Donald Trump’s decline is accelerating

At 9:32 last night, hours into the start of the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, “God Bless the U.S.A.” began playing loudly from the speakers inside the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. As the music played, Donald Trump stood up, gripped his chair with his right hand, and steadied himself before taking the short few steps to the podium. The song was then cut short, and he began to speak, telling the audience about the canceled first dinner back in April, “That was going to be a doozy,” he said. “I was so psyched. I was going to rip people.”

While most presidents speak for ten, fifteen, maybe thirty minutes, poking fun at themselves and bringing a little levity to the evening, they normally end on a serious note, reminding everyone why a free press matters. Donald Trump spoke for more than an hour, treating his time like a campaign rally, rehashing tired complaints, and trying to tell jokes about journalists he doesn’t like. He tried mocking CNN’s Kaitlan Collins because she “never smiles,” and because she shouldn’t have won an award because her reporting is “fake”. He called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television” with the “lowest IQ on television.” He also went after Anderson Cooper, saying “he’s got a little different persuasion than me in many ways actually,” alluding to the fact that he found humor in Anderson being gay. The majority of his jokes were met with silence, including the story he told about an aging senator being unable to walk upstairs and have sex at the same time, saying “I can’t do both.”

But maybe one of the most important moments of the night was when Wolf Blitzer presented the Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability, before Trump’s was even up at the podium.

The prestigious award went to a team of reporters at the Wall Street Journal, to honor them for their work that first surfaced the lewd birthday letter bearing Donald Trump’s signature in an album assembled for Jeffrey Epstein. This reporting helped force thousands of documents into the light for all of us to see. And with Donald Trump seated just a few feet away, Wolf Blitzer read the details of what they did to win the award while he was forced to listen.

Blitzer was careful with his words, but did not soften any of it. “Despite the president’s threat of a lawsuit, the Journal published a story about a provocative letter to Epstein bearing President Trump’s signature. Trump quickly filed a twenty billion dollar lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One, but the reporters continue to file revelatory stories.”

And while Blitzer spoke, Donald Trump shrugged and smiled. He threw his hands up toward the room, twice, and when Blitzer finished, he stood and shook the reporters’ hands. Ironically, this was the award he appeared to acknowledge the most out of the entirety of the evening; the awards that honored the people he has tried to punish at every turn. He pretended not to care, but in his opening, he declared, “This has not been an easy evening.”

Nearly every award handed out on Friday was for reporting about him. The Associated Press was honored for uncovering his purge of the National Security Council. Kaitlan Collins was honored for her coverage of the Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Zelensky. A photographer was honored for his November 2025 image of Trump standing with an empty expression while a White House guest had a medical emergency right beside him. He sat through more than an hour of praise and awards to the people who wrote story after story filled with the truth of his time in office. Many of them included people and networks that he had tried to bury, sue, or subpoena into silence.

Each of those journalists and photojournalists is a threat to him and his regime. That is the reason he goes after them as much, and as hard as he does. Any one of them alone could be the reason he loses power. He knows that the people telling the truth, investigating him and his enablers, are the last strong line standing between our country surviving this period and a finished authoritarian takeover.

So he does the only thing he knows how to do. He attacks the people telling the truth about him. He mocks, insults, and blames them for the problems he created. But he also told us something else even more important. He didn’t spend an hour attacking journalists because they were wrong. He spent that hour attacking them because they’re one of the few groups he still can’t completely control. A free press gets in the way of rewriting history, hiding his administration’s failures, and convincing people not to believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes. All pieces that are necessary to retain power and control.

The world has seen this before in other countries that lost their democracy to a strongman. The press is always amongst the first they come after. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels understood that controlling the newspapers and the radio was necessary if they wanted to control everything else, so the independent press was seized, shuttered, or absorbed until only one voice remained, the ruling party’s. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the reporters who investigate the powerful end up in prison, exiled, or dead, and the ones who stay learn quickly what they are permitted to say. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the takeover wasn’t as obvious, because Orbán did not need to jail very many journalists. He simply handed the country’s newspapers and television stations to his allies, one by one, until the whole of Hungarian media looked like a map of his friends all sharing the same propaganda. The methods were different from place to place, but the goal was always the same. Silence the people who can tell the truth and flood the space they leave behind with propaganda. And if we look at the ways it has been done in the past, we can see that Trump and his enablers are taking the worst parts from all of those past regimes and creating a new roadmap with them.

And then there is what he told us at the very end of the night, when he reached down and pulled out a red cap that read Trump 2028, while joking about running for another term, something the Constitution absolutely forbids. He might have been attempting a prewritten joke, but threats against the Constitution are never funny. Plus, authoritarians rarely hide their intentions. They announce them just like he does. After testing them like he often does, they wait to see whether anyone will stop them. He is still testing to see what kind of response and backlash he would get if he decided to actually do it, and run for a third term, because the one thing we all know for sure is that Donald Trump does not want to leave office, ever.

The reality is that Donald Trump’s speech was a failure. It met with silence, forced laughter, and polite applause. At one point, after delivering a joke that fell completely flat, he looked up and asked, “Who the hell wrote that?” Because even he recognized how bad it was.

In normal times, I would never look at a bad speech and think it could mark the beginning of the end of such a dark chapter in our country’s history. Our president stumbled through an hour of flat jokes and bizarre behavior, which is not on its own the thing that turns a country around. But these are not normal times, and what we watched went beyond an off night or just Trump being Trump. He is no longer trying, or able to hide, what is happening to him, and that changes everything.

His decline is accelerating at the worst possible time for him. He knows the midterms are not looking good for his party, which is a signal of what is to come for his unchecked power over our country. That is why this might be the beginning of the end, not in spite of how he is unraveling, but because of it. His decline is not only his problem, it is also our opening. The more he lashes out, the more he exposes himself. And the more he exposes himself, the more people will see. And the more people see, the harder it becomes for the propaganda to keep its control over them.

This is what we all must do to make sure that come November, we reel him back from unchecked power. We protect the truth. Unlike the other side, we do not have to invent anything or stretch a single fact. We only have to keep showing people what he says and does. He keeps giving us the material, the chaos and the cruelty. Our job is to make sure the country sees it every single day before November. Because he is not going to stop, and the press is the last strong line between us and everything he wants, and he knows it. He is going to keep coming, harder and harder, right up to the midterms and beyond. Our job is to make sure the people telling the truth are still standing when he does. We have to create a bubble of safety around them, the reporters, the photographers, the independent voices, the people showing up night after night to tell us what is actually happening in this country, and we do that by making sure they are supported enough that he cannot starve them out or scare them into silence.

You all have been amazing at doing exactly that for me. Your paid memberships are the reason I can sit down every single night and bring these articles to you, and the reason I can keep doing more to build up our coverage as we ramp up to the midterms. Thank you for your support. Tonight, like all past nights after the president attacks our free press and the First Amendment, I’m asking you to think beyond just supporting me. Please take a moment and think of the other people doing this work day in and day out and support them too. See if they have a paid membership option, and if they do, and it wouldn’t be a stretch for your own budget, please subscribe. This is how we build the truth and accountability force Donald Trump is so scared of.

Last night, in that ballroom, Trump was celebrating and attacking at the same time the very thing that will be the undoing of his authoritarian takeover: the truth, and the people who will never stop searching for it, sharing it, and holding the powerful accountable to it. We are seeing people threatened, attacked, and still risking everything to exercise their First Amendment rights. And nothing Trump or his enablers have done has even slowed them down. 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: The heatwave broke a bit today, so I headed down to the beach to watch the waves. I even saw a couple of dolphins. At least I hope they were dolphins!

Sources:

President Trump Delivers Remarks, Jul. 24, 2026: YouTube White House Video

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/25/nx-s1-5907805/white-house-correspondents-dinner

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/25/media/trump-white-house-correspondents-dinner-speech-whcd

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/politics/live-news/white-house-correspondents-dinner-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/24/trump-returns-correspondents-dinner-after-shooting-disrupted-april-event/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/live-blog/white-house-correspondents-dinner-trump-live-updates-rcna588931

https://whca.press/award/whca-announces-2026-journalism-awards/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/17/politics/video/ebof-andrew-harnik-trump-photo-guest-faints-whca-award