Donald Trump is an absolute disaster

At 6:20 PM last night, Donald Trump picked up the phone and made a phone call from the White House that sent shock waves through not just the country, but the entire world. Over the next 45 minutes, he rambled incoherently, told millions of Americans that immigrants are genetically inferior, admitted he has no exit strategy for the war he started other than waiting until he “feels it in his bones,” confessed he doesn’t even know whether the leader of the country he’s bombing is dead or alive, snapped at his friendliest interviewer for quoting his own words back to him, and then, in the middle of all of it, he started talking about how he buys dress shoes for his cabinet members because he doesn’t like when they wear sneakers. It was another reminder of just how vulnerable the entire planet is with someone like him in charge; a man with no plan, no clarity, no impulse control, and no business being anywhere near the decisions that determine whether people live or die. This is what happens when the most dangerous and least qualified person on earth is the President of the United States of America.

During the call, which was recorded to air this morning on the Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox News Radio, Kilmeade brought up a series of violent attacks across the country, including a shooting at Old Dominion University and a vehicle ramming at a synagogue near Detroit. These are real acts of terror on American soil. And when Trump was asked about the people responsible, he didn’t talk about intelligence failures, or radicalization, or the fact that his administration has been gutting the FBI and DOJ of the very counterterrorism experts trained to stop these attacks. Instead, he said this:

“They’re sick people... Others, they just go bad. Something wrong, there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly... they’re not exactly your genetic.” That is the President of the United States, on a phone call from the White House, broadcast to millions of people, telling a white interviewer that the people committing violence in this country don’t share “your genetics.” He separated human beings into genetic categories.

This is a dog whistle. This is eugenics. This is the same framework that sorted human beings into “desirable” and “undesirable” in the early 20th century. The same language that underpinned forced sterilization programs in the United States, programs that targeted Black, Indigenous, disabled, and immigrant communities for decades before Nazi Germany adopted the model and industrialized it. When a head of state begins classifying people by their DNA, publicly, casually, on friendly media, that is not a slip. That is a signal. And every white nationalist watching heard it clearly.

HuffPost’s headline was “Trump Appears To Endorse Eugenics.” The New Republic went with “Trump Tells White Reporter Immigrants Don’t Have ‘Your Genetics.’” NBC, Raw Story, and Yahoo News all ran separate pieces on just this one quote. Because once a president starts telling the public that certain people are genetically inferior, history has shown us exactly what comes next. Every single time.

But the genetics comment wasn’t even the most dangerous thing he said. It was just the most disgusting. The most dangerous part came when Kilmeade asked him a simple, direct question that any wartime president should be able to answer without hesitation: when will you know the war is over?

Trump’s response: “When I feel it... I feel it in my bones.” Kilmeade followed up. Asked if it would be a joint decision, if his advisors would weigh in. Trump said he has “great people,” named a few, and then added: “I convince them all to, let’s do it my way.”

And there it is. No benchmarks or conditions for victory. No timeline or consultation with Congress, which never authorized this war in the first place. No metrics for success. And no definition of what “over” even means. Just one man, sitting in the White House, telling the country that American service members will keep fighting and dying in a war until something in his body tells him it’s time to stop.

And while he was saying that, we learned that all six American service members aboard the KC-135 refueling plane that crashed in western Iraq on March 12 were confirmed killed. That brings the total to 13 American service members who are no longer with us because of his “excursion,” which is what he actually called the war once again during the interview, and roughly 140 more have been wounded.

And it’s not slowing down. On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved a request to deploy 2,500 additional Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with the USS Tripoli, to the Middle East. If this war is going as well as the administration claims, if we are “way ahead of schedule” as Trump keeps insisting, then the obvious question becomes why thousands of additional troops are suddenly being sent into the region. Marine Expeditionary Units are not symbolic deployments or political theater designed for headlines. They are built to conduct ground operations, amphibious landings, and direct combat missions, which means that while their deployment does not guarantee a ground invasion is imminent, it absolutely means the military wants that option firmly on the table, and that is an escalation no matter how the White House tries to frame it.

But the most revealing moment of the entire interview came when Kilmeade asked Trump directly about the possibility of seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s most critical oil terminal. Trump did not dodge the question or laugh it off as speculation. Instead, he erupted. He called the question “foolish,” told Kilmeade that he “shouldn’t even be asking it,” and said only a fool would answer something like that publicly. And yet the question itself is the part that should stop you cold, because Kharg Island is not something that comes up casually in conversation. It handles roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. You do not ask about it unless someone has told you it is under consideration.

And Trump’s reaction was not the reaction of a man surprised by a wild guess. It was the reaction of a man furious that something he believed had been shared privately was suddenly being said out loud, on the air, to millions of people. He tried to wave it off, insisting it was “not high on the list,” but only hours later he posted on Truth Social claiming that the United States had “totally obliterated every MILITARY target” on the island. Which tells you everything you need to know. It was never off the list. The war is escalating.

When Kilmeade brought up the growing opposition to the war, including from veterans in Congress like Senator Mark Kelly, Trump didn’t engage. He didn’t try to explain his strategy or defend the mission. He attacked. Called Kelly “not a smart person,” “terrible,” and “a pathetic guy.” Then said, “You follow him into a grave.” Mark Kelly is a decorated combat veteran and a former astronaut. He has risked his life for this country in ways Donald Trump cannot even comprehend. And Trump called him pathetic because he dared to question a war that has no plan.

Then, instead of circling back to anything that mattered, Trump started bragging. “I’ve rebuilt the military into the strongest military in the world by far,” he said. “I built it.” Then he drifted into talking about the border wall. Then immigration. Then he said it again: “I had to take an excursion. We had the greatest economy in history. We do, we still do. Oh, this will bounce right back.” In one breath, he called the war a temporary excursion from a great economy, and in the next, claimed we still have one. But the American people aren’t buying any of it. Polling released this week from Quinnipiac shows 53% of registered voters oppose this military action. Only 40% approve. And 74% oppose sending ground troops into Iran. The country doesn’t want this war. And the man running it has no plan to end it other than a feeling in his bones.

Then Kilmeade asked Trump if he believes the Supreme Leader of Iran is still alive. And Trump said: “I think he probably is. I think he’s damaged, but I think he’s probably alive in some form, yeah.”

In some form. He’s bombing a country and he doesn’t know if its leader is dead or alive. This is the man making life-and-death decisions for our troops, and he can’t answer the most basic question about the enemy he’s fighting. That tells you everything about how this war is being run. It isn’t being run. There’s no one at the wheel. And because nothing about this presidency operates with any seriousness at all, he started talking about shoes. The President of the United States went on to tell Brian Kilmeade that he’s been buying Florsheim dress shoes for his cabinet members because he doesn’t like it when they wear sneakers. “It’s a gift from Donald Trump,” he said. In the third person.

Photos show Rubio and Vance wearing the shoes. And Rubio’s shoes are clearly too big. But he and the others wear them anyway, because they are that afraid of him. They won’t even tell the man the shoes don’t fit. And maybe that’s the most honest picture of this entire administration. Powerful men walking around in shoes that are too big, given to them by someone who didn’t bother to get the size right, too scared to say a word. The shoes don’t fit. The war doesn’t fit. The presidency doesn’t fit. And everyone around him just keeps pretending they do.

And it just kept getting worse. He also admitted that Putin is helping Iran. Kilmeade asked him directly and Trump said, “I think he might be helping them a little bit, yeah, I guess.” This is the same Putin he still talks to. The same Putin he’s protected at every turn. Russia is helping the country our troops are fighting and dying against, and the president doesn’t care because his relationship with Putin matters more to him than the lives of American service members. Under any other president, that admission would have triggered hearings by morning. Now it barely makes the news because there’s just too much chaos and corruption.

Trump said on the call that we still have “the greatest economy in history.” He said it would all “bounce right back.” But you can’t bounce back from something you’re still making worse by starting a war that’s driving up the cost of everything. He’s not living in the same country the rest of us are. He’s living in the version he invented on that phone call. And the distance between his version and reality is getting people hurt.

And all of this is happening while the country is under active threat, not just overseas, but right here at home. This week alone, there were three separate acts of ideologically inspired violence on American soil. A naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, previously convicted of providing material support for ISIS, opened fire at Old Dominion University in Virginia. In Michigan, a naturalized citizen from Lebanon who had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike just days earlier plowed a vehicle into a synagogue where 140 children were inside the preschool. The FBI called it “a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” And in New York City, two teenagers built improvised explosives and brought them to Gracie Mansion during a protest in what authorities described as an ISIS-inspired attack. On top of that, the Justice Department seized four websites that were being operated by Iran to call for the killings of dissidents. Not overseas. Here. And reports surfaced about the possibility of Iranian one-way suicide drones capable of reaching California.

Trump seems to believe that because there’s an ocean between us and Iran, we’re untouchable. That he can launch strikes on the other side of the world, the same way he did in Venezuela, the same way he threatened Greenland, and there won’t be real consequences here at home. But that has never been true, and it’s even less true now. The threats aren’t hypothetical. They’re active. Sleeper cells have always been a risk in this country, but a war like this is exactly the kind of trigger that activates them. We are not isolated. We are not safe just because we’re far away. And the very agencies that are supposed to be tracking these threats are being hollowed out by the man who created the danger in the first place.

And when Trump was asked about these attacks on the Kilmeade call, he didn’t talk about how his administration is taking the threats seriously and is dedicated to keeping us safe stateside. Instead, he deflected. He called the attackers “demented people” and said, “I don’t worry about it, because if you did, you wouldn’t be able to function,” before saying “we’ll watch them very carefully” but offering nothing concrete. And when asked how he learned about the drone threat, he said the report came from Gavin Newsom, then spent his time mocking Newsom’s learning disability. “He has learning disabilities, so I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t know,” Trump said, laughing. Then added this about the possibility of Newsom running for president in 2028: “President can’t have learning disability. If you have that, that’s not a good thing.”

And that moment may have been the clearest illustration of the entire call. The irony of Donald Trump commenting on anyone’s mental fitness is beyond staggering. This is a man who can barely complete a coherent thought on his best days. Who falls asleep during his own cabinet meetings. Who just spent 45 minutes on the phone drifting from eugenics to shoes while the country faces real, active threats that he couldn’t even be bothered to take seriously.

By now, most of us understand exactly what we heard on that phone call. It wasn’t policy or strategy. And it certainly wasn’t leadership. It was a man openly embracing racial hierarchy while admitting he has no plan to end a war he started, no understanding of the threats facing this country, and no control over the words coming out of his own mouth. The danger is no longer hypothetical. It’s here. And naming it clearly for those who are still refusing to see it is the first step toward stopping it.

So what do we do? We start by being very clear about what we just heard. When a president of the United States tells a white interviewer that certain people don’t share “your genetics,” that is not politics. It is the same framework that was used to rank human beings as superior and inferior in the early twentieth century, the framework that led to forced sterilization laws in more than thirty American states before the Nazis adopted it and took it to its logical end. That is the language of extermination. And every time a leader has used it, it was never just words. It turned into policy and law. It was violence carried out by the state against people who had been told they didn’t belong. It didn’t start with camps. It started with classification. It started with a leader telling a country that some people were less than others because of their blood. That’s where we are right now. And if we don’t name it clearly, loudly, and without hesitation, we become complicit in what comes next.

We register every single person we can to vote. We don’t wait. We don’t assume someone else is handling it. We do it ourselves, one person at a time. Because every vote matters. And if you need proof of that, look at what just happened in Boca Raton, Florida. Andy Thomson was just elected mayor by a margin of five votes. Five. That’s one family. One conversation with a neighbor who wasn’t planning to vote because they thought their vote wouldn’t matter. That is the difference between the country we want and the one they are building.

The midterms continue to be our greatest hope to stop this. If we flip Congress, we take back oversight, the power to authorize or end wars, and the ability to hold this administration accountable for everything it has done. Without that, they control everything through the next presidential election, including what happens after the votes are counted.

But tonight, even after everything I just wrote, I want to end with something that gave me real hope. For months, Trump and his allies have publicly attacked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates. In January, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro issued grand jury subpoenas targeting him directly, using a probe into the Fed’s building renovation as the pretext. And today, Chief Judge James Boasberg in Washington quashed those subpoenas. He didn’t just rule against them. He found that there was no factual basis for a criminal probe. That the subpoenas were a pretext to pressure the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates. That after more than one hundred public attacks on Powell by Trump and his allies, this was retaliation and not law enforcement.

And then he wrote a sentence that every American needs to hear: “The Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President.” That is a federal judge looking at the full force of this regime’s legal machinery and saying: no. This is not justice; this is a vendetta. And I am stopping it.

He released the ruling publicly. He broke it down so clearly and so thoroughly that there was nowhere for the administration to hide. He didn’t pick a political side. He picked the side of the law. And the Constitution held.

The courts are holding. Not because the system is invincible, but because there are still people inside it who believe in their oath. Judges who are willing to stand up, put their names on a ruling, and tell this administration that the law still means something. The tools are still there. People with power are still pushing back. This 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: Today was a gorgeous day here in San Diego. It was in the 80s by the coast, one of those perfect days that in the past would have been a reason to step away from the computer and go enjoy it. Unfortunately, there was just too much news happening to make that possible. Between JD Vance’s speech in North Carolina, Trump’s call, the court ruling, and everything unfolding with the war, it felt like one thing after another all day long. I dream of the days when “politics” is boring again, and I do believe that day will come. But until then, I had this little girl keeping me company. Apparently, she was just as tired as I was, because at one point, she fell asleep with her tongue sticking out like this. And thank you to everyone who has sent well wishes. She’s hanging in there.