Donald J. Trump is losing it all
After spending much of the day at his golf course in Jupiter, Florida, the President of the United States abruptly disappeared from the course just after 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. Without warning or explanation to the press traveling with him, he was quickly ushered into his presidential motorcade, with a reporter noting he was wearing a white shirt and a baseball cap when he was last seen through the window of the car before it pulled away.
With his health visibly declining for months, speculation immediately began to swirl, with early questions pointing to a possible medical emergency. And when reporters pressed for answers, a White House staffer dismissed the growing concerns entirely, saying he had simply been taken to a local dentist, on a Saturday, for what was described as a “planned visit” that had not appeared anywhere on his official schedule.
And this would not be the only moment this weekend where something happened out in the open for all to see, only to be explained away afterward as something else entirely.
If the dentist trip really was as routine as the White House wanted us to believe, the explanation would have been simple. He broke a crown. He needed an implant adjusted. He was overdue for a cleaning. Saturday made sense because the office was empty. He preferred a dentist he trusted in Florida. All of that would be reasonable. None of it would require any of this.
But none of that is what happened. The pool reporter, Annie Linskey of the Washington Post, was not even allowed to see him. There was no name given for the dentist. No description of what was performed. No statement from his physician. The trip was not on the public schedule, but the White House also called it “planned.” Both of those things cannot be true. And the White House facility that has housed a fully equipped dental operatory since the Hoover administration, the same one Joe Biden used for a root canal, sat unused.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist at George Washington University Hospital and a CNN medical analyst who was Dick Cheney’s physician, said what most of us were already thinking. “There’s been such lack of candor about the health of the president that even a visit to the dentist raises questions.” That is not a partisan reading or posturing. It is what it looks like when the White House decides the public no longer gets to know basic facts about the man in the Oval Office.
And we have been watching this for months. The bruised hands tucked under the other hand at meetings. The shorter walks. The sitting through events he used to stand for. The pauses to catch his breath. The cabinet meetings where he nodded off in the middle of remarks from his own appointees. The droopy face on bad days. The strange staring spells. We see all of it.
And the reason for the secrecy and deception is that they want us to stop trusting our own eyes. The same White House that calls itself the most transparent in history is the one telling us to ignore what is right in front of us. And that is the deeper strategy here, the one that goes beyond any single weekend or any single visit. When a regime convinces you not to trust your own perception, you stop trusting yourself. And once you stop trusting yourself, you stop trusting the people next to you. That is how shared reality breaks and how a country comes apart. Through the slow erosion of the simple agreement that what we are looking at together is real.
And it was not just the deception around the dentist. It was part of a larger pattern, one designed to distort what we see in front of us and erode the line between truth and fiction and right and wrong.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision that gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed to protect Black Americans from having their votes diluted through gerrymandered districts. Justice Kagan, writing in dissent, said the ruling rendered the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.”
The reaction from Republican-controlled states was immediate. By Thursday, Louisiana’s Republican governor had suspended the May 16 House primary, even though early voting had already started and absentee ballots had already been cast. Those ballots will not be counted. By Friday, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were calling special sessions to redraw their congressional maps. Florida approved new maps within hours of the ruling. The estimates suggest as many as twenty new Republican-leaning House seats could be drawn before November, most of them by dismantling the majority-Black districts the Voting Rights Act was created to protect.
And the president clearly has this ruling on his mind, thinking about how he can use it to his advantage, posting about it on Truth Social today. He used the same playbook of reality manipulation to make it sound reasonable to demand that Louisiana voters be forced to “vote twice.” He wrote that elections cannot be conducted “unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures.” The convenience he was dismissing was the right of Louisiana voters who had already mailed in their ballots not to have their votes thrown away. He was telling them that their ballots did not matter. That they would have to come back and vote a second time, under a redrawn map, because the first map produced an outcome the Republican Party did not want.
That is a sitting President, using language that sanitizes what is happening, directing state legislatures to throw out ballots already cast and force voters back to the polls under maps drawn to erase Black representation in Congress. This sounds dangerously close to rigging an election through last-minute gerrymandering.
He also spent the day demanding that Hakeem Jeffries be impeached. Jeffries had called the Supreme Court “illegitimate” after the Voting Rights Act ruling. Trump declared this an impeachable offense. The hypocrisy here is so clean it almost writes itself. Just two months ago, when the same Supreme Court ruled against him on tariffs, Trump unleashed a rambling Truth Social tirade calling the Court “ransacked,” “weaponized,” and “a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.” Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter called it one of the most incendiary attacks on the Court in memory. The pattern is clear. The Court is sacred when it rules for him. The Court is corrupt when it does not. Anyone who agrees with him gets to say it. Anyone who disagrees should be removed.
Buried in that same post was a line worth paying attention to. “They’ll be doing this to me.” It was easy to miss, but it tells us exactly how he is thinking about all of this. He is not talking about Jeffries or Democrats in the abstract. He is talking about what happens if they take back the House in November.
Because if Democrats regain control, impeachment is back on the table. Not as a symbolic gesture, but as a real and immediate threat to his power. Hearings. Subpoenas. Investigations that are no longer blocked by a Republican majority willing to protect him. And this time, the stakes are higher. This is not just about being impeached again. It is about the possibility of removal.
And that is what changes everything. Because removal would strip away the protection of the presidency. It would leave him exposed to everything that has been waiting. The civil lawsuits. The growing weight of the Epstein files and the people connected to them. And the very real possibility of criminal charges that are much harder to contain once he is no longer in office. That is what he is calculating.
So when he talks about forcing voters to “vote twice,” when he embraces a ruling that allows states to redraw maps after ballots have already been cast, when he pushes for outcomes that tilt the system before the votes are even counted, it is not about process or principle. It is about survival. He is afraid of impeachment and all it could lead to.
By Saturday evening, his rage had moved on to comedians and television hosts. In a long, rambling post on Truth Social, he turned his attention to Bill Maher, attacking the HBO host for not being tough enough on Gavin Newsom during a recent interview. Maher had pressed Newsom on California gas prices and the high-speed rail project. Which should have thrilled Trump, but none of it mattered. Trump still unleashed on him.
He called Maher “a weak and ineffective person,” said he was “nervous, scared” when they met at the White House, and mocked him for supposedly asking, “Can I have a drink?” He wrote that Maher was “defenseless, and totally deficient,” that he “choked” the interview, and ended by declaring, “Bill Maher is a MORON.” He demanded that Fox News stop putting him on television entirely. He even worked in a swipe at Jimmy Kimmel along the way, writing that Maher is “slightly more talented than Jimmy Kimmel,” a backhanded jab that took aim at both men in a single sentence. That kind of layered insult is the giveaway. Kimmel was not part of this conversation. He did not need to be mentioned. But Trump cannot help himself. The grudges stack on top of each other, and every post becomes an opportunity to settle multiple scores at once.
Bill Maher is not someone I would normally find myself defending. But this is not about whether I agree with Bill Maher. This is about whether the President of the United States gets to dictate which voices Fox News, or any network, is allowed to put on the air. Because that is exactly what he is trying to do. He did not just insult Maher. He instructed Fox News, in his own words, “DON’T USE BILL MAHER ANY LONGER AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF YOU!” That is a sitting President telling a private television network who to fire. It is the same instinct that drove him to demand ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel last week. The same instinct that pressured CBS into ending the Late Show with Stephen Colbert last year. The same instinct that has now led to the FCC ordering Disney to file its broadcast license renewals years ahead of schedule.
It’s all an attack on the First Amendment. It does not begin with arrests or the shutdown of newsrooms. It begins with a President using his platform to publicly threaten networks until they decide, on their own, that certain voices are not worth the trouble and conclude that putting a particular guest on the air is not worth the federal headache that follows.
That type of math is the entire point. He does not need to ban anyone. He just needs the people who run the networks to do the banning for him. The reason this matters, even when the target is someone like Bill Maher, is that the principle does not bend to whom we like. The First Amendment protects speech we agree with and speech we do not. The minute the President gets to decide who appears on television, none of us are protected. Not the voices we trust or the voices we tolerate.
And it’s not just Trump distorting what is plainly in front of us. The pattern runs through the entire administration, and it was on full display Sunday morning. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sat down with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. He was asked whether minority voters are represented equally in this country. He said yes. Then he pivoted, unprompted, to demanding voter ID.
The exchange went like this. Welker asked him directly: “But the voters see this country differently. According to the latest Gallup poll, 83 percent of Black Americans and 61 percent of white Americans believe that racism is widespread. Does that challenge the idea that there is racial equality?”
Blanche brushed it off, saying the Supreme Court is not allowed to make decisions based on polling. Welker pressed again: “The root of the Voting Rights Act was to make sure people were treated equally, equal rights when it came to voting and representation. Doesn’t that weaken the ultimate goal?”
And here is where Blanche delivered the line, as if what he was saying was fact and made complete sense: “The fact that we are talking about this decision from the Supreme Court, which is just a constitutional decision, when what we should be talking about is that there’s a lot of things that we can be doing, like voter ID. Like every time you walk into a restaurant or a club, you have to show your ID, how about you have to show your ID to vote? That’s not, that’s not anything that’s crazy. And that’s what we should be talking about.”
He said, “Every time you walk into a restaurant or a club, you have to show your ID.” But that is not true. Nobody checks your ID at restaurants. That is not how restaurants work. Most of America was sitting on their couches Sunday morning, saying out loud, “What is he talking about?” And Kristen Welker, a careful, respected journalist on the country’s most-watched political show, let it pass. She should have clarified. Did he mean checking age when ordering alcohol? Or was he really trying to normalize a police state where ID checks at restaurants are not just happening, but acceptable?
This was another missed moment by legacy media. They are so worried about access and staying on the administration’s good side that they cannot push back when an official says something that is categorically untrue. The acting Attorney General lied on national television. He compared a lie to a thing that does not happen, in defense of restricting the right to vote. And it was allowed to stand.
What we saw this weekend was the systematic destruction of the three pillars that hold up a free country: the courts, the elections, and the press. We are watching all three be attacked at the same time. The courts are being weaponized against voter rights and protections. The elections are being rewritten mid-stream, with ballots thrown out and maps redrawn to manufacture a House majority before November. And the media is being squeezed from every direction, with comedians threatened and the President repeatedly attacking anyone who dares ask him a question he does not want to answer or anyone who refuses to agree with him. He sees the press as threats to his power and operatives ready to humiliate him.
These are not separate stories. They are connected. And underneath all of them is the First Amendment, the load-bearing wall of the entire structure. If the press goes, the rest follows. There is no functioning democracy without journalists who can do their work without being threatened by the state. And that is exactly what this regime understands, which is why they are coming for it now, while they still can, before voters get to render a verdict in November.
What we must do is keep building an alternative media that is harder for them to touch and control. I made the decision to keep all of my content free and never behind a paywall in anticipation of exactly what Trump is doing right now. I am funded entirely by readers because I do not want anyone over my shoulder telling me what I can and cannot say.
We are going to have to build a new kind of media. There is no way around that. Trump is systematically destroying the right to free speech and the people who deliver the information that protects it. We need more reporters, not fewer. More investigative work, not less. More of us speaking openly. The way through this is not waiting for the legacy outlets to find their courage. It is building something independent, ours, that is untouchable by a government with authoritarian ambitions.
This is going to take all of us to accomplish, and we have to act fast. We all must have a part in this. From talking about what is really happening, so those not following closely know the danger we are facing. To supporting those who are doing the work to uncover and explain it so that they can keep doing this important work. There is a place for all of us in this resistance. So tonight, take a moment and consider your part. Most of your favorite independent media have a paid option. Support them if a paid subscription does not cause you a financial hardship. Help keep the work available for those who can’t support in this way. And not only mine. Support the others you turn to each day for the truth as well. The other side has deep pockets and the money to drown us out. We might not be able to match their dollars, but collectively we can still be heard and be successful. Every paid subscription is a vote for the kind of media we are going to need to get through what is coming.
If we can keep access to the reality of what is happening in our country alive, we have a very good chance of making sure Trump and his enablers lose at the midterms. We have real numbers on our side to prove it. A new Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll was just released. Trump’s approval is at 37 percent. His disapproval is at 62 percent. That is the worst of his presidency, both terms combined. He is underwater on every single issue measured. Two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. The Iran war, as I said earlier, is at Iraq-and-Vietnam levels of unpopularity. Nearly six in ten Americans now publicly say he does not have the mental sharpness to serve as president. His entire cabinet is underwater. RFK Jr. at minus nineteen. Kash Patel at minus nineteen. Pete Hegseth at minus seventeen. JD Vance at minus thirteen. Marco Rubio at minus seven. The only major figure in the administration’s orbit who is actually liked by the public is Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chair the President has spent months trying to fire.
This is why he is panicking and why we must make sure that every American has access to what is really happening. Because when they do, they are disapproving in huge numbers. And we need to remember that he is not raging on social media because he is winning. He is raging because the floor is collapsing, and he knows it. We can see that with our own eyes, and no amount of spin will cover the reality of what is actually happening. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
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: I couldn’t take my eyes away from the flag this afternoon. A reminder and a symbol of what we are fighting for. The other side has commandeered it as an image of division and blind devotion to a man, but we are closer today than yesterday to restoring what it was always meant to stand for.
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-dental-visit-sparks-health-speculation-from-critics-11909157
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5858012-landry-suspends-louisiana-primary/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5861681-trump-jeffries-impeachment-supreme-court/
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/transcripts/meet-press-may-3-2026-rcna343322
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/28/nx-s1-5802997/fcc-abc-license-renewal-melania-trump-jimmy-kimmel
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/03/trump-approval-ratings-poll/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/01/poll-trump-iran-war-iraq/
Edit: Trump did attend the final day of the Doral golf tournament, but he did not present the trophy. I have corrected the post accordingly.
He's a freakin' mob boss.
"Nice country you got here. Shame if it caught fire, hey".
Bear in mind the British equivalent of Jerome Powell is now the Prime Minister of Canada