Trump can never change this about us
In the early morning hours of April 29th, 2026, the President of the United States couldn’t sleep. So he did what he often does in those dark moments. He picked up his phone, opened Truth Social, and posted a meme of himself in a suit and sunglasses, holding an assault rifle, standing in front of a burning, bombed-out landscape with explosions rising behind him. Above the image, in bold letters, it read: “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! 🇺🇸”
He shared a post trying to project power, presenting himself as a one-man army, someone capable of personally blowing up Iran if they don’t sign a deal with him. The man with his finger on the nuclear codes spent the overnight hours posting action-hero fan fiction of himself. And as unbelievable as that is coming from a sitting American president, the rest of the day only became harder to believe.
The Atlantic reported today that a longtime Trump confidant told them: “He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live. He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.” A senior administration official added that Trump is “unburdened by political concerns” and that this freedom is what drove the decision to strike Iran. We are at war, according to his own team, because one man decided he was powerful enough to make that call alone, and wanted history to remember it.
And it goes further than that. Two people with direct knowledge of his private conversations told The Atlantic that Trump has stopped thinking of himself as a peer to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. He has, in private, begun placing himself alongside a different group entirely: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. One senior official suggested Trump may be drawing on a speech he heard at a golf club event last year, where a speaker framed him alongside those figures, and Genghis Khan. The tendency, The Atlantic noted, “has become even more important in setting his priorities and steering his actions as he hurtles through his final term in office. He no longer has to worry about the judgment of voters.”
This reporting confirms what so many of us were already seeing. His delusions of grandeur are deepening. And him seeing himself as comparable to these men is both dangerous and completely detached from reality.
Especially understanding who Alexander was, a Macedonian king who built one of the largest empires in ancient history. He was militarily brilliant and tutored by Aristotle. He is remembered, in the shorthand version of history, as great. But here is what the shorthand leaves out. Alexander achieved his empire through relentless, brutal warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He burned cities. He massacred civilian populations. He destroyed the Persian royal palace at Persepolis. In a drunken rage, he personally killed his closest friend with a spear during an argument at a banquet. He declared himself a god and demanded that his subjects prostrate themselves before him. He grew increasingly paranoid and tyrannical as his power expanded. And he died at 32, possibly from typhoid or excessive drinking, leaving behind an empire that collapsed almost immediately because he had built it entirely around himself, with no institutions, succession plan, and nothing built to last. A whole system built around one man’s impulses, meant to benefit him, with no thought for the people he was supposed to be leading.
And it makes perfect sense that this is also Trump’s chosen path. He is just as impulsive and self-centered. Often completely unaware or completely without care for what he says and does. Like how today, as he was sitting in the Oval Office, welcoming the Artemis II crew back from their historic mission around the moon, in a moment meant to celebrate these remarkable astronauts, Trump veered off to comment on NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s ears. “He’s got beautiful ears,” adding “He’s got super hearing” in reference to Isaacman’s prominent ears. In a moment that should have been entirely about four people who flew around the moon and questions about NASA in general, the President of the United States redirected attention to a colleague’s physical features. It was strange, uncomfortable, and entirely what we would expect from someone who believes that he is the most important person on the planet.
And for all of Trump’s self-centered impulsiveness, his rule is already having consequences that will weaken our country for decades to come, and continue to divide us intentionally.
Earlier today, six justices handed down a decision that will reshape American democracy for years to come. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, passed in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, signed by Lyndon Johnson, paid for in the sweat and tears of people who marched and were beaten and some of whom were killed so that Black Americans could vote.
The case centered on Louisiana’s congressional map, but its reach goes far beyond one state. The ruling makes it dramatically harder for voters of color to challenge redistricting plans that dilute their political power. It effectively raises the bar for Voting Rights Act cases so high that, as one political scientist at Carnegie Mellon who has served as a special master in multiple VRA cases put it plainly: “The Voting Rights Act as a means to protect minority voters from vote dilution is essentially dead.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court’s “gutting of Section 2 puts that achievement in peril,” adding: “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” Former Attorney General Eric Holder called it “Supreme Court sanctioned racial and partisan gerrymandering,” and said the court “ensures that it will be remembered as one of the most destructive and deeply irresponsible Courts in the history of our nation.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s president coined a term for what comes next: the “Alito map.” A map, she said, that “blatantly dilutes the voting power of Black voters and other disenfranchised communities on account of race in order to maximize partisan advantage,” now with a Supreme Court stamp of approval.
An NPR analysis found that at least 15 House districts currently represented by Black members of Congress could be at risk. Hours after the ruling, Florida’s legislature approved a new congressional map aimed at creating four additional Republican-leaning districts.
This is what consolidating power looks like. Not with a gun. With a legal opinion, written in careful language, that will make it harder for Black Americans to elect representatives of their choice for a generation.
I was on a plane flying home today when the decision was announced. Somewhere 30,000+ feet over this country, looking down at the country changing beneath me, snow-capped mountains giving way to plains giving way to coastline, I thought about what America actually is. Not what it has been claimed to be by the people currently in charge of it. What it is when you move through it at ground level.
I watched a gate agent at the airport spend the better part of an hour with a woman who was clearly terrified to fly. Not because it was in her job description. Because the woman was scared, and the gate agent saw it, and she stayed. I watched a man, probably in his eighties, struggle with a heavy bag near the jetway, and three strangers moved toward him at the same time. Nobody asked or waited to see if someone else would do it. They just did it.
That is America. That is who we actually are when we walk into a room with strangers, when we sit next to someone on a plane, when we see another person who needs something. We don’t talk about them the way Trump talks about other people. We don’t treat them the way he treats people. No American we have ever actually met has spoken about human beings the way this man speaks about human beings every single day.
He is not us. And we can never forget that. The Trump loyalists are becoming fewer and farther between. And the ones still standing by him, that is their problem.
We just have to remember, for ourselves and for each other, that America is, has never been, and never will be Trump. He is a passing moment that will not be in power forever. Whether he likes it or not, we have term limits. Alexander the Great didn’t build anything that lasted. And neither will he.
And for every victory that gives Trump a step toward destroying our country, we build three times the momentum for the path to better days. Like how today, a federal appeals court refused, again, to let Donald Trump escape accountability to E. Jean Carroll. The full bench of the Second Circuit, in a split decision, denied his request to rehear the case, leaving in place the more than $83 million jury verdict that found Trump liable for defaming her after she accused him of sexual assault in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He will likely ask the Supreme Court to take the case. He may succeed. But E. Jean Carroll filed her first lawsuit in 2019. She has been in this fight for six years. And today, she is still standing. Her attorney said simply: “E. Jean Carroll is eager for this case, originally filed in 2019, to be over so that she can finally obtain justice.” Six years. Two trials. More than eighty-three million dollars in verdicts. And she has not stopped.
And then there is Disney. Yesterday, the Trump administration’s FCC, in an action that has almost no modern precedent, ordered Disney to file early renewal applications for all eight of its owned ABC stations, years before those licenses were due. The move is widely understood as retaliation for Disney refusing to fire Jimmy Kimmel after Trump demanded it. And today, Disney responded by invoking the First Amendment and saying it was “confident” its record “demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees.” The FCC’s own lone Democratic commissioner called it “the FCC’s most egregious attack on the First Amendment to date,” and added: “But it will fail.” And Kimmel? He’s not stopping. The show goes on. And so does the resistance.
And on the redistricting fight, Democrats are not retreating. A new analysis found that Democrats could redraw as many as 19 Republican-held districts in states they control, which could neutralize the expected effects of today’s Supreme Court ruling. Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke said: “We’re not powerless and we’re not backing down. The Congressional Black Caucus is prepared to take any measure necessary to protect Black voters in this country.” The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has been reintroduced. The counter-offensive is being planned. The midterms are the most immediate answer.
We also need to pay close attention to redistricting fights in our own states, because what happens to those maps will shape who has power in this country for the next decade. We are being reminded in no uncertain terms that local elections matter and we need to rally more people around them.
Our constitutional republic and democratic norms took a big hit today. There is no way to gloss over that. But we also saw Trump admit exactly how he sees himself, and that gave us important insight we can use to slow the damage ahead of the midterms. And even more importantly, even in the middle of that destruction, we are still who we have always been. We went through a period where we felt divided, exhausted, and unsure of each other. But we are starting to see the good in one another again. The real spirit of what it means to be American. Something he may have beaten down for a time, but could never truly destroy. That is what I saw at the airport today. And that is what I know to be true about us. 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: Flying home over this vast, complicated, beautiful country today. He cannot have this. It was never his to take.
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/donald-trump-legacy-history/686817/
President Trump Participates in a Greeting with Artemis II Astronauts: video
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-redistricting-gerrymandering
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/29/politics/e-jean-carroll-trump-appeal
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/steven-cheung-r-word-post_n_69f1a5c2e4b01910ba1a6ae2
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/29/politics/astronauts-artemis-iran-trump-oval-office
Someone needs to remind Trump that as he is a convicted felon he’s not allowed to own a firearm as seen in that image. Only nuclear codes.
It's good to be reminded of all tyrants' downfall.
They are always messy.