The President has lost all ability to hide his decline
At 3:47 p.m. this afternoon, the President of the United States walked into the East Room of the White House nearly an hour late for the Small Business Summit he was hosting. He did not explain the delay, that there had been a man with a gun shot by Secret Service officers nearby, or that a child had been struck by gunfire and rushed to a hospital. Instead, he walked to the podium, and in front of hundreds of small business owners who had traveled from all across the country, for what was supposed to be the proudest day of their professional lives, he launched into a 67-minute ramble, airing all of his grievances and personal vendettas.
With a voice that was softer than usual and words that kept slurring, he jumped from tariffs to imaginary economic victories, from attacks on political opponents to bizarre claims about global wars, rarely finishing a thought before veering into another. Stopping to go off on a tangent about how great he is at taking cognitive tests and telling the business owners seated in front of him that they probably couldn’t pass one. But most shockingly, he repeated his plan to not leave the White House at the end of his term, saying, “when I get out of office in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now.”
The event today was supposed to be a celebration. National Small Business Week is a tradition that goes back to 1963, when President Kennedy established the tradition by proclamation to honor the country’s top small business owners. The 2026 winners had come to Washington, D.C., for this moment. More than 130 owners in the room representing their state, who had built their businesses over years and decades, whose families had traveled with them to Washington to watch them be recognized for their work. They were supposed to walk into the East Room and celebrate the businesses they had built, and walk out with a story they would tell for the rest of their lives.
That is not what they got. What they got was a man whose attention span has visibly collapsed, performing for the cameras, who spent more time talking about things that had nothing to do with small business and everything to do with Trump and his need for validation.
And what made it so jarring wasn’t just what he said, it was the disconnect between the room he was standing in and the reality he chose to create inside it. These were not rally attendees. They were not there to hear his plea for votes ahead of the midterms. These were small business owners there to celebrate Small Business Week. And the president of the United States couldn’t control himself even in a crowd like that. He took the discussion in many different directions, spending a large amount of time talking about his repeated cognitive testing. He told the room, “in my opinion, anybody running for president or vice president should take a cognitive test. And no president has ever taken one except me. I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one.” He went on to describe the first question on the test, which involves identifying which animal is the squirrel out of a list that includes a lion, a bear, and an alligator. He bragged that “one doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times.”
He named the doctor. Ronny Jackson. The same Ronny Jackson who, in 2018, stood at the White House podium and told the country Trump had “incredibly good genes” and might have lived to 200 if he had eaten healthier. The same Ronny Jackson who is now Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas, who was demoted by the Navy after a Defense Department Inspector General report found he created a hostile work environment, made “sexual and denigrating” comments about a female subordinate, violated alcohol policy during presidential trips, and used prescription-strength sleeping medication in a way that raised concerns among colleagues about his ability to provide proper medical care, though Trump’s Navy Secretary later reversed the demotion in 2025. That is the doctor Trump just told us has examined his cognitive function.
He also said, “I’m tired of taking that test. You know, you sit before a group of doctors, and they ask you questions.” This is the first time I can remember Trump publicly stating that there was a “group” of doctors who tested him. And that is something we need to remember, because it means there may be more doctors than we thought covering up whatever the president might be going through.
And that means Trump is lying about the doctors. Or those doctors saw exactly what the rest of us see and signed off on a clean cognitive result anyway. And if it is the second one, those are doctors who took an oath, who know exactly what they signed, who will have to live with what they did for the rest of their professional lives. They have not just betrayed an oath. They have betrayed their country.
But the bigger story is that a man genuinely confident in his cognitive function does not perform his cognitive fitness in front of small business owners on a Monday afternoon. The fact that he keeps bringing it up unprompted is itself the answer. No president in modern history has made an issue of his own mental fitness the way Donald Trump has. And every time he does, we learn another piece of the truth, even when he thinks he is keeping it from us.
Buried in this same speech, he gave us this. He was talking about how the press would cover it if he ever publicly admitted he was not feeling well. Then, in the middle of the thought, he said: “Actually, I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it just like you did in the last administration.”
He is not warning us about a future decline. He is telling us his decline is not happening right now. He is pointing at Biden as proof that decline is visible to the public, and then asking us to look at him and see nothing. But we do see it. We have seen it for months. He is hoping that his over-explaining and manipulative words will make us ignore the man in front of us. We are not ignoring him. We see exactly what he is, and exactly what is happening.
Then came the eight-to-nine-year line. The full quote, in context, while he was explaining a tax provision: “I really was going to make it for a one-year period. That would mean you spend all your money immediately. Now, unfortunately, I gave you too much time. I was sort of against that. I said, ‘Let’s do it for a shorter period of time.’ But we did it. It’s the right thing. And this way, when I get out of office in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now, I’ll be able to use it. I’ll be able to use it myself.”
He thinks he is being funny. But we can see through this performance, too. We remember when he tried to overthrow an election. We hear him every single time he lies about winning in 2020. We watched him say last week that voters might need to “vote twice.” At best, this is cruelty disguised as humor. At worst, he is telling us, again, that he has no intention of leaving. Either way, it is a direct threat to the Constitution, and we have to take it seriously.
Then came the war talk, which somehow made his whole time at the podium worse. He called the Iran war a “mini war.” A “little detour.” He said it was “going very well.” Then he turned to the Venezuela operation and said, “that war took us approximately 48 minutes.” Forty-eight minutes. He bragged that Iran “had 159 ships. How many do they have left, Kelly (referring to SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler)? Out of 159, take a guess. She’s very smart. Zero. 159 ships in the first two weeks.” His only complaint about destroying 159 warships was that he didn’t get to keep more of them. His exact words: “I actually got very upset. I said, ‘How quality were the ships?’ They were very good. I said, ‘Why didn’t you just take the ship? Why do you have to send it to the bottom of the sea? We could have had, let’s say, out of the 159, we could have taken 59. We would have had 59.’ But they, like, they’d rather blow them up than save them. I would have preferred saving them. But these are minor details.”
These are minor details to Donald Trump. Because they are minor details to him. These events are just theatrical performances to him. These people are not “his people”. They are the people he panders to for votes and pretends to care about. It was especially evident when he was talking about tariffs today. He told small business owners that the tariffs, which, according to JPMorgan, have tripled the tariff bills of mid-sized American businesses in 2025, are not high enough. He said it directly. After Andrew Saville of Coosa Steel stood up and thanked him for the steel tariffs, Trump turned to a different small business owner and said, “you actually said thank you for the tariffs, but the tariffs really aren’t high enough in my opinion in that particular thing.” Then he announced that more tariffs are coming. His exact words: “the tariffs will actually be higher. It’s turning out they’re going to end up being higher.”
The Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump’s current tariffs could cost the average American household between about $760 and $940 in lost buying power. The New York Federal Reserve published research finding that nearly 90 percent of the burden of Trump’s tariffs are being paid by U.S. companies and consumers. Kevin Hassett, his National Economic Council director, called that paper “an embarrassment” and said the researchers should “be disciplined.” Which is Trump Administration code words for, the facts don’t support the propaganda. So we will attack the findings in hopes of discrediting the results, and then they attack the people who reported it.
And then there was the cruelty. Casual, constant, dropped into the speech like it was nothing. While talking about the estate tax, which Republicans rebrand as the “death tax,” he said this: “They end up going bankrupt. They end up, in many cases, committing suicide. We have a lot of that.”
He was claiming this is what happens to family-business owners and farmers when they cannot afford the estate tax after a parent dies. The framing itself is a lie. The federal estate tax in 2026 only applies to estates worth over $15 million per individual, $30 million per couple. The vast majority of small businesses and family farms in this country never come anywhere near that threshold. The “death tax” talking point is a long-running Republican fundraising tool that scares small business owners into voting against their own interests and supporting tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-wealthy. But set aside the lie for a second, and look at what he actually said. He told a room of family-business owners that “a lot” of people in their position end their own lives. A few seconds later, he made a joke. He said, “Now, if you don’t like your children, it doesn’t mean anything. But if you do like to leave them to somebody that you love, then it’s a big deal for them.”
What he meant was that the estate tax repeal only matters if you actually want to leave your business to your kids. So if you don’t like them, none of this applies to you. Maybe that joke makes sense to him because he is the one who can’t stand his own children. That would explain a lot. It would explain why he could stand in front of a room like that and say something so out of step with what those people actually feel about their life’s work. But beyond what it says about him, it tells us how he sees families in general. They are not legacies, and there is no love. They are simply transactions to Donald Trump. Property to be passed around. Just like how he sees this country.
Then there was the strange moment with Rick Harrison from Pawn Stars. Before Trump even introduced Harrison, he pivoted away from the small business owners in the room to lecture them about how hard it is to make it in television. “5% of the shows make it. 2% of the shows make it pretty good. 1% of the shows make it. So it’s very risky to do a television show, because, and I did The Apprentice, and that was one of the great hits of a long time.”
He did not say this about the small business owners in the room. He said this about himself. At a small business summit. Then came the introduction. Trump introduced Harrison by saying: “I think I’d rather be liked than loved by him. Although he is a very handsome man, I would say.”
Harrison then walked up and delivered sixty seconds of pure sycophancy, calling Trump “maybe the best president ever” and saying, “I love this guy.” Trump took the microphone back, said Harrison did better unprepared to comment than he would have done prepared, and immediately turned the conversation back to himself.
And when he called up members of his administration to comment on small businesses and the people who run them, they used the time instead to humiliate themselves by falling over themselves to praise him to stay close to power. Including his SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, who spoke beside him with the cadence and devotion of state media, calling him “the most pro-growth, pro-small-business president in American history” and “the greatest commander-in-chief ever.” Unfortunately, Trump himself might not have heard all the praise. Because even though he was standing right behind her, his eyes kept closing, and he looked wobbly on his feet as he swayed nearly asleep. He could not stay awake during his own event.
This is what authoritarianism looks like in the late stage. It is not always what we imagined it would look like. Today, it was a 79-year-old man in the East Room of the White House, slurring through a 67-minute speech, surrounded by enablers who tell him he is the greatest leader in American history, while the country he runs falls apart around him. It looks like Brezhnev’s last years in the Soviet Union. Slurred speeches. Handlers managing his attention span. State media reading prepared praise while the leader stood unfocused beside them. The propaganda machine running on top of a leader who could not reliably finish sentences. Everyone in the room knew what was happening. Everyone outside the room knew too. The only people still pretending were the ones whose power depended on the pretense. That is what we watched today.
I keep thinking about something I saw with my own eyes back in 2020. We were living in Newport Beach at the time, where every other house seemed to have a flag for him in their front yard, and then he attacked the military. He called fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” And almost overnight, the signs came down. Not slowly or gradually, but within days and with very few holdouts. Either no signs went up to replace them, or Biden signs went up.
That is what is building up again right now. Not a big moment like that, when saying something diabolical could elicit that kind of response, but the slow erosion of his control over his base. The closer we get to the midterms, the more performances like today we are going to see, because he cannot help himself, and the people propping him up cannot fully control him anymore. And every single one of those performances pushes more people toward the exit. The Newport Beach moment is happening again, on a national scale, in slow motion, every single day. And it is not going to stop. The momentum is building, the facts tell the real story of what is happening to our country and no amount of propaganda speeches like we saw today will change the truth. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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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: I took this picture last week in D.C. Seeing his face hanging off the side of a federal building, paid for with our tax dollars, was deeply unsettling. I have not been able to shake how it felt. This is what authoritarianism looks like.
Sources:
President Trump Participates in a Small Business Summit: Video
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/04/capitol-hill-shooting-white-house-lockdown/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/16/politics/dr-ronny-jackson-donald-trump-clean-bill-of-health
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/09/04/ronny-jackson-demotion-physician-trump/
https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/donald-trump-small-business-summit-1821344
https://www.thedailybeast.com/child-struck-in-secret-service-shooting-outside-white-house/
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-april-8-2026
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_ec356177-919e-4c01-9987-1e9d035c64d1.html
What I can’t understand is why anyone would attend an invitation to the White House. We have all seen how rude trump treats even the pope. How on earth a group of small business owners could subject themselves to the insults, they must know are coming. Maybe trump is right and his followers are stupid.
Why does anyone even go there for these types of events? They already know it will be a complete waste of time and expense.