I’m from a Country Where the President Is Trying to Erase The Truth.

This is not just a post. It is a record. A warning. A line in history to say that some of us saw what was happening and refused to stay silent.

If I am to write these journals every day for the next three and a half years, I wonder how many times I will feel like I do today. Because this is not a good feeling. This is the kind of feeling you get when you know something bad is going to happen. Where hope that it won’t flickers, but then dies, because you know there are no other paths that avoid it.

I joke that I read Trump’s Trash Social posts so you don’t have to. And today I’m not joking. Because today, every word of his post drips with the contempt he has for truth itself. Beyond being able to actually read what he says and then try to understand what he is trying to get across, I just shake my head.

Can you imagine the leaders of other countries seeing his posts and having to take him seriously? Today was another day I wish I could be a fly on their walls because I would love to hear what they are thinking.

Donald J. Trump has now been president (again) for 7 months as of tomorrow.. And I want this documented, because few would have imagined how far we would fall to unleash his madness again this fast. I want this documented for the history books. For those outside of the country. For my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I want it recorded that so many of us stood against this. That we named it clearly. That we did not stay silent.

Today, Trump posted this on Truth Social, his private propaganda platform:

When I saw his post, my mind went straight to the museums that have shaped my life. The way they’ve shaped my children’s lives, too. The field trips with backpacks and permission slips. The quiet afternoons wandering halls where time itself seemed to pause. The sudden moments when my children stood before something they never could have imagined otherwise.

Because the truth is simple: where you live, where you grow up, it’s a bubble. You don’t see beyond it. That’s why travel matters so much. But not everyone can travel. And that is why museums matter. They are passports without planes. They are open doors to the stories of others. Like books, they let us step into shoes we will never wear. They remind us that lives are different, that needs are different, that our small circle is not the only one.

I remember the first museum that truly changed me. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.. I walked through its doors and saw them. Hundreds. Thousands. Piles of shoes. Shoes that once walked to markets and weddings, shoes that ran through playgrounds, shoes that carried parents and children until they could carry them no longer. Shoes taken from people before they were murdered in gas chambers. That sight never left me. It seared into me.

And when Trump rails against museums, when he sneers that they talk too much about slavery or suffering, I think about those shoes. I think about how his goal is to make us look away from them. To teach people that piles of shoes, or chains from plantations, or photographs from Japanese internment camps, are not history but “woke.” He wants those shoes to vanish into silence so that cruelty itself can be normalized.

Because that’s what museums do. They refuse silence. They hold memory in a pile so heavy and undeniable that no one can pretend it did not happen. And that is exactly what he fears.

Museums don’t just preserve artifacts. They preserve truth. They preserve memory. They spark compassion. And Trump cannot allow that. Because compassion is dangerous to him. Thinkers are dangerous to him. Memory itself is dangerous to him.

That is why his post matters. He said the Smithsonian is “out of control.” He complained that “everything is about how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

I’ve been staring at this screen trying to process what he said about slavery. That speaking honestly about it is “too much.” That remembering it is “out of control.” That telling the truth is somehow an attack on America itself. The sickness of that thought is almost too much to type.

And before I continue, I want it said, slavery was humanity at its lowest and evil in its purest form. It was theft of life, theft of dignity, theft of generations. No good ever lived inside it.

He said there is “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.” And then he promised that his attorneys would “go through” museums, just as they have gone through universities. He ended, as always, with his chant: “Woke is broke.”

But here’s the truth: he is trying to desensitize us. To slavery. To cruelty. To atrocity. To the worst chapters of human history. So that when he commits the same acts, we no longer recognize them for what they are.

And this tactic is not new. Hitler once told Germans that remembering the shame of defeat after World War I was “poison”, so he replaced it with a mythology of destiny and pride. Stalin erased names from photographs and purged textbooks until truth itself bent to his will. Franco forced Spain to forget its dead, calling memory itself “divisive.” Always the same method: erase suffering, glorify the nation, replace empathy with obedience.

And that is exactly what Trump fears. Because once you have stood before those shoes, once you have felt history press against your chest like that, you can never again be told it “wasn’t that bad.” You can never be trained to shrug atrocity away. Museums make denial impossible.

Which is why he wants to gut them. He knows the power of memory. He knows the danger of compassion. He knows the strength of truth when it is held up where everyone can see it. And so he tries to replace it with noise. With chants. With sneers.

He is beginning with his most loyal followers. The ones who now spit out words we buried long ago because they carry wounds too deep to heal, words that reopen pain every time they are spoken. He is training them to see slavery not as shackles, not as whips, not as generations stolen, but as some twisted gift. He wants them to shrug and say: No, no, they got to come to America. Their children got to live in the land of promise.

That is not true. That is not how history works. That is not how humanity works.

What he wants is an army of people who will, every time someone speaks the truth, sneer back: “It’s not that bad. You’re just being woke.”

He is not just rewriting memory. He is programming a reflex. Training millions to defend horror before it even happens. And history tells us what comes next: once atrocity is normalized in words, it is only a matter of time before it is normalized in action.

Because if he can erase slavery from our museums, he can erase anything.
If he can twist compassion into weakness, he can twist cruelty into law.
If he can silence the vote, he can silence us all.

I keep thinking about my children. What museums will they be allowed to enter if he succeeds? Will my daughter ever stand before the pile of Holocaust shoes, or will that memory be labeled “too divisive, too woke”?

He wants to slice away every part of history he cannot bend to his will. He wants to carve out the chapters of sorrow, of struggle, of survival, leaving only a hollow story that flatters him.

At one point, I had to stop typing. I shut my laptop and walked outside. The sky was impossibly blue, so blue it almost hurt to look at. The flowers in my yard were open, leaning toward the sun. Kids rode their bikes down the street, their laughter carrying on the breeze. Life looked normal. Beautiful, even. And the contrast hit me like a wave. Out here, in the quiet of my own neighborhood, you would never know the darkness being planned behind closed doors. You would never know that a president was plotting to erase memory and to silence ballots.

And I felt rage, deep and raw, that something so ordinary could exist side by side with something so monstrous. Most people don’t see it yet. Most people don’t feel the seriousness of it. And that is exactly his plan. To lull us into comfort. To cook us slowly, like a frog in a boiling pan, turning up the heat just enough so that we don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to jump. Until the heat becomes our new normal.

And while he floods the air with noise, he is remaking the White House itself. Not repairs. Not touch-ups. Not preservation. But transformation. His own golden fortress. His own palace. Walls reinforced. The beautiful lawn ripped out from the Rose Garden, now filled with hardened slabs of concrete. Just as museums hold piles of shoes to remind us of lives stolen, he replaces living grass with stone to remind us of nothing at all. Absence becomes the message. Beauty erased. Memory erased.

And in the East Wing, a new ballroom, 90,000 square feet, costing 200 million dollars, vast enough for 650 guests. Versailles on the Potomac.

The White House was never meant to be permanent. It is supposed to be borrowed. A home of the people, entrusted for four years, maybe eight. But Trump is not borrowing. He is building. He is engraving himself into its bones. Because he has no intention of leaving.

He does not want to leave. He is not going to leave. He does not think he will ever leave. He believes himself a king. In his mind, maybe JD Vance can one day play the puppet president. But Trump will remain the ruler.

History echoes here, and dictator playbooks are being followed. Putin poured millions into the Kremlin, lining it with gold and bunkers, symbols that screamed permanence. Now, Trump remakes the White House in that image. Not a home of democracy. A citadel of rule without end.

And right now, as I type this, his lawyers are drafting an executive order to wipe out mail-in ballots. Tonight, while we put our kids to bed, he is plotting to take away our right to vote. I even Googled “can a president ban mail-in voting,” because surely it cannot be legal. And it isn’t. The Constitution gives states control over elections, with Congress setting the rules. Presidents have no such power. Courts have said this again and again. But he will try anyway. Because even if judges block it, the chaos and confusion will still help him. He knows the truth: if every American votes, he cannot win fairly.

And this is where we cannot lose focus. Because he is going to make noise. That’s what he does. He creates chaos so we cannot see the plan. And that chaos is the cover. It distracts us with words like “woke,” with attacks on museums, with rallies full of insults. But beneath it, the real move is happening. The guarantee of a free and fair election is what he is trying to steal.

And this is not new. This is the pattern. Every dictator begins with memory. Rewrite it. Erase it. Twist it. But they only survive if they can destroy the vote. Hitler gutted elections with the Reichstag fire decrees. Pinochet sealed his coup by replacing ballots with bullets. Lukashenko criminalized election monitors so he could cling to power. Always the same sequence: erase the past, seize the ballot, declare yourself eternal.

And here in America, the numbers do not lie. In 2020, nearly 46 percent of all ballots were cast by mail, more than 65 million votes. Take them away, and you are not just silencing convenience. You are silencing democracy itself.

You are silencing the soldier stationed overseas who still believes his vote matters.
You are silencing the grandmother in a rural county who cannot drive to the nearest polling place.
You are silencing the single mother working two jobs who depends on that ballot to speak in the one place her voice carries equal weight.
You are silencing the man in a wheelchair who cannot stand in line for hours.
You are silencing the college student away from home for the first time, learning what it means to have a say in her future.
You are silencing the wildfire evacuee, displaced and living out of a motel room, but still clinging to the promise that his voice counts.
You are silencing the cancer patient too weak to leave her bed but strong enough to mark a ballot.

Strip mail-in voting away, and you strip away not just ballots but people. Not just numbers, but lives. Because every envelope carries more than a vote. It carries a story. A struggle. A belief that in America, your voice still matters.

So I want this written down. I want it recorded that in 2025, the President of the United States attacked memory, turned compassion into a curse word, fortified the White House into his palace, and tried to silence the vote.

But I also want this recorded: we did not give in to despair. We remembered what America really is. A nation where power is borrowed, not seized. A nation built by people who fought Jim Crow, who marched for suffrage, who faced fire hoses and billy clubs and still went to the polls. Every right we have today exists because someone before us refused to be silenced then.

There is so much happening. And there is still much we can do. Share these actual truths online. But more than that, speak them aloud. Around dinner tables. In classrooms. In workplaces. In pews. Because silence is the oxygen of authoritarianism, and breaking the silence is how we breathe freedom back into this country.

And we must stay laser-focused. The most important fight right now is to protect voting rights.

That is the line. That is the fight. Do not be distracted. Do not be silenced.

And here is the truth. I do not know if we are going to be okay. I cannot promise that. But I know we cannot go silent. I know our children and grandchildren are watching. And I know the story of this country is still being written.

And that is what gives me hope. Because the future is not finished yet. We still hold the pen. We can still choose the ending. I believe we can accomplish this. Together.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

PS. This is going to take all of us. Share this. Tag someone who needs to read it.