Only the good die young

Aug 26, 2026

At 6:58 this morning, just as the sun was rising over Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was already wide awake inside the White House, posting on social media about renaming lakes to provoke and harass one of our closest allies. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing [sic] much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This was just the first of dozens of posts he made throughout the day while the White House kept him locked away from the waiting press and public view. This is what the 80-year-old man entrusted with the most powerful office in the world decided to do as soon as he woke up.

Like many others, this was the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning, and it made me stop and stare at my phone, asking myself again how we got here. How did we go from stability, coexistence, and allyship to a President of the United States who wakes up looking for new ways to torment our neighbor? I found myself thinking about the 80 years Donald Trump has spent on this planet, how much he has been given during that time that most could only dream of having, and how much harm he has done and continues to do with it. Most days I might have cast aside the pettiness of the whole thing and moved on to the next story, but my mind kept coming back to the absurdity of a world filled with problems he has the power to help solve, and how at every turn and opportunity he instead spends so many of his waking moments searching instead for something else he can make angrier, more divided or completely destroy.

What I didn’t know was that just a few hours later, everything I was thinking about would take on an entirely different weight. Because this afternoon, Dolly Parton died. She was 80 years old, too. And suddenly, I found myself thinking about 80 years in an entirely different way. About how much life that really is. How many choices it holds. How many opportunities we are given to make someone else’s life a little better, or a little worse. And ultimately, how differently two people can choose to spend the time they are given.

Trump wasn’t finished with Canada; the lake post was only the beginning. He was fixated for hours. By 9:40 AM, Trump was attacking Canada again, accusing our neighbor of “Ripping Off” the United States for decades, calling them “the most difficult and unreasonable” country he deals with, and declaring that “they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer.” Twenty minutes later, he claimed the United States loses “on average, 60 Billion Dollars a year with Canada,” another number thrown into the world to convince Americans that one of our oldest allies is somehow our enemy. Four minutes after that, his account shared a map of the Great Lakes with “Lake Ontario” crossed out in red and “Lake America” stamped over it in shiny gold, complete with a “Team Trump” logo at the bottom. This is what our foreign policy has been reduced to under the Trump administration. There is no real strategy or diplomacy. Only threats, insults, and poorly executed propaganda. The President of the United States is using the power and reach of his office to torment a neighboring democracy because they will not bow down to his ever-changing demands. That is where we are now.

What made the whole thing even more troubling and, really, dangerous was what Trump posted in between those attacks. At 9:32 AM, he praised his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” while repeating that he had instructed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea, bending American military policy to please the North Korean dictator. So within the same hour that Trump was threatening Canada, one of our closest allies and a democracy that has stood beside us for generations, he was bragging about doing a favor for Kim Jong Un. And I don’t know how we are supposed to look at that and pretend any of this is normal. Canada is not threatening us with nuclear weapons. They are not starving their own people, imprisoning political opponents, or running one of the most repressive governments on earth. They are our neighbor and our ally. Yet Trump treats them like an enemy that needs to be punished while treating a brutal dictator like a friend whose approval he desperately wants.

And this is so much bigger than another unhinged social media post. The President of the United States is using American power to antagonize the countries that have historically stood beside us while bending over backward for the dictators who threaten them. He sees loyalty and cooperation from our allies as weakness, but cruelty and absolute power from men like Kim Jong Un as something worthy of respect. It is completely backward, and every time he does this, he makes the world a little more dangerous. He weakens relationships that took generations to build, undermines the alliances that have helped prevent larger wars, and sends a very clear message to dictators around the world that if they flatter Donald Trump enough, he might be willing to give them anything they want, no matter the cost.

And this isn’t just about who Donald Trump considers a friend or an enemy. It’s about the fact that this same warped thinking now runs through nearly every part of our government. He gravitates toward the cruelest people, embraces the worst ideas, dismisses experts who tell him things he does not want to hear, and surrounds himself with people willing to reinforce whatever conspiracy or grievance has captured his attention that day. The things that should protect us become the things he attacks, and the people and ideas that should frighten us become the ones he elevates. We can laugh at the absurdity of “Lake America,” but there is nothing funny about what happens when this way of thinking begins determining American policy. Because we might see what he says as ridiculous and unworthy of even our attention, but millions of his devoted followers don’t. They believe him, and they repeat it. They make decisions based on it as if what he says is the gospel, and eventually the consequences become real people whose lives are changed, or even lost. Today, two people died because of the disinformation coming from this administration.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed today that two unvaccinated people have died of measles in Lancaster County, the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. Hundreds of people have already been infected in the state, dozens have been hospitalized, and vaccination rates in Lancaster County have fallen below the level needed to protect the community from outbreaks like this one.

Lancaster is a beautiful place I have visited many times before. It is my husband’s hometown, and we were heartbroken to hear that this was happening there. These are real people, real families, and a real community now dealing with a disease that most of us grew up believing had been left in the past. And that is what makes this so difficult to accept. Because this did not have to happen.

We know how to prevent measles. We have known for decades. These deaths should not have happened. Yet instead of protecting the progress that has been made against the spread of measles, this administration has spent its time elevating conspiracy over science, putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and undermining confidence in vaccines that have saved countless lives. Trump just signed an executive order this month calling for the combination MMR vaccine to be separated into individual shots, despite the lack of scientific evidence that doing so is safer. This is where all that disinformation eventually leads. It leaves parents afraid of the medicine that can protect their children, and communities vulnerable to diseases we already knew how to control.

Which makes what happened later today feel even more heartbreaking. The woman who used her own money to help fund vaccine research that would protect millions of people died this afternoon in Nashville. She was 80 years old. Her publicist confirmed she passed at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, surrounded by loved ones, after a brief battle with cancer. Her family asked that in lieu of flowers, people donate to her Imagination Library.

She was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. She was the fourth of 12 children. Her family had no electricity or running water. The walls were lined with newspaper for insulation. The doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a sharecropper who could not read or write. She described her family as “dirt poor,” but she also said, “We didn’t have any money, but we were rich in things that money don’t buy. Like love and kindness and understanding.”

She could have been bitter about those years and resented the poverty, cramped cabin, and the weight of growing up with eleven siblings and parents who had almost nothing to give but love. But she never did. She adored her father. She spoke about him for the rest of her life. She had more pride than money could ever buy for him. “Daddy was a very smart man,” she said. “And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write.”

He inspired her to start the Imagination Library, a program she launched in 1995 in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee, to mail one free book per month to every enrolled child from birth to age five, regardless of family income. It started as a small local effort. It became the largest children’s book-gifting program in the world. Over 300 million books have been mailed to children in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. More than three million books go out every single month. All because a girl from a one-room cabin loved her father enough to make sure no other child would grow up without the chance to read as he had.

But that was not all she built. In 1988, she created the Dollywood Foundation and a program called the Buddy Program, which gave $500 to every seventh and eighth grader in her area who graduated from high school. The local dropout rate went from 35 percent to six percent. She covered 100 percent of tuition, fees, and books for any of her 11 thousand Dollywood employees who wanted to continue their education. After the Gatlinburg wildfires in 2016, she gave $1,000 a month for six months to every family that lost a home, and raised millions more. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, she donated $1 million of her own money and another $1 million from her businesses.

And in April of 2020, when the world was shutting down and the virus was spreading faster than anyone could contain it, Dolly Parton donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. That money funded what researchers later called the “critical” early stages of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When she received her first dose on camera in March of 2021, she sang a version of “Jolene” with the word “vaccine” and told the country, “Don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot.” She died today at Vanderbilt. The same hospital where her donation helped fund the vaccine that saved millions of lives and continues to save lives.

Dolly Parton spent her 80 years building an empire of kindness, literacy, and generosity from almost nothing, and when she saw something broken, hurting, or someone who needed help, her instinct was always to ask what she could do to help.

Donald Trump has spent his 80 years showing us almost the exact opposite instinct. He was born into enormous wealth, inherited the advantages and access that came with his family name, and has spent much of his life trying to make the world around him a monument to himself. And now he is doing it to our country. He demolished the East Wing of the White House to make way for a massive new ballroom. He is pushing forward with plans for a 250 foot triumphal arch in Washington, larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. His Treasury Department announced that Donald Trump’s signature will become the first sitting president’s signature to appear on American paper currency. The Kennedy Center board he chairs has voted to put “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” across the facade of a national memorial built to honor John F. Kennedy, while also renaming the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” And today, his administration went to court and argued that without the renovations and financial support tied to his recognition, the Kennedy Center could deteriorate to the point that it would eventually need to be torn down. This is what he does.

Maybe that is why today has hit so many of us so hard. It is not just that we lost Dolly Parton. It is what her loss illuminates about the moment we are living through. Her life feels like an answer to so many of the questions we keep asking ourselves about whether goodness still matters, whether one person can really make a difference, and whether it is worth continuing to try when so much of the world seems to be controlled by people determined to tear it apart.

She proved that it is. Dolly spent her life showing us that what matters in the end is how we made other people feel, who we helped along the way, and whether this world was any better because we were lucky enough to spend some time in it. She put books into children’s hands. She helped families rebuild their lives. She opened doors for people who needed a chance and gave without demanding anything in return. And perhaps the most beautiful part of her legacy is that she never had to tell us she was building one. She just kept doing good, year after year, until one day we looked around and realized how much of it she had left behind.

Today was another tough one. The hits just keep coming, and I found myself asking over and over again why someone with such a pure heart had to be taken from us while we are living through a moment that already feels so cruel. I keep trying to visualize the path out of this for us. A place somewhere on the other side of all of this where life starts to make sense again. Maybe you are feeling that way, too. Maybe your mind is going in 100 different directions these days, trying to figure out how we possibly get from where we are to where we need to be.

What I keep reminding myself in moments like these is that we do not have to know the entire path tonight. We just have to keep taking the next step together. The midterms are the next step, and then the presidential election after that. There are so many next steps we can take. We can organize the resistance and vote. We must speak out when something is wrong. We need to support the people and institutions doing good work and check on the people around us who are struggling. We must refuse to allow cruelty to make us cruel. And when we see a need that we have the ability to fill, we fill it.

That might be the most important thing Dolly Parton taught us. One person born with almost nothing can change millions of lives by deciding, over and over again, to give instead of take. We do not have to be billionaires or be famous. Most of us will never have our names on buildings, and that was never the point anyway. We just have to look around at the little piece of this world within our reach and ask ourselves what we can do to leave it better than we found it.

Tomorrow we will wake up to a morning without Dolly still here earthside, but she will live on in our hearts and her work will continue without her. The Imagination Library will keep mailing books to children who will never meet the woman responsible for putting them into their hands. The medical research she supported will continue helping people she will never know about. The students whose education she invested in will carry what she gave them into families and communities of their own for generations to come. The people she helped after fires and floods will wake up tomorrow in lives she helped them rebuild. She is gone, but the good she put into the world is not, and it never will be.

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