The president is falling apart

Aug 22, 2026

At 7:05 tonight, Donald Trump was seen offstage through a slit in the curtain, wearing a deep navy suit and bright red tie as he made his first pass at the stage. Not even a minute later, he emerged, energized and ready to go. Stepping forward, he stopped to soak in the cheering crowd as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blasted through the speakers. As he headed toward the podium, he approached the steps and gripped the handrail with one hand before grabbing it with both and using it to catapult himself toward the stage.

At 7:09, with sweat already pooling on his face, he launched into an hour and 20 minutes of pure chaos and madness, stopping at one point to tell the crowded room that Melania Trump hates when he dances to YMCA. “She hates when I dance to that great... to the gay national anthem. That’s what it is. It’s called the gay national anthem.” He warned the crowd that he would be impeached if Democrats take back Congress. And then he declared that there really is no Republican Party anymore. It is all MAGA.

He is not exaggerating when he says the Republican Party as we knew it is gone. He is describing what he has built. A political movement where no internal dissent, institutional checks, or voices inside the room feel safe, or are allowed to say no. When there is nothing left to push back against a president, all that remains is domination.

Today, his Pentagon showed us exactly what that kind of unchecked power looks like when it reaches the last independent voices standing between the American military and state-run propaganda. They fired three people from Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has served American troops since the Civil War. The reason they were fired is the part that concerns me the most.

Max Lederer is an Army veteran who joined Stars and Stripes in 1992 and served as its publisher for 19 years. Erik Slavin was named editor-in-chief last September after joining the paper in 2005 as a reporter in Japan. He went on to embed with American forces in Iraq, report from South Korea, and oversee news operations in Europe and the Middle East. Lara Korte joined in 2024 and has spent the last six months reporting from the Middle East on the Iran conflict, living alongside the servicemembers and military families whose stories she was telling the world. All three received separation notices on Friday, all citing insubordination.

And what was the insubordination? What was the act so dangerous, so threatening to the Department of Defense, that it required the removal of three journalists from a newspaper that has existed for over 160 years? They defended the idea that the troops deserve the truth.

In a CBS Sunday Morning segment that aired last month, Slavin was asked whether he had any red lines. He answered the way any journalist with integrity would. He said that if the Pentagon tried to kill an accurate story and replace it with one written by its own public affairs office, that would be a red line. Korte said something just as direct and apparently just as unforgivable: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”

That is what got them fired. No breach of ethics or failure of any kind. They said what the mission of their newspaper has always been, and the Pentagon treated it as an act of defiance.

But here is the part that I keep coming back to, the detail that tells us everything about how far this has gone. According to a source who spoke to Fox News Digital, the Pentagon did not simply decide to fire Slavin and Korte on its own. Pentagon leadership directed Max Lederer to do it. They told the publisher of the troops’ own newspaper to fire his editor and his reporter for defending press freedom on television. Lederer refused, so they fired him too.

This is a travesty. The man who spent 19 years serving the troops’ right to a free press was fired because he would not become the instrument of its own destruction. He chose his journalistic integrity over his job. He chose the mission he was given over an order that betrayed it, and they ended his career for it.

They already seem to have his replacement waiting, too. Earlier this month, and without much fanfare, the Pentagon installed Navy Captain William Urban, an active-duty public affairs officer, as Lederer’s deputy. Lederer was not consulted, and he was not told it was coming. He found out after it had already happened. When Lederer announced his retirement this week, writing in a staff memo that his understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes differed “in fundamental ways” from the direction the Department of Defense has for the organization, Urban was already there, ready to step in. On Friday, Urban published an open letter about “modernization,” saying he had received “multiple assurances” from Pentagon leadership that they remain committed to editorial independence. We will have to wait and see whether he is given Lederer’s position.

They can tell us they remain committed to editorial independence, but their actions tell a very different story. This did not happen overnight. For eight months, they have been methodically dismantling the independence of Stars and Stripes from the inside. When we look at everything they have done, step by step, it becomes impossible to pretend this was anything else.

In January, Hegseth’s spokesman declared that the Pentagon would return Stars and Stripes to what he called its “original mission,” refocusing content away from “woke distractions” and toward “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability.” That same month, applicants for jobs at the paper were being asked through the federal hiring system to explain how they would advance the President’s policy priorities.

In March, the Pentagon issued new rules declaring that content must be ‘consistent with good order and discipline.’ That phrase comes directly from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and Slavin immediately raised an alarming question: could a servicemember working for Stars and Stripes face military discipline, even court-martial, for something they publish? The Pentagon did not answer. And that same month, the paper’s own Pentagon reporter was barred from attending a Hegseth press conference. The Pentagon claimed there was no room. They blackballed their own newspaper from covering their own briefing.

In April, they fired the ombudsman. That was the person whose entire job was to safeguard editorial independence. In June, they banned reporters from the Pentagon’s press office entirely.

And then in August. Urban was installed, and Lederer was pushed out. Today, three journalists who dared to say the troops deserve the truth were terminated.

It took them just eight months to dismantle something that had endured since the Civil War. I keep thinking about the servicemembers overseas right now, the ones stationed in the Middle East, the ones on ships, the ones in places where Stars and Stripes might be the only independent news they can access. What do they read now? What source do they have that is not controlled by the chain of command that sends them into harm’s way? Who tells them the truth when the truth is inconvenient for the people giving the orders?

What is happening makes me think of Eisenhower. In this moment, history feels less like a lesson and more like a gut punch, because General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who commanded the liberation of Europe, personally defended Stars and Stripes during World War II. He wanted the troops’ newspaper free from propaganda and free from the influence of military brass. He understood, in the middle of a gruesome and bloody war, that soldiers fighting for democracy needed to read the truth, not the version that flattered their generals or the version that protected politicians from scrutiny. He demanded they be told the truth.

That was the principle. For more than 80 years, through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and administrations of both parties, that principle held. It did not take a foreign enemy to destroy it. It just took Trump appointing and Congress confirming Pete Hegseth. And he only needed eight months to do it.

The timing of all of this is what makes what happened later in Trump’s rally so disturbing. On the same day that the Pentagon dismantled one of the military’s oldest independent sources of news, Trump showed us exactly what he plans to fill the space now that the truth has been pushed out. Fear, propaganda, and stories he can pervert, repeat, and pull out whenever he needs them.

At 8:06, near the end of the rally, he pulled out a piece of paper and brought back an old rally staple he had not used in some time. “The Snake.”

“The Snake” is a poem written in 1963 by Oscar Brown Jr., a Black civil rights activist, singer, and social justice advocate from Chicago. It is based on one of Aesop’s fables, “The Farmer and the Viper,” a story about trust and betrayal. A tender-hearted woman finds a half-frozen snake on a path. She takes it in, wraps it in silk, lays it by the fire, feeds it milk and honey. And when the snake recovers, it bites her. As she lies dying, she asks the snake why. And the snake replies: “Oh shut up, silly woman. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

Trump has been reciting this poem at rallies since January 2016. He stole it from a Black civil rights activist, twisted its meaning, and turned it into a weapon against immigrants. In his sick rendition, America is the tender-hearted woman and immigrants are the snake. The moral, as he frames it for those cheering crowds, is that compassion is foolishness and cruelty is wisdom. He trains his followers, night after night and rally after rally, to believe kindness is the problem. That the woman who showed mercy deserved what she got.

Oscar Brown Jr. died in 2005, before Trump ever touched his words. But his daughters have been fighting to reclaim them ever since. The family sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Trump campaign. He ignored it. And his daughter Africa Brown said exactly what I felt hearing him recite her father’s work when she said: “Trump is the living embodiment of the snake that my father wrote about in that song.”

The American people are the tender-hearted woman. They saw what Donald Trump was. He incited an insurrection on January 6th. He tried to overturn a free and fair election. He was indicted on 91 felony counts across four cases. He was found liable for sexual abuse. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He showed this country exactly what he was. Every warning sign was there, and every red flag was flying high in the sky for all to see. And a substantial part of our country took him in anyway. They gave him a second chance. They nursed him back to power and believed him when he promised he would be different this time.

And he bit them. He bit the veterans whose newspaper he gutted today. He bit the workers whose jobs are disappearing while he stands in front of a microphone and brags about the greatest economy in history. He bit the taxpayers by increasing the deficit while grocery prices soar. And he bit the world by launching his ego war that has caused instability and sky-high fuel prices. He bit every single person who believed him when he said he was fighting for them.

And when they cry out, and they ask him why, the answer is the same one it has always been. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. He told them. He showed them. He never once hid what he is. And now the bite is not just for the people who voted for him. It is for all of us.

And when his time was up, and he was ready to go, YMCA blasted through the speakers one last time. The gay national anthem. He did his little dance, and then he started pretending to hit golf balls from the stage. Air golf, swinging at nothing, while the crowd cheered. Then he made kissing faces, pointing at people in the audience and blowing kisses through the air. That is how the President of the United States ended his evening.

The hardest part of watching that rally was not what came out of his mouth. Most of it was the same recycled talking points, the same chaos his deteriorating mind can hold on to. It was just the same material his handlers fill these speeches with because they know he can still perform it. I expect that. It feels like background noise at this point. What really hurt and what made me have to take breaks before turning it back on was watching the people cheer for him. People were cheering for the worst things he said. People were booing the press and the media. That is the part that breaks something in me every time. It is devastating knowing that these are my fellow Americans.

Today has been especially brutal when it comes to “reader feedback.” It happens, and my skin has grown thicker, but some days it really piles on. Watching this rally felt personal in a way it normally doesn’t. I found myself looking at their faces and wondering which one sent the email today telling me to end my life. Which one wished cancer on me. Which person cheering for our clearly soulless president decided it was acceptable to threaten my child today.

This is what is happening. Every single night. I made a decision when I started writing these posts that I would try not to delete those comments. When this is all said and done, I want people to be able to search for their family members. I want them to be able to look back and see what they said, what they did, and what this man turned them into. Maybe that is part of how we stop this from happening again. Maybe someday someone will look back and discover that the grandparent they remembered as the kindest person in the world was going onto a stranger’s page and wishing death on her and her children. There has to be a record of how people behaved during this time. There has to be.

I have not given up on these people even after this. I have to hold onto the belief that they are not all too far gone. But I am also not spending my energy trying to convert the committed. I would still welcome any one of them back if they can stop long enough to look around and ask themselves whether their lives are actually better, or whether they have simply been taught to hate their neighbors and say things to strangers they would never say to their faces. Maybe some will see it before it reaches them. Maybe others will have to feel the bite themselves before they finally see the snake for what he is.

On days like this, I turn to action. I do something meaningful to mend my heart. Today, Trump gave me the direction I needed. I did what I always do when this administration attacks the First Amendment and our free press: I rallied. Because the answer to silencing good people is making sure their voices get even louder. This is something we can all do. We can rally behind the journalists who refuse to be silenced. We can rally behind independent writers and content creators. We should support anyone willing to tell the truth about what is happening to this country, so they have the resources to keep going.

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