The worst of Trump is yet to come
In the middle of the night, while most Americans were fast asleep, the President of the United States was awake inside the White House. Unable to get any much-needed rest, he opened Truth Social and shared a post that had the complete opposite effect he hoped it would.
And at exactly 12:35 this morning, Donald Trump decided it was the perfect time to announce to the world that a cognitive screening exam, the kind doctors use to help identify signs of cognitive impairment and dementia, proved he possessed what he called “extreme intelligence.”
In that rambling late-night post, Trump bragged that he had scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on what he described as a “high difficulty” cognitive test. He questioned whether “Dumocrats” would be surprised by how smart he was and celebrated his fourth “perfect score” on this dementia screening test.
But what he either doesn’t understand, or what nobody told him, is that these tests are not designed to measure genius. They’re not IQ tests, and they’re not difficult for those without impairments to pass. They are screening tools used by doctors to determine whether someone may be showing signs of significant cognitive decline. Healthy adults are expected to perform well on them. The goal isn’t to identify extraordinary intelligence. It’s to identify potential impairment.
Which makes the President’s insistence that this was a “high difficulty” test proving his “extreme intelligence” far more revealing than the score itself. Because healthy, confident leaders rarely spend their Saturday nights bragging that they successfully passed a basic cognitive screening exam. They don’t treat a dementia screening as evidence of brilliance. And they certainly don’t feel compelled to announce it to the world after midnight. Something else is happening here. And it is a warning that we are entering the most dangerous period of Trump’s presidency yet.
Because the danger right now is not really about the score on a test. It is not even about whether Trump can subtract seven from one hundred or draw a clock, which is the kind of thing that test actually asks. The danger is about timing. About where we are on the calendar. And about what a cornered man does when he can see his reign of power coming to an end.
And as much as the timing matters, it’s important to also understand just how absurd his social media post is and what he is trying to accomplish. Because Dr. Jonathan Reiner is seeing what we are all seeing. He is a professor of medicine at George Washington University, a cardiologist, and the man who served as Dick Cheney’s doctor through the Bush administration. When the medical report came out, he went on CNN and flagged the problem with giving Trump this test again and again: “That’s not really that useful when you take it over and over and over again, because the questions don’t change that much.” He explained that the exam in question, the MOCA, is “a test used to detect signs of cognitive decline and dementia,” and added, “It shouldn’t be hard to get through it anyway, because it’s a dementia screening test, it’s not an IQ test.” Then, after Trump’s late-night brag itself, Reiner said it even more plainly on X (formerly Twitter): “I’m glad the president did well on the MOCA exam, but it’s a dementia screening tool, not an IQ test, so a score of 26 or higher represents normal cognitive performance, not extreme intelligence. None of the questions are high difficulty.”
That is a doctor, telling the country that the President of the United States is bragging about passing a dementia screen and calling it genius. And the official report from the White House physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, declared Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and overall physical function.” So we are told he is in excellent health. And in the same week, that excellent health required a midnight post defending itself against a test that healthy people pass without thinking about it. Both of those things were put in front of us by his own administration. We are simply being asked to ignore the obvious.
What Trump shared was never really about his health. The post on Truth Social, the one sent at 12:35 in the morning, was simply the latest expression of a pattern that has become impossible to ignore.
All weekend, he had been posting rambling nonsense on social media. During a seven-hour posting spree on Saturday alone, he shared more than fifty posts, including fake images of himself standing beside George Washington, multiple depictions of himself carved into Mount Rushmore, and jealousy that China has a ballroom and he doesn’t. And later, he even posted a bizarre power-fantasy image of Air Force One surrounded by a military escort.
We have to consider what it means when the President of the United States of America is spending his weekend sharing manufactured images of himself alongside the founders of the United States. And then, hours later, he is online insisting that a dementia screening exam was proof of his extraordinary intelligence.
The fake images and the false boast are not separate stories. They are the same story. Both are attempts to manufacture a version of himself that reality will not provide. He cannot place himself alongside anyone alive today who is of historical significance these days, so he commands others to create fake images of himself with George Washington. He cannot point to actual evidence of extraordinary intelligence, so he points to a test that was never designed to measure it. The medium changes, but the impulse remains the same. Image by image. Post by post. Claim by claim. He is constructing a version of himself that the facts cannot sustain.
And here is the thing about a person who has to keep insisting, all night, that he is great and brilliant and in command. Usually, it is because somewhere underneath, he can feel that he is not. And this is why the timing matters so much. Because for the past year and a half, there has been no limit to his madness. No member of his own party has stood in his way and held. No agency, no cabinet, no institution has drawn a line he respected. He has done what he wanted, when he wanted, and the only consistent response has been silence or applause. A person who has never once been told no does not learn restraint. He learns that there is no such thing as a limit. That is the country we have been living in.
Except there is one limit left. And it has a date on it. The midterms are coming. And the midterms are the first real mechanism in eighteen months that could actually take some of his power away. Right now, Republicans control both chambers of Congress, and that control is the thing that has let all of this run unchecked. If that changes in November, the unbroken green light he has enjoyed since January of last year goes away. There would be subpoena power in hands that are not his. There would be oversight he cannot fire. There would be, for the first time, friction. And he knows it. He can count. He has seen the special election results. He has watched his own numbers. He understands, somewhere underneath all the bragging, that the clock is running.
That is what makes this moment dangerous. Not his physical and mental decline by itself. Or the instability by itself. But instability in a man who is approaching the loss of unchecked power and has shown us, again and again, that he does not believe any limit applies to him. A man with everything to lose and, in his own mind, nothing left to lose, both at the same time. History shows us how this goes. Authoritarian leaders do not grow gentle as they weaken. They grow more dangerous. The moment they feel the walls move is the moment they stop pretending and start doing whatever it takes. We have watched it in other countries. We are about to watch it here, in real time, over the next five months.
And if you want to know what this man does when he is faced with losing power, you do not have to guess. We already have the footage. The last time the transfer of power was tested, it ended with a mob inside the Capitol and a gallows on the lawn and a sitting vice president hustled through the halls while the crowd chanted for his hanging.
The lesson of January 6 was never just that Trump struggles to accept defeat. It was that when reality collides with the version of events he wants people to believe, reality is the thing he tries to destroy. And he is not above using chaos, intimidation, or even violence to try to make his preferred version of events prevail.
And then there is the reality of what is actually happening in Iran. Because this pattern does not stop at social media posts, election results, or dementia screenings. It extends to matters of war and national security as well. Today, CNN published an investigation into Iran. After the president ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear and missile sites, he stood in front of the country and told us the job was done. He said the sites were obliterated. He listed the destruction of Iran’s missile capability as one of the central reasons for the whole operation. It was, by his telling, a triumph. A demonstration of strength. Proof of his command.
But it was not true. CNN’s investigation, built on commercial satellite imagery, found that Iran has already reopened at least 50 of 69 tunnel entrances at its underground missile bases. They did it with bulldozers and dump trucks. The roads that were bombed have been repaired, and in some places repaved. Experts who reviewed the imagery for CNN estimate that Iran may still possess around a thousand missiles, stored deep inside facilities buried beneath hundreds of meters of rock, the kind of stockpile that strikes aimed at tunnel entrances were never going to reach.
Trump told us he obliterated something he did not obliterate. A war sold as a victory that the evidence now says was a fabricated story. And the truth came out anyway, in satellite photographs, for the whole world to see. He could not keep it contained.
And that is the through-line of his entire weekend, from the midnight post to the war. This is a man whose claims do not survive contact with the facts. He says a dementia screen proves genius. He says a bombing run obliterated an arsenal that is sitting intact under a mountain that is real. He says he is in total command at the exact moment the evidence says otherwise. The fake images and the test boast are the small, almost absurd version. Iran is the large, deadly serious version. Same man. Same pattern. Wildly different stakes. And the thing that should worry us most is not that he believes his own claims. It is that he is willing to drop bombs to make them true, and willing to lie about the result when they don’t.
We are entering a very dangerous period. Trump has already proven there are no limits to his willingness to distort reality when the truth threatens his image, his power, or his interests. And it is not just about him and his ego anymore. His lies about Iran and the success of that operation carried real consequences. Real people paid the price. American and Iranian civilians alike.
Things are going to get worse because, for Donald Trump, there is nothing more intolerable than being told “no.” And if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms, that is exactly what he will begin hearing. Constantly.
And for the first time in years, there would be investigations he cannot stop. Hearings he cannot control. Subpoenas he cannot simply ignore. The possibility of impeachment returns. The possibility of removal returns. The possibility of criminal exposure, not just for him but for many of the people around him, becomes real again. That is what makes this moment different. This is not a president preparing for a second term. This is a president staring at the possibility that the protections surrounding him may not last forever.
The next five-plus months may be the most dangerous stretch of this presidency yet because Trump and the people around him have everything to lose. Their political power, public image, and ability to avoid accountability. And most importantly, their freedom. And people who believe they are running out of time often stop thinking about tomorrow. They start thinking only about survival. That is the risk we are approaching now.
That is why we should expect more chaos, more spectacle, and more manufactured crises. We need to prepare now for more attempts to make us exhausted, divided, frightened, and distracted because they know the clock is ticking.
But what they are forgetting is that the thing making him dangerous is also the thing making him vulnerable. The midterms. That is what all of this is really about. The midterms are why he is spiraling. And the midterms are why we are not powerless. The next five months will not be easy. In many ways, they may be the hardest period we have faced yet. But that is exactly why we have to keep going. Because the one thing Donald Trump fears more than being told “no” is being told “no” by millions of Americans all at once. And that is still within our power. This 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: So thankful for longer days and warm nights. Soaking up a little summer joy today.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/31/us/iran-tunnels-reopened-us-strategy-bombing-invs
https://www.irishstar.com/news/politics/trumps-truth-social-meltdown-posts-37227348
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jan-6-gallows-construction-new-video/
There’s so much we know but so much more that we don’t, but these times demand the very best from us as we’re fighting an enemy that doesn’t follow or play by the rules. But the federal courts are not only holding but winning cases. However this led to Trump demonizing a judge who will now have to order and pay for security services. A day will come, sooner than later that we will see Trump die, but in the meantime we suffer through his psychotic tantrums. Hopefully the end will come soon.
Each day it gets worse. Each day I am afraid to turn on the news ( I have a 5 hour lag in Nz) and each day I find it’s worse. Thank you for letting me know it’s not just me. And for keeping me sane these days.