This wasn’t a normal morning in America.

At 8:07 this morning, the President of the United States took to his state propaganda channel, Truth Social, not to warn Americans about international drone incursions or nuclear threats, but to attack a female journalist. Again. This time, calling CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins “Stupid and Nasty” because she asked about the 300 million dollar White House ballroom that began as a 200 million project and has already blown past its original estimate. She responded on Instagram by saying, “Technically my question was about Venezuela.” Which makes this whole exchange even more absurd, because not only did he ignore the actual question, but he also dodged accountability on both a bloated vanity project and a major foreign policy crisis.

Trump didn’t say a word about ICE agents pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress in Arizona. He ignored the military-grade drones that could have collided with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plane over Ireland. Instead, he went online to insult a journalist for doing her job.

To those of you outside the United States, watching this unfold, I see your comments. I know you’re worried. I want you to know: it’s even worse than it looks. What’s happening here isn’t just a national crisis. It’s something we’ll be reckoning with for generations. And the destruction doesn’t stop at our borders. What happens in America ripples across the world. Right now, our president is causing instability and suffering far beyond our shores.

I live in San Diego, in what still feels like a bubble of compassion and reason. Most people are kind, accepting, and decent. I don’t see red hats. I don’t see immigration raids on the routes I travel. They’re happening, but not directly in front of me. And then I open my laptop, and it’s like stepping into another country entirely. ICE raids. Conspiracy theorists running the government. A president raging at reporters. And the worst part is, both of these realities are true. The kindness around me is real. So is the collapse I write about. That duality we’re living in is the camouflage. That’s how it hides. That’s how it spreads. So if you’re not seeing it in front of you, know that it’s still happening. And if you are seeing it, know that it’s even worse than what you can see.

It reminds me of what people said about Franco’s Spain: clean streets, quiet cities, and a death grip on anything that looked like dissent. Tourists came for the architecture. They didn’t see the surveillance or the cells. That’s what this is starting to feel like: a dictatorship with a tourist brochure. It’s why I feel both incredibly safe and constantly on edge. I can feel the layers splitting beneath my feet.

Those of you outside the US probably see it more clearly than most Americans do because you were taught how fascism works. You were educated on the front end of authoritarianism, not just the part where the Allies swoop in and “save the day”. You studied how the Nazis rose, how Stalin consolidated power, and how democratic systems decayed from within. In America, we were taught the hero version. We were told that fascism was something that happened “over there,” and that we came in only after Pearl Harbor forced our hand. We were not taught that American corporations sold steel and oil to Hitler, or that our government turned away Jewish refugees while camps filled across Europe. We were not taught about the America First rallies at Madison Square Garden, or the German-American Bund marching under swastikas in U.S. streets. We were not taught that fascism had roots here, too, or that our government buried those stories to preserve the myth of American exceptionalism.

We were taught that we saved the world, not that we waited too long. The timeline was edited. The villains were easy to spot because they all wore the same uniform and spoke another language. No one told us that sometimes they wear suits and speak English and build ballrooms while they strip a nation down to its bones.

Maybe if we had been taught this history properly, we would have recognized what it meant when Trump invited Vladimir Putin onto an American airbase in Alaska, where US troops were photographed kneeling on the tarmac to straighten the red carpet for him. That was the moment we slid, without resistance, onto the wrong side of history. That moment should have shattered every illusion. And it’s no accident that every man Trump gravitates toward, Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Xi, even Kim Jong Un, shares the same hollowed-out core. There is no moral center. No guiding ideology. Just the hunger for control. These men understand each other because they’ve already stripped themselves of shame. Trump doesn’t align with them despite their crimes. He aligns with them because of them.

This isn’t the first time history has seen dictators orbit each other this way. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, they didn’t trust one another, but they understood the game. They formed alliances not out of loyalty, but out of strategy, like contestants on a reality show forming temporary teams before inevitably turning on each other. That’s the same pattern Trump is replicating now. His newly published National Security Strategy calls Europe weak, praises far-right parties, and declares that it’s time for the United States to “reclaim” the Western Hemisphere by force. This isn’t leaked rhetoric, it’s official doctrine. It praises Europe’s far-right as “a cause for optimism,” urges the U.S. to support nationalist movements that break apart the EU. They’re not even hiding this. It’s posted in plain sight on the White House website. After Project 2025, they learned they could announce their agenda out loud, and most Americans still wouldn’t believe they would carry it out. There is a lot to it, and I’ll be writing more about this in the coming week, but it is truly terrifying and deeply concerning.

We also learned that on Thursday night, five unidentified drones flew over a highly sensitive military site housing France’s nuclear submarines, prompting French naval forces to open fire, according to Agence France-Presse. And just days earlier, on Monday, four military-grade drones appeared to be trying to follow or intercept Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plane as it arrived in Dublin, according to The Journal. These incidents appear to be connected to Russia. As Newsweek reports, European nations have accused Russia of violating sovereign airspace using drones as part of a “hybrid warfare” campaign, meant to destabilize NATO allies and create anxiety among nations supporting Ukraine.

This is what happens when America abandons its allies and its post as a stabilizing force.

Then came the leaked conference call. Last Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz joined Zelenskyy in a high-level virtual meeting. According to a leaked transcript obtained by German outlet Der Spiegel, Macron warned: “There is a possibility that the U.S. will betray Ukraine on the issue of territory without clarity on security guarantees.” He also reportedly said Zelenskyy was in “great danger.”

President Stubb echoed the concern, warning against trusting the White House to manage peace negotiations. “We mustn’t leave Ukraine and Volodymyr alone with these guys,” he said.

Rutte added: “I agree with Alexander; we must protect Volodymyr.”

This is how the world sees us now. Not as protectors. As a liability. As a threat. Trump has made the United States the weakest link in the global order. And he is proud of it. This isn’t just a disaster for the world. It leaves Americans exposed to authoritarian power grabs, cyberattacks, economic coercion, and the very real possibility that no one will come when we call for help.

Inside this country, we are being softened with distraction and cruelty. In Arizona, ICE agents launched raids across multiple cities. They used pepper spray on peaceful protesters—including Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who says she was sprayed in the face while identifying herself. If this is how agents treat an elected official in public, imagine how they treat people without a badge or a platform to speak. Dozens more were arrested.

And it’s not just the executive branch. On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could overturn nearly a century of legal precedent and hand Trump the power to purge any independent agency head who doesn’t obey. If that happens, the president could fire the heads of agencies like the Federal Reserve, the NLRB, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau any time they issue a ruling he doesn’t like.

This is a textbook fascist maneuver. Authoritarians always start with the agencies. In 1934, Hitler launched the Night of the Long Knives, a coordinated purge of internal rivals under the guise of legal authority. It wasn’t just a bloodbath; it was a message. Bureaucrats, officers, even judges were told: you serve the leader, or you disappear. It marked the end of independent governance. The law no longer belonged to the people. It belonged to one man.

That’s the quiet terror in this moment. Our agencies are being emptied with paperwork that makes it all look like politics as usual, and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

We imagine fascism as something that storms in through the gates. But more often, it walks through the front door, invited by people who think they’ll be spared if they cooperate. That’s what’s happening now. Governors. Judges. CEOs. They are choosing comfort over country.

So to everyone outside the United States who is watching, documenting, remembering, I want to say thank you. You are not just bystanders. You are holding the receipts in case they are ever needed for trial. In case we are silenced. In case this all goes where history warns it can. You are the ones keeping record. Please don’t stop. Because I worry about the day when truth becomes contraband. When only one voice is allowed. And on that day, we’ll need you to say: “We were watching”. We remember. We wrote it down.

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.