Donald is the “GREATEST” presidential failure

At 5:10 p.m. last night, while aboard Air Force One on his way to Texas to campaign for a man who had been impeached by the Texas House on charges that included bribery, corruption, and abuse of office, the President of the United States opened his personal social media platform, Truth Social, and posted a graphic ranking the presidents of the United States. He put himself at the top, declaring himself in a league of his own as, “THE GREATEST.” One level below himself sat George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, classified as merely “GREAT.”

Barack Obama was labeled a “FAILURE.” So were Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Ulysses S. Grant, and Warren Harding. There was no historical argument, just Donald Trump placing Donald Trump above the men who founded the republic, preserved the Union, and led the country through two world wars.

If that had been the only thing he posted, it might have been easy to dismiss it as just another bizarre post from the President of the United States. But it wasn’t. It was just the beginning. Over the next 24 hours, Donald Trump would post and repost more than 60 times, attacking the press, attacking governors, celebrating the gold plating he has been adding across Washington, along with complaints about all sorts of things and made-up wins for himself.

By this morning, he had progressed to reposting a fake image of himself wearing a black suit and dark sunglasses, carrying an assault-style rifle as he walked toward the camera while buildings burned and explosions erupted behind him. Across the top, in giant black letters, it read, “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” The eighty-year-old President of the United States was portraying himself as an action hero, weapon in hand, telling the country that whatever restraint he believes he has shown is apparently over, while also claiming to be the greatest president of all time.

Then he posted another graphic, this time putting himself alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Ronald Reagan as the “FIVE WHO BUILT AMERICA.” According to Trump, Washington gave us our foundation, Lincoln preserved the Union, Jefferson gave us liberty, Reagan gave us strength, and Donald Trump gave us “AMERICA FIRST.” Below them were the “FIVE WHO BROKE IT”: James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.

There was just one problem: in that earlier post, Trump had ranked Woodrow Wilson as one of America’s “GREAT” presidents. Now he was telling us Wilson was one of the five presidents who broke the country. Apparently, sometime overnight, Woodrow Wilson went from being great to helping destroy America.

It would be easy to laugh at the contradiction, but something much more important is happening here. Donald Trump is rewriting American history, putting himself above George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson and telling us that he belongs there. He is counting on people seeing his face next to Washington and Lincoln enough times that eventually it doesn’t seem so strange anymore. Most importantly, he is counting on people believing him simply because he said it.

Donald Trump has spent his entire political life trying to convince people that the truth is whatever he says it is. He needs enough of us to stop checking, questioning, and eventually stop caring whether what we are being told is even true. Yesterday, Woodrow Wilson was “GREAT.” Today, he was one of the five presidents who “BROKE” America. Tomorrow, Trump could tell us something completely different. It doesn’t have to make sense. He just needs enough people to believe whatever version he is telling them at that particular moment.

That might have been the most ridiculous part of his day, if we had only been watching Truth Social. Because while Trump was flooding his feed with fabricated history and fantasies of himself armed and walking through fire, four human beings who had actually traveled farther from Earth than anyone in history were standing on a stage in Houston, waiting for him for nearly a half hour.

The Congressional Space Medal of Honor ceremony at the Johnson Space Center was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. Yet Trump continued posting on social media and didn’t walk onto the stage until 11:27 as “God Bless the USA” played. Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, the crew of Artemis 2, had been standing there waiting for the man who had spent the morning telling the world that he built America.

He opened the event by talking about himself. He described watching the Artemis launch during what he called “a very important meeting with the biggest people in the country, maybe some of the biggest people in the world.” He said the meeting was “a disaster” and “a total waste of time” because everyone stopped to watch Artemis. He claimed his uncle, Dr. John Trump, an MIT physicist who died in 1985, gave him a genetic connection to space: “So I guess we have, genetically, we sort of, I believe in that stuff.” Then he told the people at NASA that the agency had been “absolutely closed” when he took office, with “grass growing out of the cracks in the runway” at Kennedy Space Center. He said this to people who knew otherwise. Serious scientists who have been doing this work for a very long time.

This was supposed to be a ceremony honoring one of the greatest achievements in American science and exploration. But Trump stole the moment and started talking about war and other unrelated special interests of his.

But what had to be the hardest and most heartbreaking moment was when Trump was talking about Commander Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, and how during the Artemis 2 mission, the crew proposed naming a previously unnamed lunar crater “Carroll” after her. Carroll Wiseman was a pediatric nurse practitioner who died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 46. When the crew proposed the name from the far side of the moon, 252,760 miles from Earth, all four astronauts wept. Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen’s voice broke as he said into the radio, “We lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. It’s a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.” It was one of the most profoundly human moments we have all collectively shared.

Today, standing next to the man whose wife that crater honors, Donald Trump said, “I wish they’d named something like that after me, Reid. But I don’t know. I’ll have to get the governor’s approval.”

The room did not laugh, and the astronauts did not react. It was almost as if they had practiced keeping the most stoic, emotionless expressions possible. Trump moved on, because he had already taken what should have been a moment about them and made it about himself. That is what he does because it is all he knows how to do. Even standing in front of four people who had traveled farther from Earth than any human beings in history, he still needed to bring the story back to Donald Trump. He later called the crew currently aboard the International Space Station and told them, “I would not want to do it,” before admitting that going back to his plane was “not very exciting by comparison.”

But here is what stayed with me after the cameras turned off. It was their faces. The scientists. The engineers. The astronauts standing behind him, professional to the last second, showing almost nothing. These are people whose careers his administration has disrupted, whose agencies he has hollowed out, and whose colleagues have been fired or reassigned for political reasons. Yet they stood there and listened as the President of the United States talked about himself, lied about the agency they had devoted their lives to, and even stumbled over words, while telling them that he had helped usher in a new golden age of America.

That took a kind of strength Donald Trump will never understand. Because real strength does not need an AI-generated image of itself holding a rifle while the world burns behind it. Real strength does not need a graphic declaring itself “THE GREATEST.” Real strength does not have to tell us every few hours how strong it is. Sometimes real strength looks like standing quietly on a stage, knowing the truth, and not giving the president the reaction he is hoping for.

I have been thinking a lot lately about a trip I took to Normandy when I was a teenager. I remember standing there looking at row after row of white crosses and Stars of David stretching across perfectly kept green grass and knowing, even at that age, that I was standing somewhere that mattered. I did not understand then what I understand now. I knew what had happened there. I knew Americans had crossed an ocean, stormed those beaches, and that thousands of them never came home. But like most American kids, I had learned the story of World War II mostly from the perspective of how it ended. Hitler was evil. Fascism was defeated. America helped save Europe. The good guys won.

It wasn’t until I was older, when I went back to Europe, that I started asking more questions through the lens of an adult and a travel writer, about everything that came before those crosses at Normandy. I walked through towns in France where atrocities had happened. I traveled through Germany and stood in places where fascism had taken root, operated, and eventually dismantled. Each time, I learned more about a part of the story that I had never really been taught growing up in the United States. How did an entire country get there and let it spread? How did people accept things that seem so obviously horrific to us now? What did ordinary people believe while it was happening? What did they ignore? What did they excuse? What did they convince themselves was normal because accepting the truth would have required them to do something about it? The more I learned, the more I realized that we had been taught the hero version of the story. We were taught what America did to help end fascism. We spent far less time learning how fascism began.

That is the part of history I keep coming back to now. Not because America in 2026 is Germany in 1933. It isn’t. History does not repeat itself that neatly. But because the lesson was never supposed to be that one particular country, at one particular moment, became capable of fascism. The lesson was supposed to be that people can be manipulated, that truth can slowly be replaced by loyalty, that institutions can be weakened while millions of people convince themselves everything is still normal, and that none of us are somehow magically immune simply because we are Americans.

Maybe that has played a much bigger role in how we got here than we want to admit. Americans didn’t suddenly stop caring over the past few decades. Our education failed us, we grew further and further removed from the generations who actually lived through the rise of fascism, and people became exhausted. For the last 25 years, nearly every generation in this country has been living through one crisis after another. People are working two jobs to afford groceries. Parents are trying to raise children inside an attention economy designed to keep all of us scrolling instead of reading. We have lived through wars, a financial collapse, a pandemic, political violence, mass shootings, rising costs, and a technology revolution that has completely changed the way we consume information. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we stopped having the time, energy, and sometimes even the ability to figure out what was true.

September 11th shattered the sense of safety that many Americans had carried as far as outside threats since the end of the Cold War. I know I’m not alone in that I have never felt the same level of safety I felt before that day. Then came two wars whose consequences never truly ended. Then the Great Recession gutted the economy and destroyed the belief that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could build a life. People were just beginning to recover when a global pandemic killed more than a million Americans, isolated us from each other, and broke something in the way we connect. Before we had even processed the grief from that, Trump tried to overturn an election, came back four years later, and began dismantling the government from the inside. Through all of it, the cost of food went up, housing became unaffordable for millions of people, wages did not keep pace, and an entire generation of children grew up inside screens designed to keep them addicted to them rather than teach them anything.

It does not matter if we are Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z. If we have been adults at any point in the last 25 years, we have lived through crisis after crisis with barely enough time to recover from one before the next one began. That does something to people. It makes us tired, weary, and untrusting. It makes it harder to pay attention to everything happening around us when we are already trying to keep our families safe, pay our bills, and make it through another day. Authoritarianism does not need everyone to be ignorant. It just needs enough of us to be too exhausted to pay attention.

That is why we need historians, teachers, librarians, journalists and others to carry the truth. It’s why we need grandparents who sit their grandchildren down and say, “Let me tell you what my mother told me.” We need the stories passed from generation to generation because there are things we understand differently when we hear them from someone who was there, or from someone who loved someone who was. Every generation that passes takes some of that living memory with it, which makes it even more important that we learn these stories, preserve them, and pass them on.

And here is where the warning becomes urgent. Because the people who carried those stories, the last ones with a direct line to the generation that stopped fascism, are running out of time. Many of their parents stormed Normandy. Survived occupation. Came home with nightmares they never fully explained but that shaped every decision they made as mothers and fathers. Those children, now in their 70s and 80s, did not learn about fascism from a book. They learned it from the people who raised them. It was in the air they breathed growing up and in the way an entire household organized itself around the memory of what happens when ordinary people let a strongman take power.

And now they are watching people their own age, people they grew up with and worked alongside for decades, fall for the very thing their parents fought and bled to stop. They are the counter-witnesses. When someone in their generation says “this is fine” or “it cannot happen here,” they are the ones who can look them in the eye and say, “My father told me exactly what this looks like. And this is it.” Their authority does not come from a book. It comes from a parent’s voice. When they are gone, that direct transmission, parent to child, the last living bridge to the generation that stopped fascism the first time, dies with them.

World War II ended almost 81 years ago. And maybe 80 years is the expiration date on warnings carried by human memory. Maybe that is because by then, the people who lived through it are gone, and the people they raised are now entering the later years of their own lives.

But there is a difference this time. For the first time in human history, the record does not have to die with the witnesses. What is written tonight, documented and shared, becomes the living memory for the people who will need it 50 years from now. We have something no previous generation had: the ability to use the internet and social media as a bridge between lived experience and collective memory. The same tools that are being used to spread propaganda can be used to preserve truth. We can use these platforms to amplify the testimonies of people who remember. We have the ability to make sure the warning outlasts the witnesses this time around. But only if we choose to use it that way, to treat the preservation of truth as an act of resistance.

It’s not just for us in the United States either. This is a warning that the entire world needs to hear. To everyone watching from outside the United States, learn from what is happening here. Do not assume your democracy is stronger than ours was. Do not tell yourself it could never happen in your country. Do not believe that once you remove them from power, they will not come back. Look at what is unfolding and understand that timeline.

Not all is lost, though. The courts continue to hold, at least the lower ones are. Today, Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, for the third time, denied Trump’s attempt to move his New York hush money conviction to federal court. In a 35-page ruling, he wrote, “There is no way that discussions regarding hush money payments to cover up the President’s relations with Stormy Daniels could be an official act. An affair, or a cover-up of an affair, is not within the ‘outer perimeter’ of the President’s official responsibilities.” His conviction on 34 felony counts stands. Donald Trump remains the first president in American history convicted of a felony.

That is part of his legacy too. He can post all the graphics he wants declaring himself “THE GREATEST.” He can put his face next to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He can cover Washington in gold and tell us he built America. But he does not get to decide how history remembers him. None of us do. History remembers what we actually did.

I have reminded myself more times than I can count just this past week that consequences eventually catch up to people who do terrible things. Never as quickly as we want them to, and not always in the ways we hoped they would, but nobody gets to rewrite the truth forever. Donald Trump will be remembered for who he really was, not the man in the fake images he wants us to believe he is. What matters now is making sure the truth survives long enough for future generations to know the difference.

That is our job. We need to save the screenshots. Save the articles. Buy the books they are trying to remove. Support the truth tellers while it is happening. Talk to our children and grandchildren about what we saw, what we knew, what we got wrong, and what we did when we finally understood. Tell them the stories our parents and grandparents told us. Write our own stories down. Because someday we will be the grandparents saying, “Let me tell you what happened.” We will be the living memory that eventually becomes history.

Maybe we cannot stop this cycle from ever happening again. Human beings have been repeating versions of it for thousands of years. But we can make sure that with the next generation, more people recognize it and act on it sooner than we did. We can leave them better prepared to question the lies, recognize the warning signs, protect the truth, and stand up before things get this far. That may be one of the most important things we can do right now, and every day, more of us are doing exactly that. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: My two oldest are on the other side of the country, and I’ve been getting picture updates from their adventures. Today’s included these amazing-looking drinks.

Sources used in the writing of this post:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/28/politics/trump-presidential-ranking-maga
https://www.mediaite.com/online/insane-bs-conservatives-and-liberals-alike-baffled-by-trumps-ranking-of-presidents/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-20-articles-of-impeachment-filed-against-texas-attorney-general-paxton-explained
https://www.mediaite.com/online/trump-ripped-by-critics-for-nasa-ceremony-speech-what-the-fck-is-he-talking-about/
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5776440/artemis-moon-crater-carroll-wiseman
https://www.space.com/astronomy/deja-vu-trump-proposes-cutting-nasa-science-funding-by-47-percent-again
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/28/trump-hush-money-federal-court.html
https://us.cnn.com/2026/08/28/politics/trump-hush-money-federal-court-rejected
President Trump Participates in the Congressional Space Medal of Honor Presentation: YouTube Video
President Trump Calls the International Space Station: YouTube Video
https://bnonews.com/whpool
https://www.trumpstruth.org/