Donald Trump has chosen sides
At 7:57 p.m. tonight, Donald Trump shared three images back-to-back in the same minute that said more about the future of the United States than any speech he could have given. In all three, he stood beside Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the first, they walked shoulder to shoulder down a ceremonial red carpet, presented as equals. In the second, Xi and Trump both appeared composed, confident, and comfortable, standing together before an arch projecting a private moment shared between friends. The third image was unlike the others and the most concerning of them all. In it, Donald Trump stands behind Xi in the black-and-white photo, with his face drooping and confusion in his eyes. He looks diminished. Meanwhile, Xi is radiating power and energy. He’s smiling. He looks sharp. He looks like a leader in control. It was an odd way to flatter Xi if that was his intent. Or possibly Trump didn’t see it that way. Maybe the impairments he is experiencing make him believe he too looks powerful in the picture?
But the photographs themselves almost don’t matter. They could have been smiling together over dinner, playing golf, or shaking hands at a summit, and the conclusion would have been exactly the same. What mattered wasn’t the composition of the pictures. It was what they represented. The President of the United States once again chose to publicly align himself with one of the world’s most powerful authoritarian leaders while continuing to alienate the democratic allies who have stood beside America for generations.
Because earlier today, he also shared a different type of image. One with him seated at his desk in the Oval Office, with European Leaders, who used to be our closest allies, seated in front of him. The image is from 2025, but it had been altered to once again antagonize some of our closest allies. He mocked Canada, taunted Greenland, and threatened Cuba and Venezuela by replacing the original display in the picture with a map showing Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela covered by the American flag as if it were American territory.
He posted this image with the American flag draped over land that does not belong to us, to once again test the waters to see how far he can push threats of military action and territorial conquest before someone finally makes him stop. Piece by piece, Donald Trump is reshaping what the United States represents to the rest of the world. For 250 years, despite all of our flaws and all of our failures, America was at least supposed to stand on the side of democracy against authoritarianism. Tonight, that’s no longer true. For the first time in our history, the United States is on the wrong side of history. We’re no longer the country that eventually comes to help. Or the country that was always working to be better. We’re becoming the country standing beside the dictators.
Nothing he posted was accidental, and it was not a diplomatic strategy being played out over a longer timeline that we cannot see. This is who he is. This is who he has always been. He praised Vladimir Putin while Russia bombed civilians in Ukraine. He exchanged letters with Kim Jong Un and told the world they “fell in love.” He called Viktor Orbán “a true friend” and “a winner” while Orbán was dismantling press freedom and consolidating power across Hungary. He has called Xi Jinping “one of the World’s Great Leaders.” And tonight, three photographs, posted in the same minute, showing the President of the United States beside the leader of a country that crushed democratic movements in Hong Kong, targeted an entire ethnic minority into internment camps, and built the most advanced surveillance state in human history.
These are not random friendships. These are the men the President of the United States chooses to align himself with. The men he admires. The men he wants standing beside him when the world is watching. The men he wants history to remember him alongside.
Donald Trump doesn’t fill his social media feeds with carefully staged photographs of himself alongside the leaders of thriving democracies. He doesn’t post black-and-white legacy portraits with the people defending democratic institutions or protecting a free press. He posts them with the dictators, the authoritarians, and the fascists. And there is a reason for that. Democratic leaders increasingly want nothing to do with him. They see exactly who he is. They see what many Americans are only beginning to recognize. They know he does not see authoritarianism as something to resist. He sees it as something to emulate.
The democratic world has already made its assessment. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has openly rebuked him. French President Emmanuel Macron warned European allies that the United States could betray Ukraine. NATO leaders had to strategize about how to protect their countries from an American president they no longer believe is acting in the interest of the democratic world. They are not treating us as a partner anymore. They are treating us as a threat to manage. Because we have become one.
And while Donald Trump was posting those photographs tonight, the rest of us were still trying to process another series of ICE killings. Another family grieving. Another community searching for answers. Another round of official statements insisting the agents had no choice. Another set of names that most Americans will never hear because the news cycle has already moved on. This has become the rhythm of our country. Violence. Denial. Forgetting. And then it happens again.
Earlier today, I had one of those moments where I genuinely couldn’t catch my breath. I was reading about the latest ICE killings and thinking about the victims, their families, and the people still being held in inhumane conditions inside detention centers. And for a moment, the weight of all of it became almost unbearable. I allowed myself to stop thinking like a writer gathering facts and started thinking only like an American trying to understand what we’ve become.
This is happening on our watch. In our country. Our government is killing people who were simply on their way to work. People who weren’t even the ones they were looking for. Families are waking up to phone calls that will change the rest of their lives forever. And while all of that grief was unfolding, the President of the United States spent his evening posting glamour shots with one of the world’s most powerful dictators.
I know I’m not the only one carrying this feeling tonight. I know so many of us are struggling to reconcile the country we believed we were with the country we’re becoming. Not because America has always gotten it right. It hasn’t. We built this nation on slavery. We imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps. We have committed atrocities against Native Americans, looked away during genocides, and too often arrived far too late when the world needed us. But despite all of that, I still believed we were a country trying, however imperfectly, to move toward something better. Toward more freedom. More democracy. More justice.
That’s why this feels so different. Not because all of us chose this. We didn’t. Millions of Americans are fighting against it every single day. But it is still our country. And for the first time in my lifetime, I find myself looking at the United States the way we’ve so often looked at other countries throughout history, wondering how ordinary people lived through something like this while feeling powerless to stop it. How so many stood by and let it happen.
Every authoritarian regime in modern history has eventually built a force loyal not to the constitution but to the leader. A force that operates outside normal law, answers to no independent authority, and uses violence to enforce compliance. In Nazi Germany, it was the SA and later the SS. In Haiti under the Duvaliers, it was the Tonton Macoutes. In Iran under the Shah, it was the SAVAK. In Romania, it was Ceaușescu’s Securitate. The pattern never changes. The force begins by targeting the most vulnerable, the people with the least power to fight back. And once the public tolerates that, it expands to anyone who resists.
That is what ICE has become under Donald Trump. Not an immigration agency. A domestic enforcement arm that operates without body cameras, conducts raids in unmarked vehicles with agents who do not identify themselves, kills people who were not even its targets, and pressures witnesses into leaving the country. And when it is challenged, the government lies, deflects, and blames others for the lack of oversight it never wanted in the first place.
We can’t let ourselves think, even for a moment, that what is happening is just confusion or incompetence. This isn’t just a man with cognitive decline or someone simply being manipulated by his enablers. We have to accept something far more disturbing. Donald Trump has chosen a side. And it isn’t ours or our country. It isn’t the side of democracy. It isn’t the side of our allies. It isn’t the side of the people risking their lives to defend freedom. He has chosen the side of the dictators, the authoritarians, and the strongmen. The men who imprison dissenters, silence journalists, crush opposition movements, and rule through fear. Those are the leaders he admires. Those are the leaders he wants standing beside him. Those are the leaders he believes history should remember him with.
But his choice doesn’t have to be our choice. Because his dreams of unchecked authoritarian rule are meeting more roadblocks than he bargained for. Today, Senate Democrats blocked the $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act. That bill has passed every single year for more than six decades. It is one of the most consistently bipartisan pieces of legislation in American history. Today, Democrats broke that tradition because the situation demanded it. The vote was fifty to forty-six. It fell short of the sixty needed to advance. The bill could still pass in some form later in the process, but what happened today has never happened before. In the sixty-six years this bill has existed, no Senate has ever failed to advance it to debate. Democrats did not kill the NDAA. They used the only leverage they had to force a reckoning over a war the president never asked them to authorize. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer was direct: “Trump started this war without authorization, without a strategy, and without an exit.” Senator Chris Murphy called it what it is: an authorization for a war nobody in this country wants. Democrats also objected to provisions that would deepen the integration of the United States and Israeli militaries without debate, and to the administration’s push to balloon military spending while programs that serve American families are being gutted.
Congress has voted multiple times on war powers resolutions to halt hostilities. The administration has ignored every one. So today, Democrats used the only tool powerful enough to force the question. They did not write a letter. They did not issue a statement. They voted. And the line held.
And in Wisconsin, a bipartisan elections commission voted five to one to find probable cause that Elon Musk violated state election bribery laws during the 2025 Supreme Court race. Wisconsin law bans offering anything of value exceeding one dollar to induce someone to vote. Musk and his America PAC dangled million-dollar prizes in front of ordinary voters who signed a petition and participated in the election. He showed up in Green Bay, handed out giant novelty checks on stage, and spent more than twenty million dollars trying to flip the court in what became the most expensive judicial election in American history. The candidate he backed lost by ten points.
But the winners were never chosen at random. America PAC’s own director admitted under oath in a separate case that the recipients were vetted and selected based on their “suitability to be spokespeople.” One of the Wisconsin winners was the chairman of the state’s College Republicans, with ties to multiple campaigns and to Turning Point USA. He was not a lucky voter. He was a Republican operative handed a million dollars on stage. The ordinary people who signed up believing they had a real chance got nothing but their personal information harvested. A class action fraud lawsuit is now underway, a federal judge has ordered Musk to testify under oath, and the Brown County District Attorney has forty days to decide whether to bring criminal charges against the richest man on the planet for trying to buy an American election with a rigged lottery disguised as democracy.
That referral did not come from Congress or from a federal court. It came from a bipartisan state commission doing exactly what the founders built state-level institutions to do when the federal system fails.
We are on the wrong side of history right now. But we are not at the point of no return. Trump has made his choice, but he does not get to make ours. Across this country, in ways large and small, people are deciding that his version of America is not theirs. He will be remembered for the dictators he embraced. We will be remembered for what we did to stop him. 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: We are melting with high temperatures and high humidity here in San Diego, so there has been a lot of hanging out on the couch and trying to stay cool.
Sources:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5967878-senate-democrats-block-ndaa/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/14/politics/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court-1-million-checks
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5941842-musk-america-pac-lawsuit/
https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/russia-at-war/macron-says-chance-us-will-betray-ukraine/
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/23/nx-s1-5868599/senate-iran-war-powers-resolution
As someone watching from the UK, I cry every day for America and the world.
We will never be on the wrong side of history.
The victor can be on the wrong side and the loser on the right. It has to do with morality. It is the republicans who will be judged by future generations as amoral and corrupt, and hopefully some will be behind bars.