After a security scare earlier in the day that left members of the White House press corps locked down inside the briefing room, reporters were given just two minutes’ warning before Donald Trump and his friend, UFC president and CEO Dana White, appeared for a bizarre press conference at 4:40 this afternoon.
Over the next 35 minutes, the president of the United States made one absurd statement after another, including suggesting that we impeach the people who ran the Vietnam War, a war that ended more than 50 years ago and whose leaders are now dead. He said this after he was asked about supporting Pete Hegseth even after articles of impeachment were introduced against him. “What about impeaching the people that ran the Vietnam War?” is what Donald Trump said, apparently thinking he was making a very compelling argument.
He also called a sitting member of Congress a “stone-cold loser” and once again attacked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, calling her and her network losers because he didn’t like or want to answer her question. He also told the journalists sitting right in front of him that Dana White would be an interesting press secretary, then insinuated that there could be one small issue: White might eventually “beat the hell out of you.” He said that inside the room named after James Brady, the press secretary who was seriously wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan.
He even went on to admit that he had lied to the American people when he posted about wanting Dana White to be his new White House press secretary in the first place. He said he wasn’t seriously considering White for the job at the time. He said he posted it because, “We were having a very bad press day.”
The president of the United States, a position that once carried enormous weight and standing around the world, stood inside the White House and admitted that he lied to the American people because he wanted attention. And now we’re all stuck living with the consequences, in a world being upended and destabilized by a president who does not seem to understand the gravity of the position he holds or the weight his words carry. Which begs the question: What else would he say or do simply because he doesn’t like the news coverage he’s getting?
While Trump was spending the day with his friend and embarrassing the country with his bizarre performance, his administration and presidency were continuing to fall apart all around him.
Brett Shumate, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, submitted his resignation today, making him the fourth senior Justice Department official to resign since the crushing midterm elections. According to CBS News, his departure may be tied to criticism from Stephen Miller that Shumate was not aggressive enough in his defense of the administration’s legal agenda.
It is not normal to have people leave like this, and his department, the Civil Division, had already been struggling to recruit attorneys, offering signing bonuses of up to twenty-five thousand dollars just to fill positions that were emptying out faster than they could be replaced. The kind of people who would normally be in these positions have no doubt spent the last two years watching what has been happening to those already working inside this administration as they get overruled, attacked, and pushed aside. It’s hard to imagine anyone, especially those who would normally want to work in the Civil Division, looking at everything happening inside this Justice Department and thinking this is somewhere they want to build their career.
There was even an interview released with Calley Means, a former senior White House adviser who worked closely with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Make America Healthy Again scam, where he sat down with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation. Means resigned from his position late last month, and what he described happening inside the White House makes everything we have been watching unfold make even more sense in a very disturbing way.
When Means was asked how decisions were made inside the White House, he said that Trump often received what he called “severe, poor advice” from people who “treated him like a baby in many respects and used him.” He also said that Trump didn’t always have the full picture of what was happening, saying, “They would block access to and information to him all the time.”
He said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if staffers who bring Trump complicated issues are having very short conversations with him, getting an “OK, whatever” in response, and then turning around and claiming, “the president wants this.” In other words, according to someone who worked inside his White House, people around the president were able to control what information reached him and then could be using his brief responses to justify decisions they wanted to make anyway.
We are seeing a further unraveling of what political collapse often looks like from the inside. The experienced officials leave and they are replaced by unqualified loyalists. For a president who went into his second term vowing not to make the same personnel mistakes again because he blamed so many of the problems he faced during his first presidency on the people who left his administration and later turned against him, this week marks an even larger failure and more trouble for Donald Trump.
It has been over two years since the night Donald Trump was reelected, when so many of us knew this was going to get bad, but maybe the thing that has been the most surprising is not the cruelty of his decisions or even the scale of the damage and how far it has reached around the world. Maybe it’s the mockery. The sheer, relentless mockery he has made of the presidency, the White House, and spaces like what was once the Rose Garden or the entire East Wing that he tore down. Even the Brady Briefing Room, where the government is supposed to answer to the people it serves. To imagine back then that Donald Trump would one day use that space as a stage for a UFC promoter to answer questions from the media while the president thought it was funny to tell a room full of journalists that his friend might beat them up.
We are continuing to watch a presidency in free fall. His Secretary of Defense facing an impeachment vote, possibly on Veterans Day of all days. Department officials leaving. His chief of staff abandoning him and being replaced by a man that members of the president’s own party have called the “worst of all possible choices.” And then a former member of his administration going on national television and telling the world that the president is managed like a child by the people around him.
Maybe the worst part is that this is not going to get better. Desperate people do desperate things, and Donald Trump has shown us, over and over, that he will do whatever he believes is necessary to hold on to power and, possibly even more importantly for him, attention. He wants to be the center of attention and will do any and all things to get it. The rallies where crowds cheered for him are gone, and he is now resorting to bringing his friends into the briefing room to recreate that feeling. Things never get better for Trump, the people around him, or the people in this country whenever he is the president. We have years now to fall back on to see what he is capable of.
But that doesn’t mean we give up. As much as he has shown us about who he is, we have learned just as much about ourselves. There are more people finally seeing through all of his propaganda. Just this past weekend, I had a conversation with a Trump holdout. Although they still believe much of the propaganda he has pushed, they also said that the election results were not surprising. “Nobody likes Donald Trump. Nobody.” That might be an exaggeration, because people clearly still do, but what they meant was that in their circle of die-hard loyalists, the tide has turned. People are sick of what he is doing and how he is doing it. They are done with this love of chaos and want someone capable and less consumed with himself to be in charge.
This is the time for us to buckle down and really dig in where Trump has created cracks with these people. They are vulnerable to either being swept back up by Trump or brought over to the right side of history. We’ve already been fighting and resisting for years now. We can finish this fight once and for all. We have two years to do it, and if there is one thing I know for sure about us, it’s this: We don’t give up and we are not starting now. 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: I guess I’m not the only one who needs a little Christmas right now. There were a lot of other stories to cover today, including the Chinese spy and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and how Trump immediately started defending him and even said he wouldn’t mention it to Xi Jinping, just to name one. I’m waiting for this one to play out a bit more to see what else we learn, other than that Huang admitted to an affair. It feels like we have lost so much more than just the top layer of standards and accountability in this country. Even a decade ago, this would have been a much larger story with immediate consequences. Now it’s not even a major headline. I’m mostly focused on Hegseth’s impeachment. I listened to hours of coverage today, and I’m cautiously optimistic it could actually happen.
Links to sources used in writing this article:
President Trump Delivers Remarks, Nov. 9, 2026: YouTube Video
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-lawyer-justice-department-civil-division-brett-shumate-resigns/
https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/11/06/2-justice-department-officials-resign-wake-midterm-elections/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calley-means-white-house-health-and-human-services-rfk-jr/
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/stephen-miller-gop-reaction-chief-staff
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-horror-at-stephen-millers-promotion-leaks
https://www.dailysignal.com/?p=257677
https://www.fox5vegas.com/2026/11/05/house-could-vote-next-week-impeach-hegseth-gop-support-wavers/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-ballroom-east-wing-demolition
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/donald-trump-white-house-redesign-2704816
“His secretary of defense facing an impeachment vote, possibly on Veterans Day.” Wow. May the nightmares end soon.
Here's a totally far fetched scenario. Next time, and there will surely be a next time he says something threatening to the press about their reporting, or anything else, they all stand up as one, and walk out. What would he do without his audience, start chewing the carpet?