Donald Trump will not get away with it
At 9:54 this morning, the President of the United States finally emerged from his self-imposed “safety-related” isolation inside the White House to spend his Saturday at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. But instead of simply playing golf, Donald Trump spent the afternoon unraveling on Truth Social. Over the course of five increasingly erratic posts, he lashed out at journalists, declared that he had just passed another cognitive screening exam he supposedly takes “every six months,” despite his last one being just over 6 weeks ago on May 26. He attacked the “Dumocrats” as communists, called one of the nation’s most respected journalists “one of the most unattractive people in the News ‘Business,’” and, in perhaps the most surreal moment of all, wrote an imaginary speech about himself that ended with: “TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
After a week that went from bad to worse for him personally, Donald Trump managed to look increasingly weak and vulnerable in just a single afternoon. And it started, as it often does, because a journalist told the truth.
Earlier that morning, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and her colleague Jonathan Swan, coauthors of the best-selling book “Regime Change,” appeared on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” with host Jonathan Capehart. When Capehart asked whether the American people should be concerned about the mental acuity of the president, Haberman did not mince words.
“His health is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue,” Haberman said. “And if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this, in trying, not mental per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to Walter Reed several times and they have released less and less information.”
She continued: “We see what you see, which is, he is 80, which is that he is clearly, you know, doesn’t speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. As people who turn 80 tend not to.”
That was it. That was all it took. A journalist stating what anyone with eyes can see. And the President of the United States could not handle it. By 12:23 PM, Trump was on Truth Social, writing: “Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years. Her book is a joke! 90% of it is Fake News. She has made a living off her bad reporting, and will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court, which should not be that long.”
He continued: “I do mind Fake Reporting, like what’s in her boring book, and like she’s done for eleven years, with only one aim in mind, to have Trump lose Elections but, as I sit in the Oval Office and ponder, that hasn’t worked out too well. Maggot is a loser! If she ever wrote the true story about me, it would actually be quite boring, but loaded with lots of SUCCESS.”
Then, without any transition, tacked onto the end of this rant about a journalist, came this: “Also, I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all — Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right. Anyway, don’t buy their book, it’s garbage! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The problem was that he was not at Walter Reed. He was on a golf course. His last physical was on May 26. The White House confirmed he was referring to the May exam. The cognitive test he brags about, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a screening tool for detecting dementia. It is not an intelligence test like he keeps trying to make it out to be. It is the kind of test his own doctors keep giving him because they feel the need to keep checking.
By 3:16 PM, the spiral deepened. He posted a 449-word rant that attacked Haberman, Swan, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. He attempted to insult both Haberman and Swan by calling him her “lightweight assistant.” He called Democrats “generally, stupid people.” And then he wrote a bizarre tirade that underscores just how incapacitated he really is:
“All I do is WIN, often against all odds but, after the Big Election Success, there’s no, “Gee, he won, he did a great job!” There’s no saying, “Maybe we were wrong about him, the people were right” or, maybe, “Congratulations, we wish you Great Success for our Country!” No, but after I won the Election FOR THE THIRD TIME, the same people start immediately, all over again — The Failing New York Times, The LOST ITS WAY Wall Street Journal, MSDNC (They changed their name to MSNOW because nobody was watching!), Ignorant CNN, with some of the Worst No Name Anchors in History, and all three Fake Networks, ABC, CBS, NBC. All of their Readership, Ratings, and Viewership, are “tanking” because the Public understands they are, as I have said right from the beginning, “FAKE NEWS!” They have no credibility, or it would have been impossible for me to win with only bad stories, especially in a Historic Landslide. Think of it, this was my opposition! If the Election was held again today, I would win by even more — Actually, much more!”
Then came three more posts in rapid succession between 4:54 and 4:56 PM. “With only bad Press and Fake News, I won the Presidential Election IN A LANDSLIDE. Therefore, the Media has NO CREDIBILITY!” Then: “I would often say in Speeches, and otherwise, America will never be a Socialist Country, and I was 100% correct, the Dumocrats skipped Socialism, and went all the way down to Communism. AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” And finally: “The Radical Left Lunatics, often referred to as Dumocrats, have lost control of their Party. They are being led by loud and unattractive people who have totally lost their way.”
That is five deeply concerning posts from the Commander in Chief of the United States military in a single afternoon, while American forces were engaged in an increasingly dangerous conflict in the Middle East.
George Conway, the former Republican, responded by writing: “A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t seem that many people care.” Haberman responded simply by noting that her book is sold out and publishers are restocking copies. “Extremely grateful for the interest in our book,” she wrote. “Thank you to those who have engaged with it.” Swan posted a screenshot of Amazon’s Top 20 list showing “Regime Change” at number one in the country and wrote: “Many people disagree with the president’s assessment.” Then he added: “I would be honored to do another on-camera interview with President Trump whenever he wants.”
They did not flinch or back down. And that matters enormously in this moment, because what Trump is doing is not just the ranting of a bitter, compromised man. It is part of a systematic effort to silence dissent in this country, and it is accelerating.
On Friday night, the Department of Justice took our country deeper into a dangerous path when we learned that they had subpoenaed four New York Times reporters: Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, with Federal agents delivering subpoenas to some of the reporters’ homes, ordering them to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday. The subpoenas state only that the journalists are being asked to testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” What they are really about is a story the Times published reporting that the Secret Service had security concerns about the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One, that it lacked advanced antimissile capabilities, and that Trump had to switch planes mid-trip during the NATO summit because the aircraft was not ready. Before the story was published, a senior FBI official contacted the Times and asked them not to run it, citing national security but refusing to say what the specific concern was.
This subpoena is not about wrongdoing. It is about embarrassment, harassment and intimidation. The President of the United States was on a plane that was not ready, did not have the capacity to protect him, and reporters told the public about it. He was embarrassed. And now journalists are being hauled before a grand jury because they did their jobs.
The Times said it will fight the subpoenas. Their attorney David McCraw called them “brazen” and said they should be understood as an attempt to prevent the public from learning what is happening in their country. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the subpoenas break from longstanding Justice Department practice that requires prosecutors to seek information from reporters only as a last resort.
And this is not an isolated act. It is the latest step in the most aggressive assault on press freedom by any American president in the history of our country. Since Trump took office in January 2025, his administration has waged a campaign against anyone who tells the truth about what is happening in this country.
They took control of the White House press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had managed it for decades. They barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and all presidential events because the AP refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” A Trump-appointed judge called it “pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who wrote the FCC section of Project 2025, launched investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS. The one major network he did not investigate was Fox. CBS was leveraged during the Paramount-Skydance merger with what appeared to suggest that Paramount might have had to pay Trump sixteen million dollars to settle his personal lawsuit, hire a conservative ombudsman, and eliminate its DEI practices before the FCC would approve the deal. When Stephen Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe,” CBS canceled his show days later. Trump posted that Colbert was “finally finished.” When Jimmy Kimmel made comments about the Charlie Kirk killing, Carr told a right-wing podcaster, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” ABC suspended Kimmel within hours. Trump praised it, calling it “Great News for America.”
Trump sued ABC News and settled for fifteen million dollars. He sued CBS and settled for sixteen million through the Paramount deal. He sued the Wall Street Journal for ten billion dollars. He sued the New York Times for fifteen billion. He sued the BBC for ten billion. No sitting American president had ever sued news organizations like Donald Trump has. Trump turned it into just another weapon of his administration.
He signed an executive order targeting Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. VOA employees were put on administrative leave. International broadcasting that reached 427 million people a week was gutted. Congress then rescinded all federal funding for NPR and PBS, roughly five hundred million dollars a year.
The Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth, the man who championed the renaming to the “Department of War” because he could not contain his excitement about killing, introduced rules requiring credentialed reporters to accept restrictions that could punish them for seeking or obtaining certain nonpublic information, even when the information was unclassified. Dozens of reporters from the Washington Post, MSNBC, CBS News, CNN, the New York Times, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal walked out and surrendered their press badges rather than agree. A federal judge found the policy was designed to weed out “disfavored journalists.” When ordered to reinstate credentials, the Pentagon closed the media workspace and said journalists would be relocated to an “annex” outside the building.
The day after Thanksgiving 2025, the White House launched an official government website called the “media bias” tracker, featuring an “offender hall of shame” ranking news organizations by their supposed offenses against the president.
They arrested Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning, Atlanta-based, Spanish-language journalist, while he was livestreaming a protest. Despite an immigration judge ordering his release, ICE refused, arguing that his reporting on law enforcement was “dangerous.” He spent over 110 days in detention and was deported to El Salvador. He became the first widely documented journalist detained by ICE and deported during Trump’s second administration after being arrested while covering a protest.
They arrested Don Lemon at midnight in Beverly Hills and independent journalist Georgia Fort at six in the morning at her home while her three daughters, ages seven to seventeen, watched. The official White House X account celebrated Lemon’s arrest with the caption “When life gives you lemons...” and an emoji of chains.
FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phones and laptops, without giving the news organization advance notice or a chance to challenge the need for the materials.
Trump publicly threatened to jail reporters who would not reveal their sources, saying, “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security, give it up or go to jail.’ The person that did the story will go to jail if he doesn’t say.” He said news organizations should face treason charges. CNN reported that Trump personally pushed then Deputy, now Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to subpoena reporters, handing him a stack of printed news articles with the word “Treason” written in Sharpie.
He has called a New York Times correspondent “ugly, both inside and out.” He told a Bloomberg journalist “Quiet, Piggy” in response to a question about the Epstein files. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has counted over 1,194 anti-media posts from Trump on social media. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented more than 170 assaults on journalists in 2025, nearly double the previous year. 160 of them were at the hands of law enforcement. Reporters Without Borders placed FCC Chairman Carr on its Press Freedom Predators list. Trust in news in the United States has fallen to 28 percent, according to Galllop, as of October 2025. The lowest since tracking began.
This is what it looks like when a government moves to silence dissent. Not all at once, but step by step, post by post, subpoena by subpoena, arrest by arrest. Every time Trump attacks someone for using their voice, it is designed to make the next person think twice. Every subpoena, lawsuit, cancellation, raid, and deportation of a journalist is a message to everyone else: this could be you. That is the point and their strategy. It is not about winning in court. It is about the upheaval to people’s lives and making reporters, writers, content creators, and everyday Americans question whether the next thing they say is worth being subpoenaed for, worth losing everything for, worth their children living on the street for. It is about suppressing free speech. It is an attack on the First Amendment.
And if we lose free speech, the road to better days becomes dramatically more uphill. Because if the information stops flowing, propaganda replaces truth. If truth cannot reach the people, the people cannot act on it. That is exactly what they want. They do not want the real truth reaching anyone, and if they succeed, it is one of those notches that is much harder to come back from.
The weight of what we are living under is constant. It is exhausting being weighed down by the worst people. Costs are rising. The future is looking more bleak for our children and grandchildren. Measles cases are increasing, Cyclospora, a parasitic infection that causes horrendous diarrhea, is spreading because Trump’s CDC cut funding for tracking it. We are having the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record after USAID funding was pulled and teams on the ground were defunded. New World screwworm, a parasitic fly eradicated from the United States decades ago, has returned because of irresponsible decisions from this administration. We have our military fighting a forever war born from ego and enabled by a man who wanted his department renamed from Defense to War because cruelty is the only thing he is good at. We wake up every single day wondering what the President of the United States will do next to destabilize our country and our world. And it is getting worse.
The people who speak out now have reason to look over their shoulders, not just because of the cult followers who feel comfortable sending threats and saying unbelievable things to strangers on the internet. People who have put this man above their own interests, their children and grandchildren, who treat any criticism of their dear leader as a personal attack. But also because of the federal government itself, who is increasing their attacks on anyone using their voice, including journalists, comedians, writers, and everyday Americans. And all of this will only intensify from here, especially as the midterms approach.
And I know this to be true because I personally have well over 1,500 emails sitting in my inbox right now. It has gotten so bad that I have to open them only when I feel emotionally capable, because the things some people feel comfortable saying to a stranger on the internet are unbelievable. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of those emails come from people on the right side of history. But the ones that don’t are a reminder of what this movement has become. People like me are not just looking over our shoulders because of an increasingly radicalized segment of the public anymore. We are looking over our shoulders because of the federal government, too. And after what happened to those New York Times reporters this week, every independent journalist, writer, and creator in this country has another reason to brace for what comes next.
Donald Trump and his inner circle just stepped up their attack on the free press and, with it, our access to free and fair elections. We are now in the most dangerous period of Trump’s presidency so far. We knew this was coming. We knew it would get worse the closer we got to the midterms. And today they showed us exactly what that looks like. They laid the groundwork to give cause to subpoena and, by extension, indict reporters. To discredit journalists when they speak the truth about those in charge. To make sharing the truth a crime. To connect embarrassing the president to a crime.
So this is our answer. As I’ve said every time those speaking out have come under attack, we get louder. If you’ve been on the sidelines, this is the moment to step off them. If you’ve been scared, I understand that fear completely. I know what it costs to speak. I know what comes into your inbox when you do. I’ve lived it for a year. And I’m still here. Because I also know what silence costs. And that price is higher. It always has been.
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 they took it to a new level. And I am calling it out. This was an attack on every one of us who has ever written about what is really happening inside the United States, shared a post, called a representative, or showed up to a protest. They want us to feel it. They want us to hesitate the next time we go to speak. Our answer has to be that we don’t hesitate. We say it louder.
And we 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. Protecting the media that is still standing against it all is how the truth stays alive when every other system is being captured. That includes both legacy media and independent media because they both have a place in the battles ahead. I have written every single night for over 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. The same is true for countless others doing this work. Some have newsrooms behind them. Many don’t. But all of them need to know that telling the truth won’t cost them their freedom or voice.
So tonight I’m asking you 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, and you need to trust what you’re reading. The ones who are still standing with the truth 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 is a vote against Trump trying to take away our First Amendment rights.
And remember this, too. Trump is posting these threats and attacks because he is scared. Regimes on the right side of history do not do this when they feel secure. They do it when the walls are closing in. The midterms are getting closer every day. They are not coming for our words because they are winning. They are coming for our words because they know what happens when enough of us keep using them. And I, for one, will never stop using my words to fight for our country. And I know I’m not alone. 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: When the story broke about Trump’s latest attack on the First Amendment, I knew I was in for a long day of research and writing. This sweet girl sat with me for hours and hours as I worked through it all.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/11/trump-threat.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-cyclosporiasis-outbreak
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trump Anti-Press Social Media Tracker: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vbsoLq-Z5_kJaV0GOFMOqyo3dL9S1SKfUSkNWdYtMtU/edit?gid=201966548#gid=201966548
Gutter tactics and gutter speech don’t become a president. But then, he is really only an overblown, habitually cheating, real estate agent. Isn’t he?
Trump is an unhinged, narcissistic sociopath and he must be taken down like Mussolini was!!