Donald Trump can hear the clock ticking

Tomorrow, Donald Trump turns 80. On the eve of his long-awaited birthday celebration at the White House, the President of the United States spent another day at his golf club, paid for by the American people. And somewhere between swings and golf cart rides beneath the cloudy sky, he decided to share an update on the Iran war, telling the world that a deal would be signed tomorrow, on his birthday, and that the Strait of Hormuz would immediately be opened.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he warned the world that if Iran didn’t do what he wanted, he threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on Iran. Writing on Truth Social, Trump declared: “Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This is where we are as a country. The president turns 80 tomorrow and is throwing a UFC cage match on the lawn of the White House, and the day before, he threatened to start a nuclear war. In barely a year and a half, this is what Donald Trump has turned America into. This is what the presidency has become. This is how far we have fallen.

Tomorrow is not only his birthday. It is also Flag Day, a day meant to honor the flag and the country it is supposed to stand for. He has chosen to mark both by turning the people’s house into a fighting arena with “The Claw,” built and ready for the UFC event, which he has wrapped in patriotic language ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary.

Over the past 24 hours, he even allowed fighters to climb the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and face off for the cameras as part of a UFC press conference. They pushed each other and traded insults in the same place where Marian Anderson stood on Easter Sunday in 1939 and sang “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” to a crowd of 75,000 people.

Anderson performed there only after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing at Constitution Hall because she was Black. The decision was so shameful that Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization in protest. That is the stage they chose for a fight promotion.

The same steps where, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a quarter of a million people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and told this country he had a dream, speaking of the promissory note the founders had written and never honored, with Lincoln watching over his shoulder.

The same steps where King had stood six years before that, in 1957, at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and called on this country to give us the ballot, one of the first national cries of the voting rights movement.

Before the same monument that was dedicated on Memorial Day in 1922, with President Warren Harding speaking and Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s own surviving son, in attendance, at a ceremony so segregated that the Black Americans who came to honor the man who freed their grandparents were roped off and seated in a separate section, away from the white guests.

And the same steps where, in May of 1970, in the dead of night and the depths of the Vietnam War, just days after the National Guard shot and killed students at Kent State, a sitting president, Richard Nixon, walked out before dawn to face the young antiwar protesters who had gathered there to demand that he end the killing.

For nearly a century, when Americans needed a place to stand and demand that this country live up to its own promises, they came to Lincoln’s feet to do it. This time, men came there to sell a pay-per-view at the president’s request.

It was the first time in this nation’s history that a national monument had been used to stage a UFC press conference. Behind them sat the statue of Abraham Lincoln, a president shot and killed for holding this country together. In front of him stood Dana White, the head of the UFC, a longtime friend of Donald Trump and one of his most devoted allies.

None of this is out of character. One year ago, on his last birthday, he transformed the 250th anniversary of the United States Army into a military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C. Tanks rolled past the monuments. Soldiers marched in formation. Aircraft crossed overhead. The official occasion was the Army’s birthday. It just happened to coincide with his own.

This year, the spectacle looks different. The details change. The pattern doesn’t. The occasion is always supposed to be about the country. The celebration somehow always becomes about him because Donald Trump doesn’t experience America as something larger than himself. Every institution, holiday, national symbol, and historic anniversary eventually becomes a stage, backdrop, and prop in the story he is trying to tell about his own importance.

It is the behavior of a man who desperately wants to leave his mark on history, yet fails to understand that the greatest presidents were remembered precisely because they understood the story was never supposed to be about them.

And if the spectacle were the whole story, we could almost look away. But the cage on the lawn is not the story. It is the cover. It is the visible peak of something much larger and much more deliberate that has been underway for a year and a half while so much of the country was looking somewhere else.

To build himself a ballroom, he tore down the East Wing of the White House. He gutted USAID, the agency that carried American food, medicine, and goodwill into some of the poorest corners of the world. He has spent the last year dismantling the Department of Education piece by piece, firing staff, transferring programs, and openly working toward its closure. He has renamed institutions, rewritten traditions, reshaped federal agencies around personal loyalty, and treated public property as if it were an extension of his own brand. He has stamped his name on buildings, on military projects, on government initiatives, and now we are told he wants his face on our currency.

We do not need to list every single example tonight. The accumulation is the point; the strategic destruction of our country. None of these decisions stands alone. Together, they tell the same story. A story about a man who inherited institutions he did not build, traditions he did not create, and alliances he did not earn, and who has spent his presidency taking a wrecking ball to them so he can rewrite the American story with himself at the center of every page as though he were responsible for the greatness of a nation that existed for more than 240 years before he ever took office. As though the sacrifices, innovations, victories, and struggles of generations of Americans were merely a prelude to his arrival.

He tears down what generations before him built and calls it restoration. He hollows out institutions and calls it reform. He turns public monuments into stages, public service into branding, and government into spectacle. And then he throws a party in the middle of the rubble and demands applause.

He is a scam artist. He always has been. And this is how it always works with men like him. They promise simple solutions to complex problems. They sell the fantasy. They take what they can while the selling is good. And they leave the wreckage for everyone else.

And there is a reason he is going so hard on all of this right now. So why now? Why the cage, the parade, the monuments, the constant need to carve his name into everything that does not belong to him? Why throw all of it at the wall at once?

Because he can feel the clock running out. Both clocks.

Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reported yesterday that a longtime friend of the president says he privately admits he “can hear the clock ticking,” that he knows the window he has left is finite. Earlier this year, New York Magazine reported that after watching Jimmy Carter lie in state at the Capitol, Trump turned to the people around him and said that within ten years, that would be him. This is a man turning 80 tomorrow who has started counting and does not like the number.

And so he is throwing everything at it. The legacy he cannot earn, he is trying to manufacture. The greatness he was never capable of achieving, he is trying to print, pour, pave, and build into existence before time runs out.

And that is the motivation behind so much of Trump’s chaos. His need for attention. His obsession with spectacle. The constant crises. The endless stream of executive orders. The monuments. The ballroom. The parades. The UFC cage on the White House lawn. It all serves the same purpose. It keeps the spotlight fixed exactly where he wants it, on himself.

And the people surrounding him love it. Because while everyone is staring at the spectacle, they are free to reshape the country behind the curtain. While the cameras are focused on Trump’s latest performance, agencies are dismantled, protections disappear, public institutions are hollowed out, and power quietly changes hands. Trump gets the applause, the headlines, and the birthday celebrations. The people around him get something far more valuable: cover.

That is why it is so dangerous to dismiss all of this as vanity. Vanity is part of it. But it is also a distraction. Every strongman throughout history has understood the value of spectacle. Keep the public focused on the performance, and they are less likely to notice what is happening backstage. The parade is not the point. The cage is not the point. The monument is not the point. The point is what becomes possible while everyone is looking at those things instead of what is being taken away from them. Trump gets to play emperor. The people around him get to build the empire.

And maybe this is bringing about a range of emotions for you, like it is for me. Frustrated, hurt, and deep sadness for our country. Because future generations deserve better. They deserved to be able to see the East Wing. They deserved to know how it was built, and what was housed in it, and to stand inside it the way people stood inside it for more than a century. It was not his to destroy. None of it was. The White House, the monuments, the institutions, the standing this country spent generations earning in the world, none of it belonged to him. It belongs to all of us, and to the children who come after us. All of the things he destroyed were the legacy each generation before left for the next, and he has treated that inheritance like a man rifling through someone else’s attic, taking what flatters him, discarding what doesn’t, and leaving the rest broken on the floor behind him.

It is disgusting, trashy, and embarrassing. Our allies are watching this in horror, and our enemies are laughing at our demise, and neither can believe this is what the United States of America has allowed itself to become.

And I keep coming back to the same hard question. How is anyone still defending this? Not the enablers in his orbit who are getting rich off of him. And the politicians using him for proximity to power, I understand exactly what they are doing. The everyday people, the ones who work hard, who pay taxes out of every single paycheck to fund all of this, as their own situations are harmed by what he is doing. Have they just decided the cruelty is their favorite part? That watching people they dislike suffer is worth any cost they themselves might pay? Because it is hard to understand what else explains it. Their groceries cost more. Their healthcare is more uncertain. Their children inherit less. Their communities are weaker. Yet as long as someone they dislike is hurt first, they seem willing to accept almost any sacrifice.

Maybe that’s what I keep coming back to. We are not looking at politics the same way they are. We are the ones thinking about what comes next. We are the ones thinking about legacy. We are the ones thinking about what kind of country will be left behind when all of these politicians are gone, and what future generations will inherit from us, both the good and the bad. We understand that every decision we make today becomes someone else’s reality tomorrow. Every institution we protect, every right we defend, every truth we preserve becomes part of the inheritance we leave behind. I will never understand how anyone can look at everything that has happened, everything that is still happening, and decide that none of it matters. I will never understand how anyone can turn away from what is right in front of them while convincing themselves they are protecting the future, when so much of what they are supporting is taking that future apart piece by piece.

That is where we are tonight, but it’s not where we have to stay. In honor of Donald Trump’s birthday, I’m going to take my economic protest up to a whole new level. I’ve still been doing it, trying to make sure that what I spend does not go to anyone who is enabling this. It is not easy. I will be the first to tell you it is not always possible. So if you do not have that same flexibility, that is okay. We are all doing the best we can. But where we can, we move our money away from the people funding this, and we move it toward the people fighting it.

I am also going to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday by giving “gifts” of financial support to the people speaking out against him. I know firsthand how important that kind of support is. Your paid memberships are what allow me to keep growing and reaching more people. Because of you, I’ve been able to add videos and a podcast so that these posts reach people in whatever format they prefer to receive the information. Thank you for being part of the resistance.

And as I always say, please think beyond me. For Trump’s birthday, support the other people posting every single night, the independent journalists, the investigators, and the content creators on social media. If they have a paid membership, please consider joining theirs too. And if you cannot afford to, please support their work in other ways. It all helps keep them stay in the fight for as long as it takes to bring our country back.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump turns 80 and is throwing himself a party on the people’s lawn, trying to outrun a clock he can finally hear. It is our job to remind him that this country does not belong to him. That it never did. That the real idea of America, the one worth saving, is meant to outlive every single person who ever holds power, including him. He is counting down his own time. We are fighting for something that is supposed to last forever. The next 250 years do not belong to Donald Trump. They belong to us, and nothing will ever change that. 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: A banana split. It has been years since I've had one, and it did not disappoint. I needed something to distract myself from the circus he is turning the White House into.

Sources:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-13/trump-says-deal-with-iran-to-reopen-hormuz-to-be-signed-sunday
https://www.c-span.org/event/news-conference/ufc-fighters-hold-press-conference-from-lincoln-memorial/443996
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/eleanor.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/05/28/trump-250-bill-pushed-by-treasury-appointees/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-birthday-age-health/687525/