Donald Trump is getting worse by the day

Earlier today, Donald Trump made another appearance at one of his golf courses, this time in Virginia. Instead of vacationing in Florida this weekend, the President of the United States arrived at his own property, was driven around in a golf cart, and eventually emerged onto a viewing patio in a dark suit, but something immediately felt off. His usual patriotic-colored tie was missing. His white shirt was unbuttoned and unevenly opened at the neck. His hair looked disheveled but also oddly combed over and flat to his head. His eyes were heavy, and the remnants of the dark bruises seen earlier in the week were still visible on both his hands. There was something deeply wrong with Donald Trump today.

And it wasn’t just how he looked, or the strangely detached way he carried himself this afternoon. It was also what he had spent nearly six straight hours doing before he arrived there. The President of the United States sat online, posting a nonstop stream of fake images, memes, propaganda, and personal attacks. He shared fabricated war photos, fake images of destroyed Iranian ships, staged combat scenes, mocked political enemies, and bizarre fantasy memes that barely made sense at all, including images attempting to portray him as personally commanding bombing campaigns from a warship at sea. It was the kind of incoherent content that felt less like political messaging and more like a man spiraling publicly for the world to see.

And as alarming as this all sounds, what we are really seeing is a reminder of why the midterms matter so much. Because today wasn’t a rare occurrence. It was just another day for Donald Trump, and it just keeps getting worse. But if we are all seeing this for what it really is, it means others are too. And as hard as it is to imagine how difficult the days are going to get leading up to November, we need to keep our minds and actions on just how profound a change we could see if we take back not just the House, but also the Senate. Because this is not just about stopping him. It is about what we gain back and how we make sure this never happens again.

Right now, Donald Trump operates without resistance. Every executive order, appointment, and dollar he spends on cruelty sails through because Republicans control both chambers of Congress and have made the calculation that compliance is safer than conscience. The single most important thing that flipping Congress would do is end that by putting a coequal branch of government back in the hands of people who are willing to use it. And the tools they would have are powerful, constitutional, and very real.

Right now, every committee that should be investigating this regime is running interference for it. They have turned congressional oversight into a protection detail for the president while the actual scandals pile up untouched.

Meanwhile, the president posts fake war propaganda online for six straight hours, appears visibly unwell in public, and behaves in ways that would trigger nonstop investigations if anyone else in government acted like this.

Flip the House and those gavels change hands quickly. That means subpoenas. Real ones, with teeth. That means the Epstein files, the Venezuela authorization, the decision to bomb Iran without congressional approval, the ICE raids that killed American citizens in Minneapolis, the corruption around the White House ballroom, the deal between Trump and the architects of Project 2025. Every single one of those becomes a hearing. Every single one forces witnesses under oath, on camera, with the country watching.

And this matters even if convictions never come, because public hearings are one of the most powerful tools a democracy has. Watergate did not end because Richard Nixon was convicted. It ended because investigations, reporting, televised hearings, court fights, and accumulating testimony made the truth undeniable to a critical mass of Americans. Nixon’s approval was 67 percent in January 1973 and had fallen to 24 percent shortly before he resigned in August 1974. The hearings did that. The slow, methodical accumulation of testimony did that. Right now, that record is not being made. Every day this regime operates without congressional investigation is a day that evidence disappears, witnesses are intimidated, and documents are destroyed. Flipping Congress means starting the clock on accountability before it is too late.

Then there is the power of the purse. This is the one people underestimate, and it may be the most important of all. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the exclusive power to appropriate funds. That means a Democratic Congress could use spending bills to restrict, condition, or refuse funding for mass detention, expanded ICE operations, and militarized federal raids in American cities. That would trigger hard budget fights and possible vetoes, but the power itself is real. Trump cannot build detention infrastructure, expand enforcement operations, or sustain a domestic crackdown without money, and Congress controls whether that money is approved. There is real precedent for this. Congress used the power of the purse to help end U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and the Boland Amendments in the 1980s used appropriations to restrict Reagan’s covert operations in Nicaragua. A Democratic Congress could attach conditions to spending, zero out specific programs, demand reporting and oversight, and refuse emergency requests that keep this machinery running. None of that requires impeachment or conviction. It requires a majority willing to use the constitutional power it already has.

A Democratic Senate would also mean that every Trump nominee, for every position requiring Senate confirmation, faces a hostile majority. That includes cabinet replacements. It includes ambassadors. It includes U.S. Attorneys, who decide whether to bring federal charges against political enemies. It includes federal judges at every level. The pipeline of loyalists Trump has been installing across the government would slow to a crawl. The judges who have been rubber-stamping his most extreme orders would no longer be confirmable. And if a Supreme Court vacancy opens between 2026 and 2028, a Democratic Senate could refuse to confirm a Trump replacement. That alone could prevent another generation of damage to the federal judiciary.

And then there is impeachment. The honest truth is that the House can impeach with a simple majority, but the Senate needs 67 votes to convict and remove. Even in the best possible outcome in November, Democrats might not have 67 votes, but if enough Republicans see that Trump’s power has been contained, they might be willing to cross sides for the betterment of the country. But impeachment still matters for reasons that go beyond removal. The articles of impeachment are themselves a formal congressional finding of high crimes and misdemeanors. They are read into the Congressional Record. They follow a president forever. Trump has already been impeached twice, and that fact will be in every history book written about this period. A third impeachment, built on everything that has happened since, with the war, the corruption, the killings, the deterioration we are watching in real time, would be the most comprehensive record of presidential misconduct in American history. And it would force every Republican senator to vote, on the record, with their name attached, on whether to acquit. That vote follows them. That vote is what their grandchildren will read about in textbooks. The political cost of acquittal in the face of overwhelming evidence is real, especially heading into 2028.

And that brings us to the part that we should be talking about more. The 2026 midterms are not just about the next two years. They are about who controls the certification of the 2028 presidential election. Congress certifies electoral votes. We watched them try to overturn that process on January 6th. A Republican Congress in January 2029 could refuse to certify a Democratic victory. They came closer than most people remember last time. A Democratic Congress would be the firewall. It would be the guarantee that 2028 is a free and fair election whose results are honored. It could pass voting rights legislation. It could strengthen the Electoral Count Act. It could investigate and respond to the redistricting wars being waged at the state level right now. This is the structural difference between a country that still has democratic elections and one that has lost them.

And there is something else that happens when Congress flips, something harder to measure but maybe more important than any of it. The country starts to believe again. Right now, the weight so many of us are carrying is not just about the cruelty or the chaos. It is the feeling that nothing can stop this. That every institution has been captured, and every guardrail has failed. That the people who could push back have instead chosen comfort over courage. When Congress flips, that feeling breaks. The proof that the system can still respond, that voting still matters, organizing still works, and that we are not powerless, becomes visible and undeniable. Authoritarian movements depend on the perception of inevitability. They need us to believe that this is permanent, that resistance is futile, that there is no path back. A midterm victory would shatter that perception. And that psychological shift, that moment when tens of millions of people realize this can be reversed, changes everything.

And while Trump was embarrassing the country on social media from the United States, something beautiful was unfolding an ocean away. Today, on the same day the President of the United States spent six hours posting fake war images and memes from behind a screen, the people of Hungary were standing together in a public square, watching democracy return.

Péter Magyar took his oath of office as Hungary’s new prime minister, ending 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s autocratic rule. Orbán, the man Donald Trump once called “a true friend” and “a winner.” The man Trump praised for crushing press freedom and consolidating power. The same man whose playbook Trump has been following step by step. That man lost. Not to a coup or a revolution. But to an election. Magyar’s Tisza party won more votes and more seats in parliament than any party in Hungary’s post-Communist history, a two-thirds majority so decisive that it cannot be challenged or undone.

And today the country celebrated. Magyar called on Hungarians to attend an all-day “regime-change” celebration on Kossuth Square outside Parliament. Thousands came. They waved Hungarian flags and EU flags side by side. They wore the shirts of the party that had promised to bring them back from the edge. They watched the proceedings inside Parliament on enormous screens, and every time Magyar appeared, the square erupted. When the new Speaker of the National Assembly, Ágnes Forsthoffer of Tisza, made her first official act, reinstating the European Union flag on the Parliament building for the first time in over a decade, the crowd broke into applause.

And then, in a moment that filled the world with hope and personally gave me goosebumps, multiple anthems were performed at the inauguration. The Hungarian National Anthem. The Székely Anthem, honoring ethnic Hungarians living across the border in Romania. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the Anthem of Europe. And then, something no one expected from a Hungarian inauguration: the Gypsy Anthem, performed by the Sükösd Roma Child Choir, a group of children from a small town of 3,000 people in southern Hungary. Magyar had personally invited them after visiting their town during the campaign, months before anyone knew he would win. He remembered them. And when they sang in that chamber, it meant something more than music. It meant that this new government was telling every Hungarian, including the ones who had been pushed to the margins for 16 years, that they belonged. That this country was theirs again, too.

The celebrations lasted until midnight. Politicians, supporters, and performers danced and sang on stage outside the Parliament. Traditional Hungarian songs filled the square. In his speech, Magyar told the country that he would not use his office to rule Hungary, but to serve it. He said, “Today is the fulfillment of the long journey that we have made together in recent years, the fulfillment of the common belief that Hungary is able to get back on its feet, is able to believe in itself, and to once again be a common homeland for all Hungarians.”

As reported by the Associated Press, 27-year-old web designer Áron Farsang stood in the crowd during Hungary’s historic transition of power and said he hopes the new government will restore democratic institutions and lead Hungary back toward Europe. He said he wants to get rid of Russian influence as soon as possible. Another attendee, Budapest economist Andrea Szepesi, said it was about time that more women held seats in parliament. Hungary’s new National Assembly now includes 54 women lawmakers, more than a quarter of the total and the highest number in the country’s history.

This is what it looks like when a country comes back. When people refuse to accept that authoritarianism is permanent, when they organize, when they show up, and when they vote in numbers so overwhelming that the strongman cannot deny it. Orbán had 16 years. He had the media, the courts, and the money. And the people of Hungary still beat him. Not with violence, but with votes, persistence, and the stubborn, unshakable belief that their country was worth saving. That can be us.

We have less than six months to make sure that every person who cares about what is happening to this country is registered, informed, and ready. Six months to make sure the candidates who will fight for us have the resources they need. Six months to make sure that the voices telling the truth every single day, the independent writers, the journalists, the creators who are doing this work without corporate backing or billionaire sponsors, are funded well enough to keep going through the hardest stretch of all.

Because the corporate media is not going to save us. We have watched newsroom after newsroom get gutted. We have watched outlets pull back, soften their language, and look the other way. Just this week, CBS confirmed it will not renew the contract of Sharyn Alfonsi, a 60 Minutes correspondent who spent a decade doing the kind of investigative reporting that holds power accountable. Her crime was producing a segment about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to an El Salvador megaprison and refusing to let the White House kill the story by declining to be interviewed. She called it what it was: corporate censorship. She said that if the standard for airing a story becomes that the government must agree to be interviewed, then the government effectively controls the broadcast. “We go from an investigative powerhouse,” she said, “to a stenographer for the state.” And for saying that out loud, she’s out. This is what is happening to corporate media right now. The journalists who still want to tell the truth are being pushed out, and the ones who stay are being told what they can and cannot say.

With the destruction of the free press, the truth is being carried right now by independent voices, people who are doing this work because they believe it matters, not because someone is paying them to say what’s comfortable. And those voices need support. If you are able to, please consider subscribing to or financially supporting the independent writers and platforms you trust. This is an investment in the infrastructure of truth. Because when November comes, the people who are still on the sidelines, the ones who haven’t decided yet whether to show up, they are going to need to hear the truth from someone they trust. And that someone might be you, sharing a post. It might be an independent voice reaching them for the first time. It might be the conversation that changes their mind about whether their vote matters. Every one of those moments is built on the work we do now, in the months before it counts.

So stop tonight and think about who is putting in the work and helping you stay informed about what is happening to our country. And consider a paid membership to help support them. Not just mine, but as many voices as you can support without hardship.

And use your voice. Use it loudly. Share what you know. Talk to the people around you who are tired and discouraged and wondering if any of it matters. Tell them about Hungary and what happened today. Tell them that a country that spent 16 years under an authoritarian stood up, voted, and won. Tell them that children sang in the parliament and the flag went back up on the building and thousands of people stood in a square and cried because they got their country back. Tell them it took showing up when it felt hopeless. And tell them it can happen here.

Because on one side of the world today, a deteriorating man sat behind a glass barrier at his own golf course, who also posted fake images and memes for six straight hours while his country fell apart around him. And on the other side, a nation celebrated in the streets because they had done the work to take theirs back.

That is the choice in front of us. That is what these six months are for. And that is the image I want us to carry with us from now until November. Not the man behind the glass. The people in the square. 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: This was the view from the home we just said goodbye to. The one we brought our youngest home from the hospital to. The one where we raised all three of our girls. This past week, we handed over the keys, and now we are in that unsettled in-between, scrambling to secure housing until we find our new forever home. Our oldest will most likely be moving away for a job soon. Our middle daughter is finishing a novel. Our youngest has a couple of years left in high school. It is a beautiful, happy, and heartbreaking time all at once. One I know I’m not alone in feeling.

And I keep thinking, like so many of us do, about how much life has been stolen from us. The damage Donald Trump has done is not just political. It is personal. The years are short, and every day is a balance between being present with my family and compartmentalizing everything until I sit down to write these posts each night. Some days I struggle, missing the good old days before Trump, when I knew my girls, my husband, and I would all be under one roof every night, but also when I didn’t wake up every morning holding my breath as I read about the instability he has unleashed over the entire planet. And then I remember that this is exactly why I write. Because I want those days back, the ones not lost to his darkness. I know I can’t have us all under one roof forever because kids grow up, but I at least want the mornings back where I didn’t hold my breath before looking at my phone. Not just for my family, but for all of us. And I believe we can get there.

Sources:

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/hungary/hungarys-peter-magyar-sworn-prime-minister-ending-viktor-orbans-16-yea-rcna344331

https://dailynewshungary.com/kossuth-square-crowds-parliament-opens/

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture_society/peter-magyar-inauguration-anthems/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/60-minutes-star-sharyn-alfonsi-out-after-clash-with-maga-coded-cbs-boss/

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