Nobody trusts the President of the United States

Mar 17, 2026

At 3:56 p.m. Eastern time, Donald Trump sat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by yes-men on either side and the press directly in front of him. He told the world that someone else was the president of the United States and shared a completely fabricated conversation he claimed to have had with a past president. One so absurd that by evening, representatives from all four living Presidents had issued strong statements rejecting his lie.

He claimed it twice today. First at the Kennedy Center luncheon, then again in the Oval Office. He said he spoke to a former president who told him, “I wish I did it” about the Iran strikes. Peter Doocy from Fox News pressed him. Was it Bush? “No,” Trump said. Was it Clinton? “I don’t want to say.” He laughed, teased, and hinted it was a Democrat, and his lack of impulse control got the best of him. He dug in deeper, rambling, “I don’t want to say because a member of a party, a member of a party, they have Trump derangement syndrome, all but it’s somebody that happens to like me and I like that person who’s a smart person but that person said I wish I did it okay but I don’t want to get into who, I don’t want to get him into trouble.” Then he turned it into a performance, grinning at Doocy: “Would you like me to reveal your name to Peter at Fox?”

Aides to all four living former presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden, told CNN the same thing: no such conversation ever took place. Donald Trump made the whole thing up to justify his deeply unpopular war.

But the made-up conversation wasn’t even the most alarming thing he said in that room. During the same fifty-four minutes behind the Resolute Desk, Trump turned his attention to a model B-2 bomber someone had placed nearby and asked if he could keep it. Then he hugged it. Twice. Right there, in front of the cameras, while talking about dropping bombs. And not like a world leader describing military strategy. Like a small child collecting toys. “Give me that bomber over there. Thank you. You knew immediately which one.”

It wasn’t just bizarre, it was one of those moments that made everyone in the room noticeably uncomfortable, not because they were surprised, but because they’ve seen it before and still don’t know what to do when it happens. A sitting president of the United States, in the middle of a foreign war that he launched, turning toward a model of a stealth bomber and asking if he could take it home like a party favor. Then hugging it, twice. It was the kind of moment that strips away whatever illusion might still exist about competence or seriousness. He then told the room, “It looks small, but in person it’s very big. It’s the only plane capable of carrying a 200,000-pound bomb. I don’t know how they do it because it’s very sleek and beautiful, but it carries a lot of weapons.” For the record, the B-2’s total payload capacity is roughly 40,000 pounds. The largest conventional bomb in the United States arsenal weighs just under 30,000 pounds. There is no 200,000-pound bomb. It does not exist, and even if there were one, the B-2 couldn’t carry it. The president of the United States, in the middle of a war he launched, hugged a model of a plane he doesn’t understand and described a weapon that isn’t real.

He went on: “1 in the morning, it flies in and they say, ‘Sir, they’re in Iranian airspace.’ And I say, ‘Oh.’ And I’m watching it from the situation room with a couple of other very smart people, including some good generals, real generals, not television generals. And all of a sudden, you see that dive. They start diving. Sure. And you see him 30,000, 20,000. Boy, I said that was a lot. They went down fast to aim it. And they know they’re coming and they’re smart and they never saw them. And they’re firing a little bit, but they don’t know what they’re firing at because they can’t see a thing. And then you hear the biggest explosions that anybody’s ever heard. Those are the biggest bombs outside of nuclear. Those are the biggest bombs. And you say, ‘What technology we have.’ What a great country. What I built it largely. I built it during my first term. I built it.”

And then, when the conversation turned to Cuba, he treated it the way he treats everything, as something to acquire. He told the room, “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be good. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I could do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth?” He said “taking Cuba” four times. Not freeing. Not supporting. Taking. And then he followed it with this:

“I think Cuba, I don’t know, in its own way for, you know, tourism and everything else. It’s a beautiful island. Great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. You know, they won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.”

That was a direct swipe at Puerto Rico. The same Puerto Rico he visited after a devastating hurricane in his first term and threw paper towels at the crowd like it was a game. He doesn’t see people. He sees property and acquisition. Venezuela wasn’t the end. It was the test case. After that, it was Iran. And now he’s telling us Cuba is next. There is no end to how many wars, conflicts, and assaults he is willing to put our military through just so he can continue his out-of-control campaign of domination against the world, a campaign that has nothing to do with strategy or defense, and everything to do with control, projection, and the illusion of strength.

And then came the moment that told us everything we needed to know, not just about him, but about how isolated the United States has become under his leadership. When asked about Iran’s leadership, Trump started rambling. He said, “They have no leadership. The leadership is gone. But then they set up a new leadership to go and name a new leader. And that’s leadership is gone. And now they think maybe the son is gone. They’re all gone. My biggest problem is I have no idea who we’re talking to because nobody ever heard of any of these people. They’re all dead. But we did a job for the world. Not a job for us, for the whole world.”

This isn’t just incoherent babble. This is what it looks like when a president is so distrusted, so reckless, and so unstable that other governments have stopped telling him what’s happening. Not even his own intelligence community seems to feel he can handle this level of information, or they, too, are not being told. Because they’ve seen what he does with classified information. They’ve watched him reveal sources, expose operations, sabotage alliances, and turn briefings into weapons.

And if we’re to believe that he is actually running the show, if these strikes, escalations, and confrontations are being directed by the man we saw behind that desk, then we are not just watching a breakdown. We’re living inside a government where the most basic facts are being withheld from the person with the nuclear codes. Because no one trusts him to hear the truth without his accidentally sharing it or turning it into something dangerous. Either way, that is deeply concerning.

And in between the rambling monologues and scattered declarations, he managed to forget that he was the president, referred to Gavin Newsom as “the president of the United States,” and never corrected himself. He didn’t catch it. No one around him caught it either, or if they did, they didn’t dare say a word. And he wasn’t done with Newsom. He went on to mock his dyslexia, saying, “The President of the United States, Gavin Newscum, admitted that he has learning disabilities, dyslexia. Everything about him is dumb.” Then he added, “I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.” He called Newsom “the president” without realizing it, mocked a disability in the same breath, and no one in that room stopped him or corrected him on any of it.

But as we have come to know, with Donald Trump at the lead, it always gets worse. Hours earlier, at a luncheon for the Kennedy Center board, he did something that proved beyond any remaining doubt why no person, no ally, no intelligence agency, and no member of his own party should ever trust him with private information.

At that luncheon, Trump was talking about the razor-thin Republican majority in the House when he brought up a member who had been seriously ill. He started vague, testing whether he should say more. “We had one who was very ill. Looked like he wasn’t going to make it. You want to mention his name?” He looked at House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was sitting right next to him.

Johnson, clearly trying to handle this carefully, said, “Neal Dunn of Florida had real health challenges.” He was being deliberately vague. Choosing his words. Protecting a colleague. Trump didn’t. “His diagnosis was he’d be dead by June,” Trump said. Johnson’s face changed. “Okay, that wasn’t public,” he said. The room audibly groaned.

Trump kept going. “But yeah. It was grim, that’s what I was going to say.” And then he revealed it was a heart problem. “This was a heart problem,” he said, adding details that Dunn’s office had never shared publicly.

Then he told the story of how he found out. “He called to say that he was terminal, really bad heart. There’s nothing they can do. I said, ‘That’s bad.’ Number one, it was bad because I liked him. Number two, it was bad because I needed his vote.”

He described getting Dunn to Walter Reed. He said White House doctors evaluated him within hours. He said Dunn was “on the operating table like two hours later.” He talked about the stents. “It was a long operation. They gave him more stents and more everything that you can have.” Johnson added, “The man has a new lease on life. He acts like he’s 30 years younger. We thought we’d seen a ghost.”

And then Trump closed the story with the line that told you everything about who he is: “I did it for him first and for the vote second, but it was a close second, actually.”

Regardless of my feelings about Dunn and the way he votes, what Trump did was reduce his life to a political tool, and he didn’t even seem to understand why that was a problem. He didn’t understand basic human decency or the expectation of privacy and discretion that comes with keeping certain information private. Especially in the context of being the President of the United States, where discretion isn’t optional. It’s mandatory for the position. He turned a colleague’s terminal diagnosis into a story about himself, thinking it would make him look good. When all it really did was showcase why he can’t be trusted.

And while all of this was happening, he also told us what he thinks of the alliances that have kept this country safe for decades. He talked about NATO as if it were a burden. In the same breath that he was desperately asking other countries to send mine sweepers to help him secure the Strait of Hormuz, a crisis he created, he rambled on to say this: “This is the greatest thing to come out of this. We spend trillions and trillions of dollars on NATO to defend other countries. And I always said, but if it ever comes time to defend us, they’re not going to be there. Many of them would not be there.”

But they were there. The only time Article 5 of the NATO treaty has ever been invoked in its entire history, it was for us. After September 11th, our allies didn’t hesitate. They sent their forces to fight a war that wasn’t theirs to fight because that’s what the alliance meant. If you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. That wasn’t just a slogan. It was a promise. And they kept it. More than 1,000 coalition soldiers died fighting alongside us. They were on the front lines. They bled for us. NATO didn’t just protect us in that moment. For decades, it deterred exactly what is happening right now. It kept World War 3 from becoming a reality, not once but countless times, because the world knew that this alliance was real and that it would hold. Trump himself said that had he not acted, we’d be heading toward World War 3. Well, by the looks of it, we are closer to World War 3 than we have ever been precisely because of what he’s done.

When I heard him dismiss NATO today, it hurt me on a level that goes deeper than politics. Because I remember September 11th. I had a one-year-old daughter and was soon pregnant with my second child. That afternoon, my inbox was flooded with messages from people I knew through work who lived in other countries, especially in Germany and across Europe, asking what they could do. One person asked if they could wire me money. Could they send toys for my daughter? Was there anything at all they could do? They didn’t understand the distance between San Diego and New York. And even if they had, they still would have offered. Because they saw what happened and they wanted to help. They were there for me and my family even though we didn’t need it, even though we weren’t directly affected. They didn’t care. They just showed up. Just like their countries would go on to send their forces to fight alongside ours in a war that was not theirs, because that is what allies do.

For him to dare say that NATO wouldn’t be there for us, when he is the one turning his back on every alliance we have, is disrespectful to every single person who lost someone that day and disrespectful to all Americans that he thinks we can’t see through it. And I know his words hurt many of you, my international readers, and I am sorry for that. Make no mistake, we understand what we are up against. We know how corrupt, cruel, and deeply troubling this man is for the entire planet.

So what do we do? Tonight, we keep the faith alive that better days are coming. We celebrate that the courts are still holding, and that it terrifies him. That’s why he spent his Sunday evening, while we are at war, raging on Truth Social about the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, attacking Judge Boasberg, and threatening to have judges removed. He wants them gone because they are the last wall between him and unchecked power. And they are still saying no.

That matters. Because when Democrats take back Congress in the midterms, and I need you to hold on to that hope the way I hold on to it every single day, Trump and his enablers are going to fight it. They are going to say the elections were rigged. They are going to say that they don’t count because there’s a national emergency. They are going to do everything possible beforehand to make sure we don’t have free and fair elections. And after we do, because I still believe we will, because our elections are controlled by the states and Trump does not control them even if he pretends he does, it is going to go to the courts. These same courts. The ones that are still holding right now. And these courts are going to have to pick a side. Not a political party. The Constitution. The continuation of our democratic republic. And right now, all signals are that at least enough of them are still holding.

It’s March 16th. We have less than eight months. We can do this. We can keep this pressure up and keep reminding each other what America really is, what the Constitution stands for, and what prior generations sacrificed to get here. The ones who crossed oceans for a better life and the ones who were kidnapped and enslaved, and still fought for this country’s promise.

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