Donald Trump knows he’s losing control

At 3:50 p.m. today, the President of the United States suddenly reappeared after not being seen at any public events since his visit to Walter Reed Medical Center over a week ago. With bad news mounting all around him and questions surrounding his declining health growing louder by the day, Donald Trump was forced to make an appearance. And for 43 minutes, Trump and his enablers attempted to present a powerful, in-control leader. But all the world saw was a paranoid man praising an authoritarian leader as “a friend of mine, a good man,” attacking a journalist as “a young, beautiful woman who never smiles” with “hatred in her eyes,” and desperately trying to maintain the illusion that everything was under control.

And it started, of all things, with pictures of Trump’s current favorite project: the reflecting pool. Before he signed a single thing or took a single question, the President spent the first several minutes of his reappearance talking about the reflecting pool on the National Mall. He described its length. He asked his staff to bring him a picture, comparing it to some of the tallest buildings in the world. He talked about the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and the Sears Tower as if a flat pool of water were a skyscraper standing upright. He told the cameras it would be “American flag blue” and bragged about how many truckloads of garbage had been pulled out of it. This is what the man who had vanished from public view for over a week chose to lead with. Not his disappearance, health, or the mounting crises facing the country. A pool.

And from there, his rambling took him to the part that was truly disgusting and told us everything about what we are dealing with. He started describing the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most important speeches in modern American history, and used it to claim that his own crowd had been bigger. “They said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people,” he said, before insisting that if you put the pictures side by side, “I had more people. They were tighter. My people were tighter.”

For Trump, everything is a competition because everything is insecurity. Looking out over the reflecting pool where Dr. King spoke of justice, equality, and the unfinished promise of American democracy, Trump’s mind immediately went to crowd size. Not the speech. Not the movement. Not the courage it took to stand there in 1963 and demand that America live up to its ideals. The only thing he could think about was whether he looked bigger. And the men standing beside him just nodded and smiled along.

Because the actual business was real, and serious, and buried beneath all of it. He signed two executive orders. One reshapes customs enforcement. The other strips long-standing job protections from roughly 8,000 senior federal workers, making them fireable at will, the kind of move that allows an administration to purge experienced civil servants and replace them with political loyalists. Those protections exist for a reason. They help ensure that government officials answer to the law, the Constitution, and the public rather than to the personal demands of a president. Remove those safeguards, and competence becomes less important than obedience. Dissent becomes a firing offense. And the people responsible for telling the truth inside government learn very quickly that their jobs depend on telling the leader what he wants to hear.

From there, it became all about his grievances. He attacked the judge who ruled against his anti-weaponization fund, dismissing the decision as the work of “a radical left judge.” He cast himself as a victim over and over again over the search of his own home, expecting sympathy. And when a reporter asked him about the 1.776 billion dollar slush fund, he simply said, “I love it. I think it’s so important.”

Then he moved on to reframing his war in Iran. After launching strikes on Iran without congressional approval, he wanted us to believe it was barely a war at all. “It’s not a big thing for us,” he said. “We have a great military. It’s not a big thing for us.” And in the same breath, he assured us the stock market was soaring, retirement accounts were booming, and costs were coming down. The war is nothing. The economy is perfect. And if your grocery bill says otherwise, you’re apparently supposed to distrust your own eyes.

And then he drifted into communism. He had posted about it earlier today on Truth Social, and he was clearly proud of it. “Has anyone ever seen a Happy Communist?” read the first post. The second was longer: “Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL!” When a reporter read his own words back to him, he lit up. “I just wrote that,” he said. “Did you like it? Did you think it was well written?” He was desperate for praise. This was a very embarrassing moment for the president for the world to see.

Then came the familiar routine. He called New York, Los Angeles, and parts of California communist. He acted out, in the first person, what he imagined a communist demagogue would say: “You’ll no longer pay rent.” “I’ll end your mortgage.” “I’m going to give you free food.” “Follow me. You’re going to have the greatest life ever.” He performed the villain in a one-man show. He called the governor of Illinois “a slob.” He called the mayor of Chicago “a low IQ person.” He went city by city, tearing down the country he leads, cataloging the places he claims are failing, before once again casting himself as the lone man capable of saving them.

And then, in the middle of all of it, he just stopped. There was no conclusion. No natural ending. He was still talking, still wandering through one grievance after another, and then suddenly: “Thank you very much, everybody.” Almost immediately, his staff sprang into motion. “Thank you, press. Thank you, press.” Reporters were ushered out. The room was cleared. And Trump remained seated behind the desk with a blank expression, his shoulders slumped, his body seeming to sink into the chair.

We have seen this sequence before. Something changes, and suddenly the event is over. The room clears. The staff moves quickly. The same phrases are repeated, almost like a rehearsed signal. We don’t know what triggers it. It could be a physical issue or a cognitive one. But what we do know is that it isn’t how normal press events end. It isn’t how presidents typically conclude appearances. And it keeps happening often enough that the people around him appear to know exactly what to do the moment it does.

Because somewhere in that rant, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was standing there doing her job, and he went after her. He called CNN “crooked as hell” and “a very corrupt organization.” He called the network garbage. He looked at her and said she “never smiles,” that she is “a young, beautiful woman” who stands there “with hatred in her eyes.” When she tried to speak, he snapped, “Wait a minute. Be quiet.” He told her, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” He kept calling Democrats the “dum-o-crats.” And then he said the thing that I cannot stop thinking about. Talking about Democrats, and talking about her, he said, “There’s something wrong with them. There’s something wrong with you.”

He said there was something wrong with them while he sat there with his left hand gripping his right, holding it down. His face puffy and his right eye swollen and nearly shut at times while he was walking. He kept slurring his speech and then snapping back. He would erupt, and then go flat and monotone, and then erupt again. It was hard to watch as a human being and not be embarrassed for him. But it was even harder to watch as an American, to think about everyone who has ever fought for this country, and to realize that after nearly 250 years of democratic self-government, this is who we are presenting to the world as our leader.

And we have to ask why. Why, with the news this bad all around him, with his own party breaking from him in public, with the questions about his health getting louder by the hour, did he spend his first appearance in over a week attacking a reporter for not smiling? And the answer is the simplest one. He is trying to discredit the people whose job is to tell us what is happening, because what is happening is so bad for him. If he can make us distrust the press, then it does not matter what the press reports. That is the whole game.

And here is what we have to understand about that game, because it is bigger than one reporter and one bad afternoon. When an authoritarian can no longer reliably deliver his own propaganda, when the man himself is slurring his words and drifting and being hurried out of rooms, the machine around him does not stop needing the propaganda. It just needs someone else to deliver it. And so it reaches for the institutions that used to belong to all of us. It commandeers the media.

We watched it happen this week at CBS. Scott Pelley, who gave that network 37 years, was fired. One day earlier, in a staff meeting, he had accused the new leadership of “murdering the show,” the show being 60 Minutes, a program known for its accountability journalism. And then he put out a written statement that confirmed most of our worst fears. He said new management had instructed him to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. He said he had been told to include claims that were unverified, and that so far he had refused. He said politicians were being invited to choose which correspondents would interview them. And he said the network’s new owner was casting the program aside, in his words, to “curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”

CBS is gone now. Their independence and credibility are gone with it. And we will most likely lose CNN too. They will not stop. We are going to keep losing these mainstream outlets, one by one, because the people who own them have done the math. It is easier to make money telling people what a strongman wants them to hear than it is to make money telling the truth. The truth has no oligarch behind it. The lie has very deep pockets. And the men running these companies have watched how this President rewards loyalty and punishes the rest, and they have decided to grab what they can while the grabbing is good, even if they do not believe it will last. They do not care if it lasts. They care about right now.

So the work is going to fall, more and more, on the people who do not have the deep pockets. The independent journalists. The investigative reporters. The writers and the creators who keep showing up, often at real cost to themselves, on the dark days, especially. And our country cannot survive if those voices go quiet, because a country where the people do not know what is being done to them is not a free country. You can already see what the lack of knowledge does. There are people all around us who have no real idea what is actually happening. And the ones who go looking for the truth are increasingly finding only the version someone was paid to feed them.

I made a promise when I started writing these posts. Every time this administration attacked the press, attacked the First Amendment, attacked the right of the American people to speak truth to power, I would call it out by name. Today, Trump did just that. And I am calling it out. This was an attack on our right to know about the destruction to our country being carried out by this administration. He was sending a direct message to all journalists and members of the media. I will come for you too. And to the public, he is saying, you can’t trust a single thing the media tells you. Our answer has to be that we won’t back down and we will support those still speaking out and reporting the truth.

Our way through this time in history is to put our money where our voices are. Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people defending it. That is the most direct form of resistance available to us right now. Independent media is how the truth stays alive when every other system is being captured. I have written every single night for a year with no corporate backing or sponsorship money. No one who could reach into what I write and change a word of it. Every post I write is free for everyone, because the truth should not be behind a paywall. But that is only possible because of the people who choose to support this work with a paid membership, who understand what is at stake, and who choose to support it. Thank you for being with me in the resistance.

And tonight I’m asking you, once again, to think beyond just my voice. Think about every writer, every journalist, every podcaster, every independent outlet that you turn to when you need the truth. The ones who are still standing up to endless attacks in our email inboxes and under greater pressure from the federal government. The ones still posting even when doing so comes at great cost. Because what this administration is trying to build requires our silence. And the most powerful thing we can do right now is make sure the people refusing to be silent can keep going. Every paid subscription to an independent voice is a vote against everything Trump and his enablers say and do.

And the reason Trump is behaving like he is with increasing desperation is because the same day that the President of the United States was attacking a journalist and her network, the House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution telling him to end his war in Iran. It passed 215 to 208. And four Republicans crossed over and voted for it.

It still needs the Senate, and on paper, it is largely symbolic. But that is not the point. The point is that members of his own party finally broke ranks in public and voted against him. This is Trump’s greatest fear: disloyalty. People saying no. People realizing they have more to fear from their constituents than from him. That is what made this man so agitated at today’s event.

Because that is what he is doing now. He is pushing people past their breaking point. And the cruelty of this man, the paranoia, the way even the smallest perception of disloyalty has become unforgivable to him, is starting to cost him the very people who used to protect him. They are watching him slur and drift and lash out, and they are doing the math too. And one by one, they are starting to step away. 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: Back to my bird watching ways. I now understand why my grandparents loved when new birds would visit their backyard.

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5742806/trump-federal-employees-civil-service-job-protections-schedule-f

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/04/trump-strips-job-protections-8000-senior-federal-workers/

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/white-house-issues-new-executive-order-strengthen-customs

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blanche-doj-anti-weaponization-fund-house/

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/28/nx-s1-5730203/iran-israel-trump-congress-strikes-reaction

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-fires-60-minutes-correspondent-scott-pelley/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/03/media/60-minutes-cbs-scott-pelley-bari-weiss-ellison-reliable-sources

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5845102/house-iran-war-powers-vote