Trump even made this about himself

Late this morning, Donald Trump carefully used his right hand to pull himself up the stairs and onto the stage at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. As he stood beneath the blazing sun, he seemed sharper than we have seen him lately. More animated, but also less restrained. And although he was there to celebrate the graduating class, his focus was anywhere but on the young adults who were starting the next chapter of their lives. Instead, he spent nearly an hour acting like he was at a campaign rally, where he continued to repeat outrageous claims and detailed his tired complaints. He said he might still be president in 2032. He made very unsettling comments about young men. He told the crowd he was only honoring a female cadet so he wouldn’t get sued. And he hoped the graduating class would always be friends with each other, and also, “hopefully with me.”

This is sadly what the President turns events like these into now. He doesn’t go to represent the office of the president. He goes to spread hate and chaos and fuel his ego.

And that is what stayed with me all day. This was not a rally. The people in that audience did not choose to be there, and they could not get up and leave. Hundreds of young men and women in their dress whites, seated in perfect formation on a football field, under a sun so punishing that medics were moving through the stands helping people who could not take the heat. Behind the graduates were their parents, grandparents, friends, and extended family, many of them crying, watching the proudest moment of their child’s young life. In front of them, a stage ringed with security and a sheet of bulletproof glass. The cadets sat at attention. They did not look away. Many of them often looked bewildered, the way you look when you are trying to quietly pacify a man who is not well. They are officers now, and they held the line the way they were trained to, while the man who was supposed to honor them talked, for the better part of an hour, about himself.

These are not ordinary graduates. Getting into the Coast Guard Academy is brutally hard. For every seat on that field, there were many multiples of people who wanted it but did not make it. The cadets who sat there today gave four years to something larger than themselves. And here is what they got instead.

They got a man who could not praise a single one of them without turning it back on himself. And he could not even do that without being creepy about it, especially about the young men, and especially about how they looked. He brought the top cadet up on stage and said, “I hate good-looking men.” He called another one up, looked him over, and told the crowd, “Look at the muscles on this guy,” before joking that he would not fight him, “this is not UFC.” When a star athlete was recognized, he told him he wanted “25% of everything you earn.” And when it came time to honor the class president, a young woman who led her classmates and earned that title through four years of work, he said the only reason he was bringing her up was so he would not be accused of discrimination. “Ladies and gentlemen, the president got sued today,” he joked. Telling her to “come on up. I have to get her up here. And she looks so fantastic.” He could not let any of them simply have their moment. Every achievement on that field became a mirror he held up to himself.

This is the thing about him that is so hard to put into words. He has no depth of understanding of what a moment like this means. He cannot read the difference between a rally and a graduation, between a crowd that came to cheer him and a class of young people who came to be honored. He does not grasp or care how hard they worked, or what they sacrificed, or that for one morning the day was supposed to belong entirely to them. So he did what he always does. He made it creepy, and he made it about himself, because he does not seem to know how to do anything else.

Then he moved on to the parts that had nothing to do with the Coast Guard at all. He told the cadets the country had been “dead” a year ago and was now “the hottest country anywhere in the world,” that for years Washington had been “run by foolish politicians.” He repeated the line he repeats at every rally, that twenty-five million people came into this country as murderers, from prisons and mental institutions. He said America comes first now, over and over. He went off about tariffs being his favorite word and how the media gave him a hard time for it. He bragged that the auto and chip businesses were stolen from us by other countries. He even talked about the hurricanes the Coast Guard had braved, the towering waves they swam into to pull strangers from the water, and made those about himself, too, while admitting he would never have saved anyone. Telling the crowd that if he were in that situation, he would have said, “I’m not feeling so good today. I think I have to take a day off.” None of it was for the graduates. They sat in the heat and absorbed a stump speech, because they had no other choice.

And woven through it was the war. He stood in front of young people who could be sent into harm’s way and described the killing as a spectacle. Talking about the blockade, he recounted how a shot fired from four miles out took the rudder off a ship, and he called it “a beautiful thing to see. It just fell in.” He bragged about Iran, saying the United States “hit them very hard” but “may have to hit them even harder.” He talked about capturing the president of Venezuela and the oil now flowing into Houston. The cadets in front of him are the ones who will carry out whatever comes next, and he spoke about all of it as if it were a highlight reel about him.

And then, twice, he said a deep truth that he carries with him: he does not plan to leave office. Because when he was talking about icebreakers, of all things, and how the country has ordered eleven of them, with the first arriving in 2028, he said, “I’m going to be here in 28,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be here in 32, too.” He said it the way you would mention a dentist appointment, tucked inside a story about boats. But he said it to a field full of officers who, minutes after he spoke, raised their right hands and swore an oath. Not to him. To the Constitution. The same Constitution that says he cannot still be president in 2032. He floated, staying in power past his term, in front of the very people who had just sworn to defend the document that forbids it.

We have seen this pattern before, in other countries and other decades. The strongman who needs an audience that cannot talk back. Who turns the military into a backdrop for his own image. Who treats the institutions of a free country as props in a show about himself, and who tests, a little at a time, what the public will quietly accept. Fascism and authoritarianism rarely arrive all at once. It arrives in moments like this one, at a graduation, where almost everyone is too polite or too captive to say out loud what they are seeing.

What I keep coming back to is how sad it is. Not just frightening, though it is that too. Sad. Because this was supposed to be theirs. These young people did everything right, the hardest version of right, for four years. Their families sacrificed time with them for four years and sat in that heat to watch them cross into a new level of adulthood and into service. And the one man handed the microphone could not get out of his own way long enough to let them have it. He took it, the way he takes everything, and made it about himself. Another moment to add to the long and growing list of moments he has stolen from our young people.

But not everyone had to stay quiet. A few hundred people gathered in a nearby park to protest, and among them were veterans, including an eighty-year-old man who served thirteen months in Vietnam, holding a sign that read, “Please Refuse Unlawful Orders.” Those are people who know exactly what the cost would be for these new graduates if they were forced to pay it by going to war. He knows what it means to ask young officers to follow a man instead of an oath.

And we saw other shows of resistance today, too. After the President arranged to create a fund that could funnel nearly 1.8 billion taxpayer dollars to reward the people who carried out his agenda, past and future, two of the police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th sued to stop it, calling it exactly what it is: illegal. A federal judge has now demanded written arguments and set a hearing for next week. The courts keep being asked to hold the line, and again and again, they do. Congress is pushing back as well. The resistance is real. It is not enough yet, and it is not as fast as we need it to be, but it is real.

Every night when I sit down to write these posts, I never know where my mind will take me. Sometimes I’m documenting the cruelty of it all, and sometimes the corruption he is committing is what takes the lead. Tonight it was something different. It’s a deep disappointment that I feel, but also something else. Something deeper and stronger. It’s the reminder that there are still things that they can never take from us. They can hijack a ceremony. They can talk over the people they were elected to serve. They can stand behind bulletproof glass and make a sacred morning about themselves. But they cannot change the Constitution, they cannot edit the truth, and they cannot stop us from caring. If history has shown us anything, it is that the people on the right side of it, the ones telling the truth, the ones sharing the facts, the ones who actually stand for something beyond their own corruption and their own personal gain, have always been the more powerful ones in the end. Especially when we stand together.

And there is going to come a point when his lies, his corruption, and the evilness and emptiness in his soul make him weaker than he already is. The people around him will keep crumbling, the way we have already watched them crumble. The one thing they can never change is the truth. They cannot rewrite the Constitution, and they cannot stop us from caring about this country and about each other. I feel it with every bone in my body. This fight is not over. We are going to win at the midterms.

And the proof was sitting right there on that field the whole time. The over two hundred young people chose service over self, who gave four years to something bigger than any one man, who raised their hands and swore themselves to a country and not to a king. He could not take that from them. He stood on their stage and tried to make it his, and the moment he finished speaking, they became officers of this country. They are the future, and they are everything he is not. 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: Took this girl for a car ride today. She loves to get out of the house but gets nervous when there are too many people around, so we are working on helping her feel safer in public. This picture is from a past ride because the ones I took today were a bit blurry.

Sources:

President Trump Delivers a Commencement Address to the United States Coast Guard Academy: White House Official YouTube video

https://ctmirror.org/2026/05/20/trump-coast-guard-academy-graduation/

https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/new-london/who-were-the-cadets-trump-invited-on-stage-during-the-2026-coast-guard-academy-graduation/

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/05/06/us-forces-fire-at-disable-iran-flagged-tanker-trying-to-evade-blockade/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/trump-fund-lawsuit-capitol-riot-irs.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/24/nx-s1-5795898/veterans-and-military-families-protest-iran-war-on-capitol-hill