Donald Trump targets another enemy

Jun 12, 2026

This morning, for the second day in a row, the President of the United States held a televised proclamation signing from inside the Oval Office. This event, just like the last, did not feature him standing or walking in, and for what seemed like good reason. As the cameras rolled, the focus quickly shifted away from the policy and proclamation and instead fell on him, because it was impossible to ignore his physical condition. And as much as we have grown accustomed to his erratic behavior, where some days he appears energetic and engaged, and other days he seems detached and distant, today felt different.

He appeared to have poorly concealed hand bandages, which he tried to hide so we would not see them. When he spoke, his voice was often heavy and groggy, and he appeared deeply fatigued as he battled to stay awake, nodding off throughout the nearly 50-minute appearance. And while his yes-men and yes-women were carefully positioned behind him to project power and control, the rest of the country and the world, seeing just how diminished he appeared, were again asking themselves a simple question: Who exactly is running the country right now?

And that question did not come out of nowhere. Because today, his condition was just one of a large handful of alarms. Starting at 8:22 this morning, when Donald Trump seemingly threatened to send American ground troops into Iran to seize Kharg Island and assume total control of its oil, the way he claims we have done in Venezuela, only to walk all of it back hours later and announce that we had, in his own words, “just made a great settlement of the war with Iran.” Outside, on the South Lawn of the people’s house, crews kept building an enormous steel cage with a branded arch the size of a large building, a structure the promoters call “The Claw,” for the cage fight he intends to host there on June 14, which happens to be his own 80th birthday, the whole spectacle now the subject of a lawsuit calling it a corrupt and private use of our most sacred public land. And underneath all of it sat the things we are not supposed to have any energy left to notice. An Ebola outbreak tearing through Central Africa. Measles continuing to spread across our own states. And children, at least 500 of them babies and toddlers, held in our detention centers. Kids locked in pseudo jails.

And with so much going on. With all the chaos and destruction that so many of us can see and feel, I have been pushing myself to look deeper. To share the background atrocities that are just as evil as what he is doing right out in the open, but with consequences for our country that are just as devastating and potentially long-lasting. Some things he himself might not even fully understand, beyond what his enablers tell him.

Whenever I see a subtle or loud attack on these three places, I pay attention. The attack on the people we elected. The attack on the press that is supposed to hold him accountable. And the attack on the vote itself. This evening, he went after the first one yet again.

On his Truth Social account, the President turned the full weight of his office on a single man, Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He wrote:

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History. The last one that went after me on Impeachment was a pathetic soul, Al Green, who just lost his race in a landslide to an unknown candidate but, in my opinion, one that had more talent than Raskin. He spent time on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, and was rebuffed on that, just as he has been rebuffed on Impeachment, and many other things. If Biden didn’t give him a pardon, he’d be in jail right now! Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process. I agree with Mark Levin when he says, EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this, who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), casting their vote of HATE! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

He called a sitting member of Congress a “Loser in Life.” He demanded, echoing the right-wing radio personality Mark Levin, that the House “EXPEL THE BUM,” reaching for the expulsion power written into Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, a clause meant for the gravest betrayals of the office, now aimed at a man whose only offense was holding him accountable under the law. And then, in a detail that tells us just how little thought goes into any of this, he moved on minutes later to sharing other nonsense on Truth Social. Raskin, for his part, answered on MS NOW that the President “must have nightmares” about that impeachment to have written what he wrote.

Jamie Raskin isn’t just the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He is a former professor of constitutional law who taught the subject for more than 25 years. He served on the committee that investigated January 6, and he was the lead manager of the second impeachment. In other words, he is exactly the kind of person an authoritarian movement needs out of the way. Because of who he is.

At the very end of 2020, Raskin lost his son Tommy after a long and brutal struggle with depression. Days later, on January 6, while he was still in the rawest part of that grief, he walked into the Capitol with his daughter and his son-in-law, and he was there when the mob stormed it. He led the second impeachment in the weeks that followed, carrying a loss most of us cannot imagine while standing in front of the entire country to defend the Constitution. And then, two years after that, he was diagnosed with a serious lymphoma, and he went through six full rounds of chemotherapy, working the whole time, sitting in hearings in a head covering so that he would not miss a single vote, until he beat it. That is the man they want gone. A man who buried his child, survived an insurrection, beat cancer, and never once stopped telling the truth or fighting for the country that he loves. It is the same contrast that sits at the center of everything right now, between the decent and suffering man they are trying to expel, and the diminished one they are working so hard to prop up.

And this is the part I keep coming back to. Thinking about how the whole of Congress saw that social media post and how most did nothing to demand their president answer for it. And how those same members of Congress have not simply enabled him, but have refused to stop all of this, even after being presented with countless opportunities to do so. I think about how they make a choice every single day to choose access, proximity to power, and money over their country. They decided the country was worth less than their seat at the table.

And my concern tonight lies with what comes next. I am still firmly of the mindset that we will take back Congress when we vote in the midterms. But I also know that it is not guaranteed, and I see everything they are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen. And I can already see the plan if they succeed. Because they are playing every angle. Including the one Trump hinted at when he targeted Raskin. Because if they are successful in removing the people the public elected, the next move is to erase the record of Trump’s impeachments and the misconduct that led to them. Not because they can change history, they know they can’t, but because they can do the next best thing, they can change how history is remembered.

And they have already started. In May, Congressman Darrell Issa introduced a resolution, backed by Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and more than 20 Republican cosponsors, to expunge both of the President’s impeachments, to strike them from the record “as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.” The pretext was a so-called declassification from his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who claims the first impeachment was somehow manufactured. The constitutional reality is simple: once you are impeached, you are impeached. You cannot unring that bell. But the goal was never about what was legal and what wasn’t. The goal was to make sure future generations never fully understand what happened during this period of American history, or why Trump was impeached in the first place. Because they plan to use his likeness, his image, and his mythology long after he leaves office, and they need the historical record to tell a very specific story, regardless of whether it is true. That is the pattern that keeps repeating itself. First, remove the people who can hold power accountable. Then erase the record of the times power was held accountable. Then rewrite the history while it is still fresh enough that people can be convinced to doubt their own memories.

We have seen this exact sequence before, and we know where it leads. In Germany in 1933, the very first people the regime moved against were not the generals or the judges. They were the elected members of parliament. After the Reichstag fire, an emergency decree suspended civil liberties overnight, and within days, Communist deputies had been arrested, and many Social Democrats detained or driven into exile. The chamber was emptied of the people the public had actually chosen. And that, precisely that, is what allowed the Enabling Act to pass and the dictatorship to become legal. They were among the first removed, and many were among the first sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp. Today, outside the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin, there are 96 slabs of cast iron set into the ground, one for each member of parliament the Nazis murdered.

When I visited, I stood there staring at those slabs far longer than most people probably do. I found myself thinking about the courage it must have taken to speak out when so many others were staying silent, to keep fighting for their country when the personal cost kept rising, and to continue warning the public even as they became targets themselves. At the time, I remember feeling a deep respect for what they had sacrificed. Looking back on that moment now from where we stand today, I think about them differently. I think about the contrast between people who were willing to risk everything for the future of their country, for the generations that would come after them, and the elected officials we have today who folded almost instantly, choosing proximity to power, political protection, and personal ambition over the responsibilities they swore an oath to uphold. Those ninety-six slabs are there so that no one ever forgets what it costs when a country allows its leaders to strip legitimacy from the people it elected, one name at a time. And it is hard not to feel deep disappointment and bewilderment, but also disgust, for the members of our own Congress who today are actively choosing to be on the wrong side of history.

Tonight, we need to be honest about which of these dangers we can still undo, and which ones we cannot. Some of what he is doing can be reined in. It can be slow-rolled, stalled, dragged out, and eventually reversed if we take back the House, and hopefully the Senate too, this November. But some of these other things are not so easy to fix once they are done. That does not mean we will never be able to right them. It means the cost of waiting is far higher, and the damage can linger for generations. And of all of them, the ones I keep narrowing back in on, the ones I will never stop talking about, are his attacks on the vote itself, on our First Amendment right to free speech, and on the press that is supposed to hold power accountable. Because what happened to Raskin today is connected to all three. When authoritarians target elected representatives for doing their jobs, they are not simply attacking politicians. They are attacking the people who sent them there. Every effort to silence, remove, intimidate, or delegitimize an elected representative is also an effort to diminish the value of the votes that put them in office in the first place.

Because everything else, the cruelty, the chaos, the corruption, the spectacle going up on the South Lawn, all of it can still be answered at the ballot box, but only for as long as the ballot box still means something, people remain free to speak openly about what is happening in our country, and journalists are still able to do their jobs without fear of retaliation. The attack on voting is an attack on the one tool we have left to peacefully undo all the rest. The attack on free speech is an attack on our ability to warn each other that it is happening. And the attack on the press is an attack on the very people whose job it is to shine a light into the places those in power would rather keep dark. That is why these three things sit at the center of everything else. And that is why they are the things I will keep pointing to, again and again, no matter how loud the distractions become.

And here is what we need to hold onto. The ones trying to hollow out the soul of this country are still the minority. We are the majority. We are the people who look at this every single day, even when we do not want to. Even when we are exhausted. Even when we would give almost anything not to know what fresh chaos or cruelty is waiting for us when we open our phones. And yet we pay attention anyway. We stay informed anyway. Because we know there will come a moment when someone in our own life finally starts asking questions. When a loyalist starts to crack. When a neighbor, a friend, a coworker, or a family member finally says, “Something doesn’t feel right.”

And when that moment comes, we will be ready. Ready to have the conversation. Ready to explain what we have been seeing all along. Ready to ask simple questions. Can you believe the President fell asleep on camera again today? Can you believe that this morning he was talking about sending American troops into another conflict? Can you believe the uncertainty that creates for military families who are already carrying so much? Can you believe that after all of that, we are expected to trust that he has everything under control?

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