The Trump Presidency: A Nation for Sale

I’ve spent way too much time today thinking about Donald Trump. I wish I didn’t have to, but I think to survive this dark period for America, we have to understand him on a deeper level. The more I watch how he operates, the more two things keep circling in my mind. The first is that every single thing he does comes down to one thing: money. That’s it. Money, and of course, the power that comes with it.

The other part of me thinks he’s doing all of this intentionally to destroy the country, not just because he truly doesn’t care, but because when he finally leaves, he wants to spin the wreckage as proof of his greatness. He’ll say the country only fell apart once someone else took over. He’ll point to the damage and declare, See? “It’s a mess without me.”

It’s the same script he’s used his whole life: create chaos, then sell himself as the only one who can clean it up. And his brainwashed followers will believe it. Which could leave us in an even worse position, but he doesn’t care.

I keep coming back to the same question: how can someone who already has everything still be so desperate for more? He has money, fame, and power, yet it’s never enough. I don’t think it’s legacy. I don’t even think it’s love for his family. It’s the illusion of both. He’s hollow inside, so everything he does is about creating the appearance of depth. He studies how decent people act, and then mimics those gestures just enough to look human. It’s not empathy. It’s performance.

That’s why I think his family has quietly stepped back this time. It’s not loyalty. It’s self-preservation. Because he knows, on some level, that what he’s doing is wrong, not morally wrong because he can’t feel that, but dangerous. If they got caught in the fallout, he wouldn’t feel guilt. He’d feel humiliation. His ego can’t tolerate failure, and the only thing he truly fears is looking weak.

Every dictator has a different “why.” Hitler’s was hate. Mussolini’s was power. Trump’s is emptiness. He fills the void with money, attention, and applause, anything that convinces him he matters. That’s why he wanted the presidency. That’s why he still wants the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s not about leadership or even victory. It’s about collecting proof that he matters.

And that’s what I kept thinking about while walking through Berlin in 2019. I couldn’t stop seeing everything Trump was doing reflected in the same place where Hitler once built his empire of cruelty.

In Berlin, the streets still remember. You can trace the remnants of the wall with your feet, thin lines of brick slicing through cobblestone, the ghost of a barrier that once split a city in two. I walked there with my kids, feeling the weight of something I had first understood as a child in the 1980s, when the wall fell.

Even as a kid, I knew a wall isn’t just concrete. It’s a threat. It’s a way to divide families, isolate truth, and convince people that freedom and information are dangerous. The Soviet lies behind it were designed to control, to prevent reunification and protect the power they held over Eastern Europe.

Standing there that day, it hit me how easily something like this could happen again, and how the warning signs were already appearing back home.

Our guide that day wasn’t just a local expert. They were a historian. And when we stopped at an old Soviet-built apartment block, I “felt” something I had only ever read about before. A complete police state. Where the Cold War era apartments had no windows facing west. Only the balcony here or there for police or military to use. They were the only ones to see the reality beyond the lies. The regime didn’t want citizens even looking toward freedom. They didn’t just control where people could go, they controlled what people could see.

That was what haunted me most. Maybe even more than the guns or the towers, the deliberate blocking of perspective. The way power rewrites reality by shaping what people believe is possible. After World War II, propaganda became a science in the East. The Soviets even coined a term for it: “protective truth.” Information wasn’t filtered to inform, it was filtered to calm. The goal wasn’t persuasion. It was exhaustion. Keep people confused long enough, and they’ll stop asking questions.

And it’s no wonder Trump is so fascinated with Russia, always desperate for Putin’s praise. He admires what they built. He sees himself through that same historical lens, what they created through fear, control, and deception is exactly what he wants to recreate here.

Walking those streets, I realized I wasn’t just studying history. I was standing in its reflection. Because back home, Trump had already begun building his own kind of wall. Not of concrete and steel, but of lies. A wall made of propaganda, disinformation, and rage.

After he left office, I thought we as a country had finally seen through his performance. But once he was voted back in, he picked up where he left off, at triple speed. This time, he set out on a retribution tour and worked to completely destroy the line between truth and lies. He didn’t even need to jail journalists to redefine what news is; he only had to convince millions that journalists were the enemy. He didn’t have to censor the truth; he only had to flood the airwaves with so much noise that no one could hear it anymore.

The difference between Trump and Hitler was motive. Hitler built his empire out of ideology. Trump builds his out of vanity. His only faith is the mirror.

You can see it in everything he touches, the gold, the marble, the endless staged events, parties and press conferences. Authoritarians have always built monuments to themselves, Louis XIV had Versailles, Mussolini had the EUR district in Rome, and Trump has his new ballroom. He doesn’t crave followers because he wants to lead. He craves them because he needs to be worshiped. He surrounds himself with the corrupt because integrity makes him feel small.

We’re watching the cost of that performance in real time. The government shutdown wasn’t about policy, it was about optics, about who could dominate the headline. But this time it backfired. Tuesday’s election results made something clear: Americans are starting to see through the act, and Republicans felt it. They saw the numbers. They know there are more Americans who reject Trump than there are who worship him.

Because it’s not just Trump who cares about money. He forgot that all Americans care about money, most because it means survival.

When the government shuts down, it isn’t abstract. It means people go without pay, families miss rent, and food benefits run dry. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt expanded government to protect ordinary people. Trump’s answer is to starve it until only the wealthy can survive. Communities stepped up, and that solidarity terrified those in power, because when people realize they can rely on each other, they stop depending on systems built to exploit them.

That’s why the shutdown ended when it did. Not out of mercy, but fear, fear that hunger would turn into protest, that despair would turn into defiance, that Americans, finally pushed too far, would remember that government is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.

They feared what would happen if we stopped forgetting, and started remembering what he did to us during COVID. The refrigerated trucks filled with bodies. The bleach moment. The chaos. Authoritarianism often begins with fatigue, when people are kept in constant crisis.

That fatigue is what Project 2025 is counting on. It’s a 900-page plan written by The Heritage Foundation and more than a hundred right-wing groups. It calls for firing career civil servants, replacing them with loyalists, dismantling departments, and reshaping trade and tax policy to reward the wealthy. It dresses greed in patriotism and sells it as reform. And every day we live under the Trump regime, we move closer to seeing it fully implemented.

It even promises “fair trade” through tariffs, but tariffs are just taxes on the rest of us. And people are starting to realize it.

Trump once claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025, but he can’t deny it now. Maybe he didn’t understand it at first. But this isn’t a deep thinker we have as president. Once he saw it would give him king-like control and endless access to money, he embraced it. He handed the government to its architects and let them execute it line by line.

This blueprint isn’t new. Every authoritarian regime writes its plans down first, framing submission as patriotism. Trump does the same thing, only wrapped in American imagery. Mussolini had uniforms. Trump has hats. It’s the same playbook, just rewritten for social media. His fascism isn’t marched. It’s merchandised. Project 2025 is the paperwork behind the show, a manual for turning democracy into a private business.

This keeps happening generation after generation because enough people keep buying it, because we mistake fame for leadership, money for intelligence, and cruelty for strength.

That’s why I keep thinking about those bricked-up windows in Berlin. The people inside couldn’t see the other side, but the other side still existed. Truth doesn’t disappear because someone hides it, it waits.

After the wall fell, Berlin didn’t just rebuild its skyline; it rebuilt its conscience. Every memorial there is a reminder that democracy can be rebuilt, but never casually. You have to look at what was destroyed, and by whom, and with whose enabling, and decide it won’t happen again.

I write because remembering is resistance.

We’re standing at that line again, between truth and comfort, between memory and forgetting. The blueprints are written. The propaganda is running. The walls are rising. But history doesn’t have to repeat itself if enough of us refuse to follow the script.

Because when you strip it all down, past the slogans, the wealth, the fame, it always comes back to the same question: who profits from our silence?

Follow the money. Because with Trump, that’s where the truth always hides.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can help keep this work going by subscribing to my Substack; there’s a free option, or you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. Paid subscriptions help me reach more people, cover more ground, and keep telling the truth about what’s happening to our country.