At 11:21 this morning, with air already thick with humidity, and a Marine posted outside the West Wing of the White House, Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen. For the entire day, members of the press were ready, willing, and able to do their jobs, standing by as they waited for Donald Trump to make a public appearance. He never did. Instead, the President of the United States remained hidden away in one of the most secure buildings on the entire planet.
At 6:06 pm, White House correspondent John Bennett posted, “After a very quiet day, the White House called a travel/photo lid at 6 p.m. Have a good evening, folks.” Thus ending a full day in which the President of the United States never appeared before the American people.
In normal times, we wouldn’t question a president who made no press appearances for a day, even though he had six policy meetings on his schedule. But this is Donald Trump. He lives on drama and chaos, constantly looking for ways to distract his fellow Americans from the real issues he is unwilling or unable to confront. When he goes quiet, it normally means something is happening behind the scenes that he doesn’t want anyone else to know about.
Even though Trump stayed hidden away from the American people, his administration and enablers were still hard at work. They were just not doing the work we expect our government to do. They were focusing on propaganda, manufacturing new threats, and trying to convince us they are strong, in control, and that their power is not slipping away.
Like most things the Trump administration does, they failed at their goal. This morning, the official White House account, the voice of the United States government, posted a grainy black-and-white image of Trump standing on top of a building, staring down. The picture shows Trump photographed from below, looming above the camera like a figure out of an authoritarian regime’s propaganda office. The caption read: “DEPORT. DEPORT. DEPORT. DEPORT.” Beneath it was a banner that read “DEPORTATIONS ARE SPIKING,” with today’s date added right under. The image was dark and intimidating, clearly designed to project raw dominance and power. It looked like something produced by a fascist propaganda ministry in the 1930s or 1940s, not something the United States government would stand behind in 2026.
But here is what makes it worse. The photograph is not from some important presidential moment. It is from late summer of 2025, when Trump wandered onto the roof of the West Wing of the White House for nearly twenty minutes to survey his vanity ballroom project with his personal architect. When reporters shouted up to him asking why he was on the roof, he said he was “taking a little walk.” When they asked what he was building, he joked, “Nuclear missiles.” What we really saw that day was a confused man pacing a rooftop, pointing at things, shouting down to reporters below that could barely hear him. And his communications team looked at that footage and saw an opportunity. They took a concerning yet strange moment and turned it into propaganda meant to make him look powerful and intimidating. They took a man who looked confused and aimless and turned him into the strongman they desperately want us to believe he is.
The White House wasn’t the only one peddling propaganda today. Trump posted an image on Truth Social today showing the Strait of Hormuz labeled “NEW U.S. Territory.” This came days after Trump said he would “soon” declare the strait American territory. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister called it a “delusion.”
The consequences of what he posts are very real. He started a war he cannot finish, and now he is pretending that he will be conquering the area when all he is doing is destabilizing the region and making gas more expensive for everyone.
This wasn’t the only thing we learned about Iran today. According to a European government document obtained by NBC News, Russia is shipping drone components, ammunition, and TNT to Iran through the Caspian Sea to help Tehran replenish the stockpiles our military has spent months trying to destroy. The country whose leader Trump has praised repeatedly, whose president he invited onto an American airbase in Alaska while U.S. troops knelt on the tarmac to straighten the red carpet, is actively resupplying our enemy in the middle of a war.
This war and all of his other military excursions are pushing our military to its breaking point under the weight of all of it. It is not just the USS Abraham Lincoln, which I wrote about last night. The USS Benfold, a guided-missile destroyer, spent four days adrift in the South China Sea last month after an engineering failure left the ten-thousand-ton warship unable to maneuver under its own power. Sailors aboard were left without easy access to food, water, toilets, and air conditioning. This is what happens when a government stops functioning. Our national defense is weakening and fracturing, and every fracture is a signal to every adversary on earth that the United States is vulnerable.
Then came Trump’s big lie of the day. The Census Bureau released an analysis today showing that it had cross-referenced 128 million voter records from the 2020 election against federal citizenship data and found more than 24,000 linked to noncitizens. Trump immediately jumped on this and shared on Truth Social that this meant he had actually won the 2020 election. He wrote, “I WON THE ELECTION!” He then demanded passage of the SAVE America Act. But the actual math from that election destroyed his larger argument. Joe Biden won the 2020 election by more than seven million votes and the Electoral College 306 to 232. The Census Bureau’s preliminary analysis identified just over twenty-four thousand records it classified as noncitizen voters out of the first one hundred and twenty-eight million voter records it analyzed. That is less than two-hundredths of one percent. And this is only what the Census Bureau itself calls a “beginning analysis,” based on matching voter records against government databases. Similar government database checks have produced false positives and numbers that fell dramatically once election officials investigated individual cases. Trump took this preliminary nationwide number and immediately told the country that he won, even though he lost the national popular vote by more than seven million votes and lost the Electoral College 306 to 232.
But none of this is about the 2020 election. It is all about November 2026. Trump is preparing now to reject the midterm results if Republicans lose control of Congress. In 2020, he tried to overturn an election after he lost, scrambling to find any possible way to stay in power. This time, he isn’t waiting until after the votes are counted. He is putting the pieces in place beforehand. He has the Census Bureau producing data he can use. He has the SAVE America Act ready to be sold as the solution. He is already pushing “noncitizen voting” as the reason Americans shouldn’t trust the results. And in battleground states holding primaries today, election deniers are running for offices that could give them power over how future elections are administered. This is about creating as many ways as possible to challenge the election before a single vote has even been counted.
The man we have to blame for this latest scheme is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. A billionaire whose name appears in the Epstein files and who gave millions to Trump’s campaign. A report released this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that he was just one of 57 officials in the Trump administration who are worth at least 100 million dollars. Eight of them are billionaires. More than half were donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign, giving a combined $65 million to his political committees. The tally does not include Trump himself or Elon Musk. By comparison, George W. Bush had five officials with that kind of wealth. Barack Obama had three. Joe Biden had five. The combined total across all three of Trump’s predecessors is 13. Trump has 57. Thirty-two percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, and it’s not hard to understand why. Senator Bernie Sanders called it what it is: “a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” This is not an everyday administration, and they are not public servants. They are investors protecting their portfolios from inside the most powerful offices in the world.
And yet, in the middle of all of this, someone fought back today. Disney filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, alleging that the agency is waging a retaliatory campaign against ABC in violation of the First Amendment. The FCC had ordered Disney’s eight owned-and-operated television stations to file their broadcast license renewals years ahead of schedule, a move tied to the administration’s fury over Jimmy Kimmel and “The View.” The lawsuit states that the administration “has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts.” The sole Democratic FCC commissioner called it “a campaign of censorship and control” and said she was “glad Disney has shown courage.” Longtime First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that not until the Trump administration has the government “so directly, so deliberately and so dangerously sought to limit the freedom of the broadcast press.” When a corporation the size of Disney decides the legal and financial risk of suing the federal government is less dangerous than the cost of staying silent, we need to recognize this for what it really is, a dangerous time in our history, but also one where the resistance is growing.
There was a time in this country when politics, even at its most brutal, still had a floor. In 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was destroying lives with baseless accusations and loyalty tests, attorney Joseph Welch looked at him during a televised hearing and said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Everyone heard his words and knew exactly what he was saying. Enough senators in that room knew who was right and who was wrong, and McCarthy was censured by his own colleagues. The institution held because enough people inside it still believed the institution mattered more than one man’s grip on power. Abraham Lincoln filled his cabinet with the men who had run against him for the Republican nomination. William Seward. Salmon Chase. Edward Bates. He chose competence and opposing viewpoints over loyalty because he understood that governing a nation at war required the best minds in the country, not the most obedient. That was what government looked like when the people in charge believed the country was more important than themselves. Today we have a president who fills his administration with 57 people worth more than $100 million, most of whom bought their seats with campaign donations. A president who draws circles on maps and calls them territory and who hides from the press all day and lets his administration fill the emptiness with state media in his absence. The distance between Lincoln’s cabinet and Trump’s could not be any farther apart, and it shows in all the decisions Trump and his cronies are making.
When I think about what this country could look like right now, about what we could be doing with all of our resources, the talented people here, and our tax dollars, it causes a physical reaction in my stomach. Because none of this had to happen. We did not have to spend our resources helping 57 people who were already richer than most of us could ever comprehend become even richer. We did not have to lose at least 18 Americans in a war with Iran that Donald Trump started without any support from Congress or our allies. We did not have to put thousands of people into what amount to modern-day concentration camps, where we still do not know the full extent of the cruelty taking place behind those walls. American citizens did not have to be killed in the streets by federal agents. And families across this country should not be standing in grocery store aisles deciding what food they can live without because they can no longer afford to buy everything they need. That is not a political talking point. That is hunger in the richest country in the world, and it does not have to be this way.
Imagine what we could be doing instead. Our government could be pouring its resources into curing cancer. We could be working to end homelessness. We could be building enough affordable housing that young adults can actually imagine buying a home, raising a family, and putting money into a retirement account so they don’t have to work until they pass away. We could make sure older Americans are not spending the final years of their lives watching every dollar because their Social Security check barely covers their rent. We could improve our schools, strengthen our communities, and make life a little easier for the millions of people who work hard every day and still feel like they are falling further behind. That is what our tax dollars should be doing. They should be building something for us. Instead, we are watching them fund a billionaire cabinet protecting its own wealth. These are choices. And if our government can choose to build all of this, then someday we can choose to tear it down and build something better in its place. 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: We went for a night walk tonight, and the moon put on a show.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/media/disney-abc-fcc-trump-lawsuit-the-view-retaliatory
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/18/disney-abc-first-amendment-lawsuit-fcc.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/disney-abc-sue-fcc-early-license-renewal/
https://fortune.com/2026/08/17/trump-wealthy-officials-biden-obama-bush/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/17/nation/trump-administration-ultra-rich-wealth/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-takes-unexpected-walk-white-172921282.html
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/18/headlines
https://electioninnovation.org/research/claims-noncitizen-registration-voting-analysis-tracker/
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/
https://www.propublica.org/article/save-voter-citizenship-tool-mistakes-confusion
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/august-18-2026-pbs-news-hour-full-episode
Trump: "Pay all your attention to the man in front of the curtain..." - and not to the Trump-Epstein files he has hidden behind it. Trump's Distraction From The Trump-Epstein Files Parade is getting longer and longer. Meanwhile the victims are still waiting for some sort of justice while Congress sits there every day with their thumbs up their... well, you know where they're at.
Trump = loser, Loser, LOSER