Donald Trump is slipping deeper into psychological collapse

Today was a very strange and disturbing day for the President of the United States of America. In between golfing at his course in Virginia, Trump National Golf Club, and relaxing inside the White House, Donald Trump spent hour after hour on this Sunday afternoon posting bizarre and deeply disturbing content on social media. What he shared over the course of the day would have necessitated immediate intervention in any other presidency. They were that alarming. His increasingly erratic posts included pictures of him walking beside an alien, incoherent ramblings, increasingly unhinged displays of aggression, and even a fake image of a deceased President Biden floating in sewage. And as grotesque as that was, he also shared fake pictures of himself floating in a spaceship above the planet, launching nuclear weapons while large sections of the planet exploded beneath him.

This is how the President of the United States spent his Sunday over a year into his second term. The outbursts, the rage posting, and his erratic actions are just getting worse. The filters that used to exist, the staff who used to intervene, the advisors who used to take the phone away, the small, last-resort instincts of self-preservation that used to stop him before the worst posts went out, are all completely gone. There is no stop mechanism left. What we saw today across all of his posts are not separate incidents. They are one window into a single day in the life of the most powerful man on the planet, and what is inside that window should be enough to shock every American who still believes this country can be saved.

And yet here we are. Because there is a significant portion of this country that has been trapped so deeply into a cult of personality that they will look at a sitting president posting an image of a deceased former president as a corpse in sewage and find a way to defend it. Not because they believe it is right. But because they cannot admit they were wrong. Their egos matter more to them than the future their children and grandchildren will inherit. They have chosen pride over country. And they will carry that choice for the rest of their lives. And the rest of us are left to document what is happening and how they stood back and allowed it.

Today, he was focused on violence and threats. Two videos of intercepting and shooting down missiles from battleships at sunset, with the words “fire, bomb” stamped over the footage, and Trump in the corner of the frames, gesturing with his hands as if he were the one personally launching them. And then there was the image of the Middle East with the American flag draped across the entire region, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, all of it stamped in stars and stripes, with arrows converging on Iran from every direction. This was not a threat against one country. This was an annexation fantasy of an entire region, or how he actually sees the region today, posted by the sitting president, on a day when he was also publicly threatening Iran with nuclear action. The man does not seem to understand that suggesting Saudi Arabia and Turkey are American territory is a diplomatic catastrophe of the first order.

And when he posts authoritarian daydreams like this, we have to believe him. Every single time. We do not have the luxury of treating this as a man who cried wolf. Nor can we dismiss him as too erratic to be serious. Because every fantasy he posts is a preview of something he is asking the people around him to make real. He is testing us to see how far the outrage lasts and what he can get away with.

And then there were the threats; he posted a photograph of himself shaking hands with Xi Jinping. The two of them on a red carpet, calm, formal, as if they are equals. He posted it in the middle of a stream of cartoon violence. The contrast was not accidental. The dignity is reserved for the authoritarian. The cartoon violence is what democracy gets. This is a man who looks at Xi and sees a peer. Who looks at Putin and sees a friend. Who looks at the leaders of allied democracies and sees enemies. He thinks aligning himself publicly with the men who run dictatorships makes him look strong. What it really does is make him look foolish and a mark. Xi does not respect him. Xi manages him. Putin manages him. Kim manages him. The strong men of the world have figured out that red carpets cost them nothing, that he is too absorbed in his own ego to see their backhanded compliments and insults. They know that they can pretend to flatter him and, in exchange, they get a President of the United States who carries out their wishes, parrots their talking points, and isolates America from every nation that might otherwise hold them in check. He is not in the club. He is a tool.

He has known his whole life that the people on the right side of history want nothing to do with him. The decent people. The serious leaders. The ones whose names will be remembered well. They have never accepted him, and he has never been able to earn his way in. So he gravitates toward the men who will pretend to accept him, because they are the only ones who will. And those men use him. They have always used him. The Art of the Deal author cannot make a deal to save his life, because the only people willing to sit across from him at the table are the ones who have already decided what they are going to take.

Then came the two images that should have ended his presidency. The first showed him at a console in space, satellites and debris exploding around him, his hands resting on a panel of controls. The word “Space Force” stamped above. The second was worse. The same console, but this time with screens displaying “TARGET DESTROYED,” a mushroom cloud rising from the surface of the Earth below him, and his finger on a glowing red button. He posted himself as the man who launches nuclear weapons from space.

Every president since 1945 has understood that the visual of nuclear annihilation is sacred ground. You do not joke about it or fantasize about it. You do not post about it on social media. The mushroom cloud is the line every American leader has known not to cross, because the moment a sitting president treats nuclear war as a personal flex, the credibility of every deterrent we have begins to erode. He crossed that line this afternoon because he does not have even an ounce of presidential judgment. Not one.

And although the images were fake. The fantasy is real because he chose to post them. He wants to be seen this way. The man with his finger on the button, who destroys what he points at. The man who launches from above the world and looks down at the explosions. That is the self-portrait he is selling. And the only people who need to fabricate images of their own power are those who do not actually have any of the kind worth being remembered for. The real leaders in history have photographs of themselves rebuilding, helping, deciding, and signing. He has to generate his with fake ones because there is nothing real that shows him being who he wants us to think he is. Strong, powerful, and a true leader.

Then came the alien. The President of the United States shared an image of himself walking on a military tarmac, followed by Secret Service agents and military personnel, with a shackled gray alien walking beside him. And it is hard to understand why a sitting president would share something like this, but the reality is that it was not really about extraterrestrial life at all. It is about how he sees himself. The man at the center of every secret. The keeper of the classified documents. The one with access to everything. He is selling the fantasy that he is so powerful and so connected to the inner workings of the deep state that he walks the aliens out of Area 51 himself. It was also noteworthy that the alien was shown as a shackled prisoner. His subconscious is doing something. He wants to be seen as the captor.

And then the worst one. An image of three living American politicians with one depicted as if dead, half-submerged in filth, with the words “Dumacrats Love Sewage” stamped above. One of those three people was former President Joe Biden, who was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. And the sitting President of the United States posted him as a corpse in sewage. What we are seeing in Trump is a man who can no longer recognize other human beings as human. Which is as dangerous as it gets, not just for us, the people he was elected to serve, but to the rest of the world as well.

While Trump was embarrassing us on the world stage and again raising concerns for his mental fitness, I was running errands. And I once again struggled to reconcile living in two worlds at once. Because when I look around at my neighbors and at the people in the grocery store and at the cars on the freeway, they are living their lives like none of this is happening. Like the man in charge did not just post fake pictures of himself dropping nuclear bombs, himself walking next to an alien. That gap between these two worlds is the hardest part to live in.

And where we are in this moment is witnessing severe authoritarian decline and the normalization of the unthinkable. Because the strongman does not collapse in one moment. He erodes in public, in front of a country that has gotten so used to the erosion that it no longer registers. I worry about how bad this will get before he self-implodes. Because at this rate, it is coming. He can’t go on like this, and neither can we. It will just be a matter of what happens first. He either will no longer be able to serve in the role, and no amount of propping him up and pretending will work. Members of Congress will go into self-preservation mode and react. Or the midterms come, and there is accountability. None of these ends as quickly as it should.

And in the meantime, our job is also to demand more from the people we elected to stop this. We need to keep making sure that everyone in this country and around the world knows what he is posting and saying, and why he is doing it. We need to have a unified message with shared talking points. Here is what is happening. Here is what is at stake. Here is what we will do when we take Congress back. Here is what happens if we don’t. The right has shown that kind of message discipline for fifteen years. The left refuses to. That has to change, and it has to change now. We can’t wait any longer. We have to be the ones to lead.

I know that our acts of resistance feel futile. I know it feels like nothing is working, that we are spinning our wheels, and that it is impossible to imagine better days. But this is what we need to remember. And maybe this is the most important thing I can say tonight. Every act of resistance is a record. Every email. Every phone call. Every post. Every conversation. Every share. Every time someone says out loud that this is not acceptable. Most of it will feel like it is going nowhere, because most of it is happening quietly, scattered across millions of people who do not know each other. But it is not going nowhere. It is creating a record. It is the documentation of where we stood in this moment. It will become the story our children and grandchildren tell about us. That when the President of the United States posted abhorrent fantasies, we did not stay silent. We said something and we resisted at every turn.

And it matters in the present too, not just for history. Every voice that speaks gives the next voice permission. Every act of refusal tells the people still on the sidelines that they are not alone. There is power in numbers, and the regime knows it. That is why they want us isolated and exhausted. They want us to believe that nothing we do makes a difference. Because the moment we believe that, we stop. And the moment we stop, they win. They cannot arrest all of us. They cannot silence all of us. They can try to wear us down, and they are trying, but every voice that keeps going is a voice that makes it harder for them to finish what they started.

And even though it doesn’t feel like it is working, it is. Yesterday, the Senate parliamentarian looked at the rules and said no to the billion-dollar ballroom funding the administration tried to slip into the GOP budget bill. She blocked it on jurisdictional grounds. The provision now needs sixty votes to move forward, which Republicans almost certainly do not have. A Senate official did her job. She read the rules and refused to bend to a regime that thought it could quietly funnel a billion dollars of public money into a vanity project at the White House. Senator Jeff Merkley said it plainly. The American people should not spend a single dime on Trump’s gold-plated ballroom boondoggle.

This is what the resistance looks like when it works. People are still following the rules. Legally resisting. We are not without tools to slow and stop this. We just need to be loud enough to let everyone know they are not alone and to keep pushing back in any way they can. The man at the top is unraveling in public, and the structures beneath him are still refusing him anytime they can. 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 was giving these two a treat when a random thought popped into my head. And yes, this really is how my brain works 24 hours a day now. I’ve spent nearly two years trying to make sense of how this became our reality. How so many people willingly handed him power again after everything we already lived through the first time.

But what hit me in that moment was something bigger than politics. It was realizing how much more unstable and volatile the world has felt ever since the moment it was announced that he had won again. Something shifted that night. You could feel it almost immediately in the atmosphere of everything: our politics, our institutions, our alliances, even the way people talk to each other. Since then, it has felt like we’ve all been moving from one escalation to the next, one crisis to another, with this constant sense that the ground underneath everything is becoming less solid. Nothing has felt steady since.

Sources:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-regurgitates-crackpot-nuclear-slop-in-wild-posting-spree/

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5882011-senate-parliamentarian-rejects-trump-white-house-ballroom-funding/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/17/hundreds-millions-trumps-ballroom-ruled-out-order-senate/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/senate-parliamentarian-nixes-trumps-ballroom-fund-budget-bill-rcna345518

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-trump-strait-of-hormuz-trust-americans-control/

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5882193-trump-iran-clock-ticking/