At 10:14 this morning, Donald Trump shared a cartoon video that, at any other time in history, would have had him removed from office, or at the very least, opened an immediate investigation into his mental health and his ability to lead this country.
The video that he shared on his Truth Social account was made to resemble an episode of “Family Guy,” set inside the White House press briefing room, with Dana White, the UFC chief executive and longtime Trump ally, acting as the press secretary. It started with White standing behind the podium with seven UFC fighters beside him, announcing, “Trump made me press secretary. I brought help.” Then the press starts asking questions. The first reporter asks, “Is Trump a threat to democracy?” Instead of answering the question, White calmly says, “Khabib,” summoning UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, who immediately grabs the reporter, throws him to the ground, and pins him there before saying, “Let’s talk now.” Another reporter, visibly frightened and crying, says, “I don’t feel safe!” White responds by calling for Islam Makhachev, who picks that reporter up, throws him over his shoulder, and carries him away, saying with a thick accent, “Two, three years. Dagestan.”
That location, where the reporter was going to be exiled, was chosen for multiple reasons. Both UFC fighters, Khabib Nurmagomedov and Islam Makhachev, are from Dagestan, a republic in southern Russia, the country ruled by Donald Trump’s longtime friend Vladimir Putin. The line itself, “Two, three years. Dagestan,” comes from a 2024 interview in which Makhachev joked with his former teammate Daniel Cormier about sending his son there for wrestling training. It became one of the biggest memes in the UFC world, a joke about sending someone away for years of intense wrestling and combat training to toughen them up. That is how UFC fans would recognize it.
But look at how it was used in this video. It was not said to a young wrestler. It was said to a journalist who had just been physically assaulted, as a fighter carried him out of the White House. And Dagestan is not just a place known for producing some of the world’s toughest fighters. It also has a long history of violent conflict, armed insurgencies, and serious human rights abuses, including allegations of torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances at the hands of security forces. That is what makes the imagery in this video so disturbing. The President of the United States shared a fake video of an American journalist being physically assaulted inside the White House and then carried away by a Russian fighter who announces that he is taking him to a place in Russia known for torture. The same Russia where journalists and political opponents have faced imprisonment and persecution under Putin.
Then they get into the made-up Trump culture wars where they show a reporter with blue hair and a nose ring, asking, “What are Trump’s pronouns?” White responds with one word, “Ladies,” and two female UFC fighters, Amanda Nunes and Kayla Harrison, immediately rush forward and grab the reporter, who screams as he is running away, “This is fascism!” The two fighters then nearly turn on each other before White intervenes, yelling, “Save it for next Saturday!”
After that, another fighter, Justin Gaethje, kicks a reporter directly in the face, completely knocking him out and sending him crashing to the floor, while UFC commentator Daniel Cormier shouts, “Oh my goodness, he’s done!” Dana White then asks if there are “any more questions.” Another reporter pokes their head up from the floor and asks, “Is Michelle Obama running in 2028?” That is when UFC fighter Josh Hokit steps forward and repeats the same false, transphobic claim he made about Michelle Obama after his fight at the White House last June, saying, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” White responds by putting his hand over his face.
At the end of the video, the White House press briefing room has been completely destroyed. There are holes in the walls and broken furniture everywhere. Reporters are lying unconscious on the floor with stars circling above their heads, and there is a trash fire burning in the middle of it all. That is when a cartoon Donald Trump pokes his head in from the doorway, holding a Coca-Cola fountain drink, and asks White, “How was the briefing?” White responds very seriously, “Fiery, but mostly peaceful.” Trump looks around at the destruction in the room, takes a sip of his drink, and says the final word of the video: “Beautiful.”
That last line was carefully chosen. “Fiery, but mostly peaceful” was a reference to CNN’s coverage of the protests that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. During one broadcast, CNN displayed the words “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting” on the screen while its reporter, Omar Jimenez, stood in front of a raging fire. The image quickly spread across conservative media, where Trump supporters used it to accuse CNN and other news organizations of downplaying the violence and destruction that occurred during some of the protests. It became a running joke on the right, used to mock journalists and suggest that the media could not be trusted to tell Americans what was really happening. Now, six years later, Trump is using that same phrase all over again.
What he shared was unforgivable, and every news organization should be covering this right now, demanding answers and accountability. All of Trump’s Republican enablers should be doing the same. The President of the United States shared a fake video depicting physical violence against journalists, and he did it the day after he offered Dana White the press secretary position and called him “a violent Fighter and Warrior,” and said we need people like White to “defend us against the Lunatic Left.” He added, “Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!”
It would be very easy to dismiss this as Donald Trump just being his usual unhinged self, but this is far from that. He took this too far. When the President of the United States shares a video depicting fighters beating journalists unconscious for asking whether democracy is under threat, he is sending a message. He is telling the millions of people who follow him that reporters are the enemy and that asking hard questions deserves a violent response. We have seen where that message leads in the death threats that journalists across this country receive every single day for doing their jobs. Donald Trump is setting the expectation that journalists deserve whatever he is planning to do to them next.
On Friday, we learned just how far Donald Trump and the people enabling him are willing to go to silence journalists. The Atlantic reported that officials inside the White House and the Justice Department had been discussing the possibility of arresting journalists to force them to reveal their confidential government sources. Three people familiar with those discussions spoke about what was being considered, and according to two of them, Susie Wiles, the outgoing White House chief of staff, was opposed to the idea. But Stephen Miller, who is set to take her place as chief of staff on Monday, supported it. According to the reporting, Miller also argued that it “wouldn’t take long for journalists to give up their sources.” The Justice Department called the report “absolutely false.”
They added the line about fascism to the video to mock anyone who dares to call out what they are doing, but there was a lot of truth in what was said. It is fascism, and it is also what authoritarian regimes have done throughout history. They go after the press with slow, deliberate efforts to make reporting the truth dangerous. In Turkey, Erdoğan responded to critical coverage by seizing media outlets and imprisoning journalists, turning the country into one of the world’s leading jailers of reporters. In Russia, Putin built a state propaganda system while independent reporters were jailed, poisoned, and killed. And in Nazi Germany, Hitler went after the free press almost immediately after coming to power in 1933. His government shut down opposition newspapers, took control of publishing companies, and put Joseph Goebbels in charge of a propaganda ministry that dictated what journalists could and could not report. Reporters who refused to follow the government’s orders could lose their jobs, be imprisoned, or even be sent to concentration camps. Within months, Hitler had effectively destroyed Germany’s independent press. The exact steps and methods vary from country to country and from one evil leader to another, but the goal stays the same. Discredit the people delivering the news, make it dangerous for them to tell the truth, and eventually control what the public is allowed to know.
That is what this video was built to do. To normalize the idea that journalists deserve to be silenced by force and to make the sight of reporters being beaten unconscious into something people are supposed to laugh at.
This is where what we learned on Friday about Stephen Miller becomes even more disturbing. Because while Donald Trump is sharing videos of journalists being physically assaulted, the person now in charge of his administration, Stephen Miller, has already proven how little he cares for the press and especially the protections that are supposed to allow journalists to do their jobs, including their ability to protect confidential sources. Reporters depend on people inside the government who are willing to come forward and expose wrongdoing, abuse of power, corruption, and information that officials are deliberately hiding from the public. Those people often risk their careers, their livelihoods, and sometimes even their lives to make sure the American people know what their government is doing.
They come forward because they trust that the journalists they speak to will protect their identities. Without journalists being able to practically guarantee that protection, very few, if any, sources will risk coming forward if they know the reporter they speak to could be thrown in jail and pressured into giving up their name. This is how even more corruption, illegal orders, and abuses of power will take root and completely consume our government. That is what makes Stephen Miller’s reported comments so dangerous and why the President’s gross video adds another layer of intimidation to an already dangerous situation. The message being sent to reporters is that they can be punished for doing their jobs, and the message being sent to their sources is that they are no longer safe speaking to them. This is how our government is trying to make it harder and harder for the American people to find out what is actually happening inside the Trump regime. It doesn’t just threaten journalists either. It threatens every single one of us because we depend on those journalists to expose what our government is doing in our names, with our money, and with the power we have entrusted to it. Without an independent press that can investigate the government without fear of imprisonment or violence, we lose one of the most important protections we have against a complete authoritarian takeover. That is why this is so much bigger than a disgusting cartoon or one reported conversation inside the White House. It is about whether the American people will continue to have access to the truth or whether the people in power will be able to decide what we are allowed to know.
I watched this video in utter shock this morning. It’s not that what he shared that surprised me. It was the message that it sends and the dangerous step he took when he shared it. It was one of the most disgusting things he has done and further increases the temperature and division this country is facing. It puts journalists, reporters, writers like myself, content creators, and everyone else who is pushing back against this regime in danger from people in his radicalized base. It was also such a clear parallel to what other authoritarian leaders have done that the path he is taking is clearer than it ever has been. He is the lamest of lame ducks, and to him and those who benefit from his corruption, this is an all-out fight for survival.
Seeing this, I worry for the investigative journalists digging through documents without the protection of a corporate legal team. I worry for the content creators building audiences around truth on platforms that could silence them tomorrow. I worry especially for the ones still inside legacy media, the ones under corporate control, who are now being placed in direct harm by a president who just showed his followers exactly what he thinks should happen to them. I worry for us all, and I worry for the First Amendment and our right to know the truth about what our government is doing.
This is why, every single time Donald Trump attacks the free press, I call for us to come together to protect it. I made a promise when I first started writing these posts that anytime he or his administration attacked the press, the First Amendment, or the right of the American people to speak out against those in power, I would not just call it out. I would do everything within my power to make sure the people being targeted had the support they needed to keep going. Tonight, that promise matters more than it has in a long time. What we saw today was one of the most disturbing attacks yet. These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our constitutional rights, and instead we are having to protect those rights from them.
So tonight, I am asking you to join me once again in what I call my economic protest. Your support of my work has been extraordinary, and I want to thank you again from the bottom of my heart. Your paid memberships are the reason I am able to sit down every single night and write these posts, and more importantly, they are the reason I have never had to put a single word behind a paywall. I made that decision from the beginning because I never wanted the truth to be available only to those who could afford to pay for it. I know that many of you have been here night after night, sharing these posts, supporting this work, and helping build a community that reaches people far beyond what I could ever have imagined when I started. I cannot thank you enough for making that possible.
Now I am asking you to think beyond just me. Please think about your other favorite voices, the people you turn to day in and day out to understand what is happening in our country. Think about the investigative journalists uncovering what this administration would rather keep hidden, the independent writers spending their days digging through documents, the reporters asking the questions that those in power do not want to answer, and the podcasters and content creators working tirelessly to make sure the truth reaches as many people as possible. These are people who were already facing threats, harassment, and intimidation simply for doing their jobs, and now they are facing an even more violent threat from the very government that is supposed to protect their constitutional rights. We have to make sure the media Donald Trump cannot control remains standing, and that means putting our money where our voices are.
If you have the means, please consider supporting them with a paid membership. Many start at just five dollars a month, and if that is something you can afford without creating a financial hardship, please do it. If you cannot, that is perfectly okay, too. Share their work, recommend them to your friends and family, and help make sure their reporting reaches as many people as possible. Every single one of us has something we can contribute to keeping the truth alive. We have two more years ahead of us, and we need every single person willing to expose what this administration is doing to have the resources to keep going until the next election and beyond. Every time Donald Trump tries to silence another voice, our answer has to be to make sure even more voices are heard.
But tonight, more than anything, I want us to remember why we are doing this. We just watched what happens when millions of Americans have access to information about what their government is doing and come together to make their voices heard at the ballot box. That information did not appear out of nowhere. Someone had to uncover it, speak to the sources, write the stories, and put their name on the reporting, knowing full well what might come their way for doing so. Then millions of people helped make sure those stories were seen. We cannot allow that work to stop now. We have two more years ahead of us, and we need every single person in our country to know what Donald Trump and his enablers are doing to destroy our country.
So if you have been considering supporting the voices speaking out, now is the time. If you already do, thank you. The one thing Donald Trump understands above all else is money, and financially supporting the very people he is trying to silence is one of the most direct ways we can push back against his attacks on the free press.
At the end of the day, Donald Trump can post as many violent videos as he wants. His chief of staff can threaten to arrest journalists and force them to reveal their sources as much as he likes. It just shows how desperate they are to silence the people exposing what they are doing. But the free press has survived every strongman who has ever tried to destroy it. It will survive this one, too. 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 had a little break from the news tonight when I went to see the Psychedelic Furs with my sister and my oldest daughters. They played their 1982 hit song, “President Gas,” and this time, when I heard it, the meaning hit me in a way it hadn’t before. The song was originally written as a criticism of Ronald Reagan and the way politicians use propaganda, empty promises, and their public image to manipulate people into supporting them. Listening to it tonight, as an adult so many years later, I couldn’t help but think about Donald Trump and how much of what they were warning about back then is exactly what we are still living through today
Links to sources used in writing this article:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/6206667-trump-shares-dana-white-cartoon/
https://www.rawstory.com/stephen-miller-2678322963/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5890969
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2026/jul/11/new-york-times-reporters-are-subpoenaed-after-air-/
Truly terrifying. Truly disgusting. I often wonder - what if the press simply ignored Trump? Had headlines to articles such as “Today the President said” and then a blank article. No TV coverage. A blank screen with a subtitle” The President makes a speech”. Above all else, he craves oxygen.
I also note a certain cowardice in the White House press corps. The man insults one of their members, usually a woman, and nobody jumps in to defend. Nobody walks out.
Thirdly, as Jeff Teidrich so rightly points out, no journalist asks “What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I find it hard to believe that Trump is clever enough to plan a video which shows all those details in order to send specific messages. Does anyone agree with me? If I’m right, it’s a particularly nasty person who is helping him and we should know who it is !