The President of the United States is afraid

Early this afternoon, the President of the United States gave an unscheduled and deeply troubling phone interview to NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent, Kristen Welker, while he was spending time at his weekend retreat and private club, Mar-a-Lago. During this nearly 30-minute interview, he shocked world leaders and everyday Americans alike by saying he might bomb Kharg Island again “for fun.” When asked about U.S. strikes on the island, Iran’s most critical oil hub, his reply was, “We totally demolished Kharg Island, but we may hit it a few more times, just for fun.”

This is the real Donald J. Trump. The man who waged a war without congressional approval, who sent American men and women into combat, 13 of whom are already dead. And today he told the world he would continue to put American lives at risk, continue to wreak havoc on civilians, and continue to destabilize the entire planet. For fun.

(Past image from White House YouTube channel)

That was just the first few minutes. Because the longer Trump talked, the more he revealed. And what came out of that impromptu call paints the picture of a man who has no strategy, consistency, grasp of the consequences of his own war, and absolutely no concern for the Americans caught in the middle of it.

He told Welker how little he really cares about gas prices. Since this war started, gas has gone from $2.94 a gallon to $3.66. That’s a 72-cent jump in two weeks. People are already feeling it at the pump and growing increasingly concerned about how high it will go and how they will be able to cover the increasing costs. And when Welker asked Trump directly whether rising gas prices could hurt Republicans in the midterms, he said, “I’m not concerned at all.” He added, “There’s so much oil, gas, there’s so much out there, but you know, it’s being clogged up a little bit. It’ll be unclogged very soon.” That’s how the President of the United States describes a war zone that has shut down one of the most critical shipping lanes on the planet.

And then he went after Zelenskyy. The President of Ukraine, whose country has been fighting off a Russian invasion for four years, and who offered to help the United States and its allies in the Middle East by sending drone experts and interceptor technology. Ukraine knows more about defeating drones than any country on earth, because they’ve been shot at by thousands of them. Zelenskyy sent teams to three countries. Eleven nations requested Ukraine’s help. And Trump’s response? “The last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.” He also told Welker that Zelenskyy is “far more difficult to make a deal with” than Vladimir Putin. Trump said the president of the country being invaded is harder to deal with than the dictator doing the invading.

And here’s where it gets even darker. When Welker asked about reports that Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran about the location of U.S. forces, Trump said, “Russia is perhaps giving information, perhaps they’re not.” He said it like it was inconsequential, but it’s not. Because the connections here are staggering.

We are at war with Iran. Russia is helping Iran. Russia is reportedly feeding Iran intelligence about where American troops and ships are positioned, and Iran is using that information to launch missiles and drones at U.S. assets and our allies across the region. At the same time, Russia is at war with Ukraine. And today, an Iranian parliamentary official declared Ukraine’s entire territory “a legitimate target” because they are sharing their drone interception technology. So the country we are at war with is now threatening to attack the country that Russia is at war with. Iran and Russia are working together. Sides have been picked. And they weren’t picked by us.

And as much as Trump tries to tell us that Putin is a friend, we know what’s happening. Putin is playing Trump. Russia is empowering and supporting the very country that is killing American service members. And that same country, Iran, is now targeting Ukraine on Russia’s behalf. This is not a coincidence. it’s coordination. And Trump is either not mentally capable of seeing what is happening right in front of him, or they have something on him, and he is deliberately pretending not to see it.

But he can’t have it both ways. He can’t tell the American people that we have to take out Iran, and then turn around and cozy up to the country that is actively supporting Iran’s war effort against us. He can’t lift sanctions on Russian oil and call Putin a partner while Russia helps the enemy target American forces. And yet that is exactly what he is doing. Every single day.

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And when Welker asked if he was surprised by anything in this war, Trump said he was “very surprised” that Iran decided to attack other Middle Eastern countries. He called it “the biggest surprise I had of this whole thing.” National security experts, foreign policy analysts, and military strategists have all warned that Iran would retaliate against U.S. allies in the region. It was the most predictable outcome of this entire conflict. And the President of the United States says he didn’t see it coming.

Throughout the entire call, Trump’s responses did not appear to be from a man burdened by the gravity of leading a nation at war, but rather from a man entertained by it. And beyond what Trump said on that call, there’s another question we need to ask: how did this call even happen? This wasn’t a scheduled sit-down. It wasn’t on the White House calendar. It was an unplanned, nearly 30-minute phone conversation about an active war, given from his private club in Florida on a Saturday afternoon. We don’t know whether Trump called Welker or she called him. We don’t know whether it was conducted on a secure line or his personal cell phone. But given what we learned today from The Atlantic, the fact that we even have to ask that question should concern every single one of us. Because most presidents take national security communications protocols seriously. This president does not.

According to The Atlantic and past reporting, Trump’s personal cell phone number has become the hottest commodity in Washington. The White House has received reports in recent weeks that his number has been offered for sale to deep-pocketed interests seeking influence. One administration official said, “I’ve heard of CEOs offering money for his number. I’ve heard of crypto bros offering cryptocurrency for it.” Journalists have been trading contact information for other world leaders, sometimes offering up dozens of names, just to get Trump’s personal number saved in their phones. A second official called it “out of control” and “like a wrecking ball.”

And it gets worse. According to multiple reports, Trump doesn’t just take scheduled calls on this phone. He answers it indiscriminately. Unknown numbers. Random calls. He picks up. When two Atlantic reporters dialed his personal cell on a Saturday morning, unannounced, Trump answered and said, “Who’s this?” He didn’t hang up. He talked. He later called them back at 1:28 in the morning. One White House official described his phone behavior by saying, “You are talking to someone on the fly, who is yip-yapping or chitchatting.” Another said simply, “He enjoys it.” His phone lights up with unknown numbers during meetings. He has taken calls from reporters at ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Mail, Axios, Politico, and more. One adviser recalled being on the phone with Trump when he suddenly said, “I’ve got to go. I have someone from another country calling.” The adviser said Trump didn’t even know which country. He just saw the number and thought it might be a foreign leader worth talking to.

Aides say he enjoys answering unknown numbers. It feels like a game to him. During his first term, General John Kelly tried to stop this. Kelly and his staff would physically confiscate Trump’s phone and store it in a box outside the Oval Office. But Kelly is long gone, and there are no more adults in the room. Joel Brenner, the former head of U.S. counterintelligence, told The Atlantic that what Trump is doing is “terribly dangerous.” He said, “We run the risk of interception, we run the risk of impersonation, and we run the risk of being unprepared.” A cybersecurity expert at Syracuse University said that if Trump is using a standard device, “you have to assume there must be multiple governments listening to his every call, not the U.S. government.” He specifically named North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran as countries most likely monitoring Trump’s phone. He also warned that bad actors could use audio deepfakes of world leaders, like Putin, to interact with Trump directly and manipulate him in real time. And this is not a hypothetical concern. The Atlantic reported that Trump kept using his personal phone even after being told around Election Day that Chinese spies likely had the ability to listen in on his conversations. He was told. And he kept using it anyway.

One aide insisted that Trump’s phone has received “additional security hardening” and that he is “not walking around with a run-of-the-mill iPhone off the shelf.” But the White House refused to elaborate on what those security measures actually are. And when you consider that this is the same administration that accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat where senior officials were discussing sensitive military operations, the assurance rings hollow.

But what is so odd about everything Trump did today is that while he was giving this unscheduled interview, and while we were learning about how much he loves talking to the press, letting people just call him on a cell phone at all hours of the day and night, he spent the entire day from Mar-a-Lago attacking the very same press and media.

The attacks started at 6:35 this morning, when Trump posted on Truth Social going after the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets for their reporting on U.S. tanker planes struck at a base in Saudi Arabia. He called them “Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media” who “actually want us to lose the War.” He called journalists “truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.” He attacks the press to discredit them, and then he uses them to spread his version of events. Both serve the same purpose: control.

And he told us this was his strategy years ago. In 2016, Trump told CBS’s Lesley Stahl in a candid off-camera conversation, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” And every single time he posts “fake news media” on Truth Social, he is running that exact playbook. He is incrementally, deliberately discrediting the truth so that when real reporting comes out about his war, his failures, his corruption, and his decline, half the country has already been trained not to believe it.

But Trump attacking the press from his phone is just the beginning. Because behind him, the machinery is being built to turn those attacks into something permanent.

Yesterday, Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon podium and told reporters what their headlines should say. Not suggested. Told. He said that instead of “Mideast War Intensifies,” they should write “Iran Increasingly Desperate.” Instead of “War Widening,” the headline should be “Iran Shrinking, Going Underground.” He called CNN’s reporting on the administration’s failure to plan for the Strait of Hormuz crisis “patently ridiculous.” And then he drove the nail into the coffin when he said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” David Ellison is the son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison. His company is set to acquire CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. That deal still needs regulatory approval from the Trump administration. So the man running Trump’s War from the Pentagon is openly celebrating the corporate takeover of the last major cable news network that still asks hard questions. And he said it with a smile. Hegseth also reminded the room that he used to be in the media at Fox News and said, “I know everything is written intentionally,” and demanded a “patriotic press.”

And while Hegseth is dictating headlines from behind the podium, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is building the legal weapon to enforce it all. Today, Carr posted on X, quoting a 1943 Supreme Court case, Red Lion Broadcasting v. United States, to argue that denying a broadcast license in the “public interest” is not a violation of free speech. In another post, he directly warned broadcasters: “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.” He posted that in direct response to Trump’s Truth Social attacks. The chairman of the FCC is using the regulatory power of the federal government to threaten broadcast licenses because news organizations are covering this war in a way the president doesn’t like.

And Brendan Carr is not some neutral bureaucrat doing his job. He wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025. In December 2025, he told the Senate Commerce Committee that “the FCC is not formally an independent agency,” which was his way of saying he answers to the White House. And now he is saying that the government has the authority to pull broadcast licenses from news organizations that report unfavorably on Trump’s War.

And Trump just kept is attack on the media going. He shared an infographic on Truth Social titled “PRESIDENT TRUMP IS RESHAPING THE MEDIA.” It was laid out in three sections: GONE, REFORMS, and WINNING. Under GONE: PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid out at MSNBC. Lester Holt out at NBC. Terry Moran out at ABC. Massive layoffs at the Washington Post. Colbert leaving CBS. Jim Acosta out at CNN. John Dickerson out at CBS. Chuck Todd out at NBC. Meta ending fact-checking. Under REFORMS: FCC Broadcast Accountability. CBS $15 million settlement. New ownership at CNN. “Free Speech on X.” Under WINNING: Truth Social booming. “Most Accessible POTUS Ever.” He is celebrating the destruction of the free press.

This has and continues to be my biggest fear about the survival of our country. Trump attacks the press to discredit it. Hegseth dictates what the press should say. Carr threatens to shut down anyone who doesn’t fall in line. That is not politics; it’s censorship.

And none of this is new. This is how it has always been done. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels issued daily press directives telling editors what headlines to run, what stories to bury, and exactly how to frame the regime’s actions. Hegseth stood at that podium yesterday and did the same thing. In Turkey, Erdogan didn’t shut down the press overnight. He used the regulatory state: license renewals, tax audits, ownership rules. He squeezed independent outlets slowly until the only ones left were the ones that obeyed. That is the Trump Regime’s playbook: make sure the only story the public hears is the one that power wants to tell.

Every story that broke today felt like a punch to the gut. Most nights I’m left feeling disillusioned by the sheer scale of what’s happening, but it’s the nights where free speech, a free press, and free and fair elections are under direct threat that I struggle the most. Because the loss of those is the clearest sign that we are nearing fascist collapse. What’s at risk now is Trump and his enablers continuing to rewrite the narrative before the midterms, making it so that most Americans never even know what happened. That’s what keeps me up tonight. I am deeply concerned that voices like mine, and every independent journalist, writer, and truth-teller in this country, will be silenced the closer we get to the start of voting. They want to control what we know, and they are building the infrastructure to do exactly that.

This is the United States of America. We’re supposed to have free speech. We’re supposed to feel no fear when sharing what’s happening in our country. We’re supposed to know that, above all, the president of the United States holds that right in the highest order.

The First Amendment says it plainly: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Forty-five words. Written 235 years ago by people who had lived under a government that criminalized dissent, jailed printers, and controlled what the public was allowed to know. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” James Madison called the free press “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

So what do we do? How do we counter this assault on one of the oldest and most essential pillars of democracy, a free and independent press? We support the voices they’re trying to silence. Not just mine, but as many of your favorite independent voices, journalists, and platform still telling the truth without corporate approval or regime money. Share their work. Fund their survival. Make sure they have what they need to keep going, because without billionaire donors, this work only survives through your support. I can write these posts full-time, seven days a week, 365 days a year, because of your support. But tonight, I’m not just asking for your support, I’m asking you to stand behind every voice still fighting to get real information to the public. We’ll never match them dollar for dollar. But we can still outlast them, if we meet their machine with something they’ll never understand: the truth.

We also can’t let any of this be normalized. When the President of the United States says he might drop bombs “for fun”, make sure everyone you know hears about it. When he runs a war from an unsecured cell phone that’s being traded on a black market, say it out loud. When his Defense Secretary dictates headlines and his FCC chairman threatens licenses, call it what it is. Share it. Talk about it. Post about it. Because the whole point of attacking the press is to make sure this information never reaches the people who need to hear it. We have to be the press now, too. All of us.

The founders built the First Amendment not because they loved journalists. They built it because they knew that without a free press, there is no democracy. There is no accountability. There is no truth. There is only power, and the story that power tells about itself. And that is exactly what Trump, Hegseth, and Carr are trying to build: a country where the only story you hear is theirs.

2026 is the year we stop the nonstop assault on our country. The midterms are coming. Every day is one day closer. Our job is to support each other. Make sure the truth is reaching as many people as possible, and never forget what we are fighting for. Today was another day where I struggled to write this post. My hands are shaky at the thought of the press under attack. But I also know how worried and afraid they are of losing the midterms, and that this is why they are going after such a fundamental American right. Our resistance is working or they wouldn’t be pushing so hard. 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.

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