The President is deeply unwell

Apr 24, 2026

At 3:13 pm this afternoon, ten men and women stood behind the President of the United States as he sat slumped in his tall leather chair in the Oval Office. With his face sagging on one side, a lost look in his eyes, and fresh makeup covering the bruises on his hands, it was clear he did not want to be in that room, complaining he has to do this “every single day.” And it wasn’t just his words that showed it. He fell asleep only a quarter of the way through.

The nearly hour-long event was supposed to be about health care affordability, but instead, Trump hijacked the discussion in multiple directions that had nothing to do with health care, let alone affordability. He moved from attacking reporters, telling one, “You’re such a disgrace,” to cutting off another and calling him a “wise guy,” to practically admitting he believes Republicans will lose the midterms. And without skipping a beat, he also exposed what “America First” really means to him, bragging about using “Italian granite” in the White House remodel, which was really sourced from Africa and carved in Italy.

And it wasn’t just what the President said that showed us this was another staged event that wasn’t actually about what we were led to believe. Even the placement of people was telling. Trump seated at the desk. Eight men and two women, all in dark suits, strategically packed in behind him. There to laugh at his jokes and to praise him as needed. A visual show of his power, with enablers and pawns used as props. It looked like something we’ve seen before, not in American politics, but in the staging of authoritarian power. Putin uses this arrangement. Mussolini used it. The don at the head of the table, the capos behind him, present not to contribute in overly meaningful ways, but to project loyalty and muscle. It’s a very specific visual language, and someone in that White House chose it deliberately. What it says is simple: these people serve him. He does not serve them. And by extension, none of them serve us.

Behind that performance, and in between the parts he actually cares about, namely his construction projects, he was completely checked out. He lasted just about 19 minutes. Nearly a quarter of the way into an Oval Office event being broadcast live, he fell asleep multiple times while pharmaceutical executives and Cabinet members stood at attention behind him, playing their part in the performance. This is the same man who has spent years calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.” And yet he is the one who keeps falling asleep on camera.

It is worth saying clearly what this is and what it is not. Nobody should mock a nearly 80-year-old man for needing rest. People of his age, people managing whatever he is managing mentally and/or physically, deserve exactly that. That is not the conversation. The conversation is that this man holds the fate of the world in his hands. His decisions affect every person on this planet, whether we like it or not. He holds millions of people mentally hostage through instability and manufactured chaos. He doesn’t govern from a plan. He rules on impulse. And he is asleep at his own desk. That is what we are talking about.

And once again, you could see the bruises on his hand that they attempted to cover with makeup, if you looked closely. And again, this could be a non-issue if there were actually transparency in the White House. We are at war. We are struggling with inflation and affordability. The president keeps attacking foreign countries and threatening to attack more. The entire world has been destabilized.

Yet what we see with our own eyes is a nearly 80-year-old man who has gloated that his favorite meal is fast food burgers, who says he takes more aspirin than his doctor recommends, who has recurring bruises on his hands, and who can’t stay awake during events he knows will be captured on camera.

And none of those things are even the biggest issue. The real issue is the cover-up. We can see it with our own eyes, right in front of us, what is happening, and we are told there is nothing there. In fact, we’ve been told the opposite. That he is in excellent health, both physically and mentally. That he is “one of the healthiest presidents ever.”

That is the architecture of every authoritarian regime: manufacture the lie, repeat it with confidence, and dare the public to trust what they can plainly see.

And that was just the start of this “health care affordability” event. Trump also announced a new pricing deal with Regeneron as part of his Most Favored Nation initiative and TrumpRx, the 17th such agreement his administration has struck with major drug companies.

And then there was the math fiasco, where RFK Jr. tried to use fake arithmetic to argue that you could cut drug prices by 600% and still have to pay. Those of us who are not trying to mislead people know that you can’t actually cut anything by 600%. Trump has repeatedly claimed drug prices have been cut by over 100%, which is mathematically impossible. If prices dropped more than 100%, companies would be paying you to take the drugs. RFK Jr. had already been called out on this exact point by Senator Elizabeth Warren the day before, and he showed up to the Oval Office event and repeated the claim anyway. When Trump was asked about it, he defended it. There are, he explained, “two ways of calculating.” Which we all know there is not.

Then he went further off script. He pulled out photographs of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and announced he was having it resurfaced. The granite surface, he said, was leaking and he claimed, would cost $301 million and three years to properly replace. So instead he called some pool contractors he knows personally and is having it coated with an industrial pool surface for $1.5 million. He initially wanted turquoise, “like in the Bahamas,” but a contractor talked him into “American flag blue.” The pool was last comprehensively renovated in 2012, paid for by $34 million in Obama-era stimulus funding. Now it is getting a swimming pool paint job, rushed to finish before July 4th, the nation’s 250th birthday. A permanent piece of American history, coated like a backyard pool, to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of a man who wanted it to look like the Bahamas.

Then came the embarrassing and deeply offensive crowd size claim, where Trump said of the spot where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963: “He had a million people, and I had the same exact crowd. Maybe a little bit more. I actually had more people, but that’s okay.” Reporters were unable to confirm which event of his he was referring to, but his representation is far from reality, and it is profoundly disgusting that he sees MLK as a threat to his own popularity. A man who was not perfect in many ways, but who was pivotal in the civil rights movement and who paid the ultimate price for standing on the right side of history.

And then he directed those reporters to look at the construction outside the Oval Office. Black charcoal granite, he said, going in along the West Wing Colonnade. Beautiful. Magnificent. A million-year life. He was proud of it. As the press was being ushered out at the end of the event, CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe stopped at the president’s desk. “Where did the granite come from?” Trump said it came from Italy. O’Keefe pressed: “So it’s Italian granite?” Trump clarified. “Well, it came from Italy, it was carved in Italy, it came from another location. You know where the location is? Africa.” O’Keefe: “So you have African and Italian granite outside the Oval Office?” Trump: “Correct, is that okay?” And that is what Trump really means by “America First.”

The reporters in that room today tried to hold him to account and paid for it. Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason asked how long Trump was willing to wait for an Iran deal. “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me, Jeff. Guys like you...” Trump named Vietnam, Korea, World War II. Six weeks of war in Iran is nothing, he said, compared to 18 years in Vietnam. A second reporter fact-checked him on his own timeline, noting the war is now in its eighth week. Trump backpedaled; he “hoped” it would be four to six weeks, but he gave Iran “a break.” Then a female reporter asked the plainest possible question: what do you say to Americans who are worried about how long this will take, given that gas prices keep rising? Trump pointed at her. “You’re such a disgrace. Did you hear what I just said? Vietnam. How many years was Vietnam?” She did not flinch. “I understand, sir, but you are past your six-week deadline.” He talked over her. Then O’Keefe asked about gas prices and Trump cut him off mid-sentence. “Can I finish my question, wise guy?” The same O’Keefe who, minutes later, asked where the granite came from.

And it wasn’t just the reporters in that room pushing back against Trump’s authoritarian behavior and lies. The polls tell us the majority of the country is seeing it too. Trump’s overall approval is at 37%, the lowest of his second term. His approval on the economy among registered voters sits at 34% today, according to Fox News, compared to 49% right before Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms, in the same poll, from the same network. These numbers aren’t just bad. They’re historically bad. And he knows it. Which is why he is pushing “creative math” and staging all of these carefully scripted events.

We also saw today that Trump’s reach continues to creep into our ability to have free and fair press. Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve Paramount’s takeover of the entire company in a deal valued at $110 billion. Paramount is led by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s closest billionaire allies, a lead investor in TikTok’s U.S. operations, and a man who sat next to Rupert Murdoch in the Oval Office just weeks into Trump’s second term. Tonight, the same night his shareholders voted to approve this deal, he hosted an invitation-only dinner in Washington honoring Trump. Trump attended. The dinner was held at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, the federally funded building the State Department renamed after him last year. Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller will be his guests at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, attending alongside CBS News, which Paramount already owns. Ellison has reportedly promised Trump sweeping changes at CNN if the deal closes. He says editorial independence will be maintained. The Freedom of the Press Foundation says he has “zero credibility on the issue.” That means CNN, HBO Max, TNT, the Warner Bros. film studio, and the full Paramount catalog, CBS, BET, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, all moving under one roof, owned by a family that is openly, actively, and financially aligned with this administration. Several state attorneys general and European regulators have signaled they may challenge it, and the deal is not expected to close until late this year. But the direction is clear. The consolidation of American media is accelerating in the same environment where the president of the United States is calling reporters disgraces and wise guys in the Oval Office and posting about fake news on Truth Social. This is not a business story. This is a democracy story.

When two of the largest media companies in the world merge, the number of people deciding what gets covered, how it gets framed, and what gets buried shrinks dramatically. Executives who want access to the White House start making editorial calculations that have nothing to do with journalism. We have already seen this happen in this country. We watched Jeff Bezos kill a Washington Post endorsement. We watched the LA Times owner do the same. We watched ABC settle a defamation suit with Trump for $15 million rather than fight it. We are watching corporate media capitulate to authoritarian power and profit from it.

This is how it works in authoritarian regimes. Not always with government censorship or journalists thrown in jail, though that happens too. Sometimes it happens with less noise, through consolidation, ownership, and the slow replacement of editorial courage with business calculation. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán didn’t need to ban the press. He just made sure his allies bought it. In Turkey, Erdogan didn’t outlaw journalism. He restructured ownership until the journalists who remained understood the rules. Trump has studied these men. He has called them winners. He has praised their methods. And now, the media landscape that is supposed to hold him accountable just got one step closer to being significantly smaller.

There are still people doing courageous work inside corporate and legacy media. The reporters didn’t flinch today. Ed O’Keefe didn’t stop. There are journalists at the remaining independent outlets, at regional papers, at nonprofit newsrooms, risking their careers and sometimes their safety to tell the truth. We need to name them. Support them. Refuse to let them disappear quietly. And for the voices that exist entirely outside the corporate structure, the ones who answer to readers and no one else, this moment is exactly why we exist and exactly why it matters that we keep going.

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I was on a five-hour flight to DC today, and nearly the entire time I thought about how far we are from where we should be. We have the least qualified and most morally corrupt people in the most important positions, with an Epstein-connected elite enabling all of it. And driving into the city, I was reminded of how beautiful it is. The buildings are steeped in history, in both the good and the terrible. Enslaved people helped build the house Trump now lives in. He is constructing what amounts to an Arc de Triomphe for himself, determined to leave monuments that outlast him. He is fixated on strongmen. On authoritarian leaders. He sees himself as equal parts king and mob boss. Influence, wealth, loyalty, intimidation, secrecy, power, and control are the principles he rules under. Not civility, respect, compassion, care, and duty to the office that so many others have governed under in the past.

And as I drove past so many historic buildings as I entered the city, I felt a heaviness in my heart. I was really looking forward to my time here, but also troubled in a way I couldn’t quite place. And as the sun went down tonight, I finally started to understand it. It’s the proximity to power being abused. To destruction. To a man who has no care for the nearly 250 years of sacrifice that have carried this country. And now we are in a moment where one election could determine what, if anything, our children and grandchildren are left to inherit. It’s another day of living in the in-between. The beauty of what this country is in so many ways, what it could be for everyone, and the reality of what it is today after all that he has done.

But I’m also reminded that none of this is permanent. We still have a country, and there is still time to save it from complete authoritarian collapse. We have to stay focused right now on the elections and, as I say every single time he attacks the press, supporting reporters, both independent media and those still with corporate protections that haven’t completely given in to Trump. We must stand with the reporters who ask the hard questions and make it clear that their work matters. The Warner-Paramount merger is a warning about what happens when those voices get swallowed whole. We need to pay attention.

And for those of us who can, we need to support independent media, because if this merger goes through, independent media will be responsible for an even larger share of holding the line between truth and propaganda. That is why every time he attacks the press, I will say so, to remind us all what is at stake and how we make sure the truth can still be shared. Every time we lose another free and fair news source, I will name it, because that is the last line between truth and propaganda and, by extension, free and fair elections. If you are in a position to support independent voices with a paid subscription, without hardship, please do. Not just mine. As many as you can. That is how economic resistance works. That is how we show up in the numbers that actually matter to them.

The polls show he knows what is coming. His numbers are lower right now than they were before his party lost the House in 2018. He fell asleep at his own press conference today. He got caught putting African and Italian stone on the America First White House. This is not a man in control. This is a man performing control for an audience that is shrinking. We are making our way back to a better future; all the signs are there. 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.