The President is desperate
At 5:33 p.m. tonight, Donald Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office for a last-minute executive order signing. With his left hand positioned over his right, partially obscuring what could be fresh bruising, the President of the United States spent the next 44 minutes attacking the press. “You know, we’ve had a lot of problems with you, haven’t we?” he said, before signing a new order that could severely limit Americans’ ability to vote, just months before one of the most critical midterm elections of our lives.
In what appeared to be a late addition to his schedule, the executive order signing still started 33 minutes late. And as Trump spoke during this time, he was noticeably aggressive throughout, especially when answering questions. He also continues to look to be in increasingly poor health, with his body sagging under its own weight, and his typical disorientation increasing with each passing moment.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stood behind him like a statue for nearly the entire 44 minutes, speaking only briefly about barcodes on ballot envelopes before resuming his position and reason for being there, to be seen and not heard.
The actual signing of the executive order took maybe two or three minutes. The rest was a rambling, attempted show of power that touched a lot of everything and settled on nothing. All of it cascading and circling back on itself. He declared that he had won three presidential elections. He said he “loves” certain Supreme Court justices. He said justices appointed by “Barack Hussein Obama” and Biden will always rule against you, that “you don’t have a chance.” He said Republican-appointed judges who rule against him are either “stupid” or “disloyal.”
When a female reporter asked about Iran’s Revolutionary Guard threatening eighteen, mostly American tech companies, including Nvidia, Apple, and Google, he cut her off. He called her “a fresh person.” He said, “we’ve had a lot of problems with you.” Then he mocked the question itself. “What did they threaten them with? BB guns?” He said, “most of those people are dead already” about the Iranian leaders, never answered the substance of the question, and moved on. This is the commander-in-chief of an active war dismissing a direct national security threat against American companies and the people working for them, because he didn’t know enough about it to respond, and chose to humiliate the reporter rather than admit it.
He said the war in Iran would be over in two to three weeks while gas sits at four dollars a gallon. When asked about a plan to bring prices down, his answer was a simple sentence: “All I have to do is leave Iran.” Which shows he still does not understand the damage and instability he has unleashed in the region, and the world. Because even if he left tomorrow, fuel prices wouldn’t just drop instantly. Israel is still attacking, and neighboring countries are still in turmoil. Just because he is sitting comfortably across the ocean and vacationing in Florida on the weekends doesn’t mean life goes back to normal for anyone.
He read aloud from a federal judge’s ruling that had blocked his $400 million White House ballroom vanity project just hours earlier, found the security exemption in the text, and then announced on camera exactly how he plans to circumvent the court order. He said presidents for 150 years have wanted a ballroom at the White House, a claim for which there is no historical evidence whatsoever.
And then it was over. Abruptly. “Thank you very much. Thank you.” The 44 minutes of rambling ended not with a natural conclusion but with what looked like a physical cue that something was wrong. He turned his head and took a deep, labored breath, sucking in air in a way that was impossible to miss. And within seconds, the handlers jumped in to clear the room and the cameras were immediately turned off.
And we can’t forget the “reason” for this evening’s signing. The President is grappling with an increasingly dire outlook ahead of the midterms, and his enablers are grasping at any potential way to circumvent free and fair elections. And that is why the President of the United States signed this executive order that directs the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to build a federal list of citizens eligible to vote in every state in America. Under this order, the United States Postal Service would be tasked with sweeping that list and would be barred from sending absentee ballots to anyone not on that federally prepared list. Ballots would be required to have secure envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking. States that refuse to comply risk losing federal funding. And the order directs the Attorney General to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of election officials who distribute ballots to voters that the federal government has not approved. Not voters who commit fraud. Election officials who send ballots to people whose names aren’t on a list that the Department of Homeland Security built, but who would appear on the state’s eligible voters lists.
There is no explanation of how a system designed for immigration enforcement will accurately handle the voter rolls of 50 states when it has already been documented to inaccurately flag actual United States citizens. And there is no legal authority for any of it.
The Constitution’s Elections Clause gives Congress, not the president, the power to make or alter election regulations. It grants the president no role in election administration whatsoever. Elections in this country have always been administered by states and local jurisdictions, run by election officials and volunteers in thousands of communities across the country, from small townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some entire states. A previous executive order on elections, signed almost exactly a year ago and attempting many of the same things, has already been blocked by multiple federal judges who said the president lacked the constitutional authority to set voting policy. Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote in one of those opinions: “Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”
And yet he signed another one tonight anyway. This time, using the full force of multiple government agencies under Trump’s control: one that builds the list, a postal service that enforces the list, and a justice department that prosecutes anyone who doesn’t comply with the list. As David Becker, a former Department of Justice election lawyer and one of the leading election law experts in the country, said tonight: “After the Department of Justice has been telling courts they’re not creating a national voter list, this appears to confirm exactly what courts were concerned about.”
Within minutes of the signing, the lawsuits began. Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said: “We don’t need decrees from Washington, D.C. My message to the President: We’ll see you in court.” Arizona’s Secretary of State pointed out that the state’s vote-by-mail system was designed by Republicans and has delivered secure elections for decades. Governor Newsom announced, “California will see him in court.”
Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and one of the most prolific voting rights litigators in the country, said: “This is a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail. We know where this will go, the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement.”
David Becker added, “This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” He said he expects courts to move quickly to block the order, just as they did with the first one.
And all of this, every piece of it, is being done to solve a problem that does not exist. The Heritage Foundation, the architects of the playbook Trump has been following, Project 2025, built the most comprehensive database of voter fraud cases in the country, specifically to prove that fraud is widespread, but it has instead proven the opposite. In Arizona, Heritage had to go back 25 years across 36 elections and more than 42 million ballots cast to find 36 cases of fraud. That is a rate of .0000845 percent. In Pennsylvania, the data covers 30 years, more than 100 million votes cast, and 39 cases. Not a single election outcome in any of those states was altered by fraud. Not one.
And then there is one of Trump’s favorite lines, one he repeated again today, referring to Democrats and their opposition to voter ID requirements. He kept the message simple and consistent: the only reason any Democrat would oppose voter ID or proof of citizenship is that they want to cheat. And then he said: “The only way they can win is to cheat.” He wasn’t making an argument. He was laying the groundwork to reject any election result that doesn’t go his way as illegitimate.
And this is what it comes down to. He doesn’t want fewer fraudulent votes. He wants fewer votes. Because when tens of millions of Americans show up, when turnout is so large that the outcome is beyond dispute, the result is too big to rig or credibly deny, like what happened in 2020, he loses power. And that is what he is trying to prevent from happening in 2026. If you can shrink the electorate, remove enough names from the rolls, block enough ballots from being mailed, create enough confusion and enough fear around the act of voting itself with ICE agents standing guard, then the margins get thinner, and the outcome gets easier to control. He is not solving a fraud problem. He is engineering a turnout problem. And as he has shown us over and over again, every accusation he makes is a confession. When he says, “the only way they can win is to cheat,” we need to listen carefully because he is telling us exactly what he plans to do.
And we can’t forget that Donald Trump himself voted by mail last week in a Florida special election, even though he was in town while early in-person voting was available. When asked about it, he said: “Because of the fact that I’m President of the United States.” Which says it all. Mail-in voting is fraud when we do it. It is perfectly fine when he does it.
As I took in everything he said today, I felt that uneasy feeling building up in my stomach again at levels I haven’t felt in a while. And I realized it was because two of my biggest concerns for our country were tested together today. The first is that we lose free and fair elections. The second is that we lose the free press. Hearing him attack both simultaneously showed his increasing desperation, but with that comes increasing danger.
Because he didn’t just wage war on mail-in ballots, and who would be allowed to vote. He also, once again, went after the people whose job it is to tell us about what he is attempting to do. He didn’t just attack a journalist on camera for asking a question the president should have been able to answer. He also ranted about the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, saying their circulation is collapsing because “people don’t believe them anymore.” He said that to continue to create the false narrative that all media, corporate and independent, are corrupt and lie. And that he is the only true source of news, facts, and the truth. He claimed that between “93 and 97 percent of his press coverage is bad” and thus, fake. He has said it so many times that it has become background noise, but we need to hear what that actually is. This is the president telling the American people that nearly every piece of journalism produced about him is a lie, and that the institutions responsible for holding him accountable are enemies. That is not complaining about bad coverage. That is a systematic effort to destroy public trust in the only mechanism, other than elections, that holds power accountable in a democracy. If he can shrink the number of people delivering the news, sharing what is actually happening in this country, down to a handful that he can pressure, discredit, or simply drown out, then the information environment becomes one he controls in its entirety. And if the public thinks that all media and journalists can’t be trusted, then they go out of business. And the news/media platforms his friends own thrive. Creating a system where everything we see and hear is state propaganda.
After hearing everything he had to say and realizing just how serious this double attack is, I went searching for some good news. Anything that shows we still have a way out of this. And I found it in the courts. Today, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s executive order defunding NPR and PBS was unconstitutional. Judge Randolph Moss, in a 62-page opinion, called it what it is: viewpoint discrimination and retaliation. He wrote that it is “difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch.” He issued a permanent injunction. The White House called it “a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge.”
And in a ruling that just came through as I am writing this, Judge Amit Mehta today rejected key parts of Trump’s attempt to claim immunity for his actions surrounding January 6. In the case, Blassingame v. Trump, a civil lawsuit brought by Capitol Police officers and members of Congress, seeking to hold Trump personally liable for damages from the attack on the Capitol, the court delivered a huge blow to Trump’s defense.
The court found that Trump’s conduct leading up to and on January 6 could reasonably be viewed as unofficial campaign activity, not protected presidential acts, meaning the lawsuits can proceed against him personally. The judge rejected Trump’s attempt to (ironically) revive a First Amendment defense. And critically, he struck down a Westfall Act certification that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice had filed to substitute the United States government as the defendant in place of Trump personally, which would have shielded him from liability altogether. He also denied Trump’s objection to admitting the January 6 Select Committee Final Report as evidence, meaning the court can use the committee’s findings.
I am going to hold onto the faith that the courts continue to offer us time and resistance. They are inadvertently helping us run out the clock on Trump’s unchecked mayhem. But we can’t think of it as a win at this point. It’s help in the battle, not a war won. So we need to trust that they will continue to help push back on these latest voter and press suppression tactics, but also plan for a future where Trump gets away with these. That means we need to check our voter registration now and then again monthly leading up to the elections. Because with this executive order, purges are their main path to control the election results.
We also need to find out whether our own Secretaries of State are going to resist or comply with federal data requests for our voter rolls. If they are resisting, contact them with support. If they are not resisting, contact them and demand that they do. And if you are not already paying attention to your state and local races, get active in those races. Because secretaries of state and state legislators are the people who actually administer elections and help decide whether to comply with orders like this one.
And of course, continue to support independent media and voices, because this is where both of my fears meet. The free press is under direct assault, and I don’t know if we are ever going back to the system we had before this, where we could trust corporate media to hold power accountable the way it once did. So we have to be the ones to build an alternative future where we actively seek out and support the new-age journalists, reporters, and independent voices who will carry the truth, and cut through the propaganda if we are going to survive as a country.
I know that so many of us are living lives we never would have imagined just ten years ago. I never thought I would be spending my days documenting either the end of the 250-year experiment that was the United States of America, or what I will always believe: her greatest comeback. But I know from the messages I receive that I’m not alone, and on the days it feels overwhelming, I let my mind wander to the day I get to write my nightly post as a celebration, where instead of documenting the daily horrors, I’m sharing all that is getting built back, but this time, even better. More free and fair for all. I know those days are coming.
Tonight, the President attacked the free press and signed an order to control who gets to vote, all in the same 44 minutes. It was relentless and embarrassing. But it showed that he is getting increasingly desperate. The midterms are going to keep bringing out this level of paranoia from him. We have to expect it and see it for what it is, the start of the end of his hold on our country. And that is why I still have hope for America, and you should too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
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: The stairs reminded me of one of my favorite poems: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. My favorite line has always been, 'I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.' I was the salutatorian in high school and chose this poem for my speech. It continues to guide my choices in life.
Sources:
Trump signs order directing creation of a national voter list: AP video
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-signs-sweeping-order-attacking-mail-in-voting/
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5508948/trump-voter-list-mail-ballots-executive-order
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-election-fraud-in-the-united-states-not-very/
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-federal-funding
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/politics/judge-rules-that-white-house-ballroom-contstuction-stop
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5809104-iran-irgc-apple-microsoft-google-hp-meta-tesla/
Brilliant commentary, as always. I spend more than I can afford on this and other substacks, but whenever I try to prune the list, and my out of control inbox, yours always avoids the chop!
I don’t get why we don’t remove him. Any day he could blow up the world. My suggestion is to offer him a deal to fire his hires and resign.