakes this time.
In the cosmic scheme I’m a nobody. I have no position of power. I have no cadre of followers on various social media sites. I am not an influencer.
I am a citizen with all the rights and responsibilities attached thereto. And I will exercise my rights, as I do with this piece, and I will meet my responsibility to oppose the looming threat of authoritarianism in our country. Like millions of Americans, I have acted to prevent a dystopian possibility from becoming a reality. I knew what to do and I’m doing it.
I am reminded of what Robert Kennedy said nearly 60 years ago that I believe is even more relevant to our time:
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
If you care about making your community a little bit better and safer, you know what to do.
If you want the liberty to speak out without fear of reprisal, you know what to do.
If you have ever stood up and said, “I dissent,” you know what to do.
If you value objective verifiable facts, you know what to do.
If you want to live in a society where all your rights and liberties are protected, you know what to do.
If you care about your children, your grandchildren, and your family, you know what to do.
If you can vote early, then do it. If you wait until November 5 to vote, do it then.
And when you vote, you know what to do.
Now do it.
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