Trump is an embarrassment to the presidency

At 12:28 this afternoon, in the wood-paneled Rayburn Room on Capitol Hill, President Donald J. Trump stepped up to the microphone at the 43rd annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon. The room was full of dignitaries and lawmakers, the Irish Prime Minister among them. And once Trump started to speak, it took him less than five minutes to once again bring shame to the office of the presidency.

He had just finished commenting on a woman’s appearance in front of the room, showing his deeply inappropriate fixation on how women look, when he grinned into the crowd and said, “I’m in deep trouble. There’ll be headlines when I get out of this room. But I’ll stick with it.” That came right after he said, “I want to thank that beautiful, you’re not allowed to say that about women anymore, but I say it anyway. Usually, it’s the end of your career. You’re not allowed to use the word ‘beauty’ in any form to introduce a woman, but she happens to be beautiful.” He knows exactly why moments like this are cringe-inducing and wildly out of place. But he does it anyway, because no one stops him.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Just moments earlier, while talking about his razor-thin margins in Congress, he brought up the members who had recently died. Not with grief or remembrance, but with math. “We lost a couple, and we had a couple of people; they’re in heaven now, they are looking. And that didn’t help us with the vote.” He paused. Then smiled. “But we’re doing all right.” Their deaths weren’t losses to him. They were arithmetic. Inconveniences that made his agenda harder to push through. That is who represented the United States of America today, on St. Patrick’s Day, standing in front of the Irish Prime Minister and other dignitaries, celebrating past generations of Irish Americans and the deep connection between our countries.

But the embarrassment had begun long before he ever set foot on Capitol Hill. At 11 a.m., Trump was scheduled to sit down with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in the Oval Office. Instead, Martin waited nearly 45 minutes as the White House scrambled to manage a breaking resignation from one of its own senior officials and Trump fired off posts on Truth Social attacking NATO allies. Martin waited. And when they finally sat down, Trump did what he always does. For 40 minutes and 45 seconds, he talked. He attacked. And he rambled. He went after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, gesturing to the bust of Winston Churchill behind him and declaring that Starmer “is no Winston Churchill.” He said Starmer “doesn’t produce” in the context of the Iran war, bashing him for not sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz. He called Starmer’s immigration policy and his energy policies “a disaster.” And then he broadened it, saying the UK and other European countries had allowed “millions and millions of people to come into your country that shouldn’t be there” and that “bad things have happened to Europe.”

Martin sat and listened, trying to maintain his composure, and only a handful of times letting on just how ridiculous Trump’s ramblings were. At one point, even he couldn’t contain himself, and he did something almost no visiting leader has done in this White House. He pushed back.

But when he did it, he showed the world how it is done. He maneuvered and outclassed Trump without him even noticing. At one point, even interrupting Trump to defend Starmer directly. “Keir Starmer has done a lot to reset the Irish-British relationship,” Martin said. “I just want to put that on the record.” He called Starmer “a very earnest, sound person” and told Trump he had “a capacity to get along with” him. And then, with the skill of someone who had clearly walked into that room with a plan, he pivoted to the eventual end goal of peacekeeping, redirecting Trump’s hostility before it could turn on him. It worked. Trump took the bait and shifted to a softer response in the moment, before ramping back up his attacking, but never aiming it at Martin.

And then came a moment that said everything. When Trump declared that “bad things have happened to Europe,” Martin signaled to Trump to get his attention. “Europe is still a very good place to live,” he said. The room laughed. Then Martin pushed further, saying Europe was sometimes “characterised wrongly in terms of it being overrun” by immigration.

According to Politico Europe, this was not improvised. Irish officials told reporters that Martin had watched German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visit the White House earlier this month and fail to defend Starmer or any other European ally when Trump went after them. Spain’s government publicly rebuked Merz for staying silent while Trump attacked them. Martin was determined not to make the same mistake. He came in with a strategy: defend his allies, don’t take the bait, and pivot when necessary.

And it worked. Trump never turned on him. Trump never even realized what had happened. He sat in his own Oval Office, in front of the Churchill bust he loves to reference, and got outplayed by a man who actually appears to understand the art of the deal, unlike the guy who wrote a book about it.

What we saw today was the difference between a leader and a performer. Martin came to that room to represent his country. Trump came to hear himself talk, degrade other people, and complain. What I took away from that was something deeper. I sat there watching a true diplomat, somebody who actually wants respectable communication, who wants the world to be a better place, who believes that all of our countries are better together, not being torn apart, and who won’t sell out a close ally for a photo op.

Watching it unfold broke me a little, because it shows just how far we have fallen, how truly incapable and dangerous the person leading our country is, and how it didn’t have to be this way. Something about the quiet, undeniable contrast between a real leader and a man pretending to be one broke my heart a little in a way I didn’t expect.

And that pivot Martin made to Iran wasn’t just diplomacy. It pointed straight at the thing this administration is trying the hardest to cover up. Trump called it a war all day. But the second anyone brings up the fact that only Congress can declare war, and that he never asked for authorization, he changes the word. Then it’s an “excursion.” He picks whichever word keeps him out of trouble. But it’s one or the other. Either it’s a war, and he broke the law, or it’s not, and he’s been lying about it all day.

He even stood at that luncheon today and said, “We don’t ever want to have that problem again, not with lunatics. Can’t have lunatics controlling nuclear weaponry.” Trump actually makes a good point here. It’s exactly why he should never have the nuclear codes. The reality is that the person he was describing is exactly the kind of person he himself is, someone so reckless with power, so indifferent to law, and so unstable in judgment that he should never have been trusted with the nuclear codes.

He also repeated the debunked claim that other presidents have wanted to strike Iran. He says this to gaslight us into believing that an illegal war was inevitable. Like he was just the one brave enough to finally do it. He wasn’t brave. He was reckless. And people are dying because of it.

And we know this war is becoming indefensible because one of Trump’s own people just said so. Earlier today, Joe Kent, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his immediate resignation. Kent is not a liberal critic or a Democratic operative. He is a Trump appointee, confirmed by the Senate last July on a 52-44 vote, a former Green Beret, and someone with deep ties to the conspiratorial wing of the MAGA movement. This is not someone who was ever on the fence about Trump. He was a true believer. And even he looked at this war and said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” His break from Trump does not make Kent suddenly a voice of moral authority; he’s not. But this is telling because of what it means when even the loyalists start breaking. It tells us the cracks are forming in places this administration cannot afford. But two things can be true at once. Kent’s resignation is a real sign that the foundation is fracturing, and it is also deeply revealing in what it refuses to say. Because in his letter, addressed directly to the president, Kent blamed everyone except the man who launched the war, Trump. He cast Trump not as the commander in chief who ordered the strikes, but as a figure swept along by forces beyond his control. He framed a two-term president as someone who was manipulated into a war rather than the person who chose it. And that tells us something, too. Kent’s resignation is a crack in the wall. It’s not a clean one. It’s not a noble one. But cracks don’t need to be clean to matter.

And Kent isn’t alone in seeing the truth. Across this country, millions of Americans are waking up every morning and feeling the cost of this war in their own lives. Gas prices climbing. Grocery bills that keep getting worse. That’s real life for real people right now. And in a normal administration, that would keep the president and his advisors up at night too. It would be the thing they couldn’t stop thinking about. The thing that drove every decision. But not this one.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett went on CNBC and told the American people that their pain from this war is “the last of our concerns right now.” He said it “wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much.” The man the president put in charge of economic policy, the person whose entire job is supposed to be looking out for the financial wellbeing of American families, looked into a camera and said that what we’re going through doesn’t matter to them. Gas is up 80 cents from a month ago. Oil is near $100 a barrel. Five states are approaching $4 a gallon. The war has cost taxpayers $12 billion in its first two weeks. And his response was that it’s the last of their concerns. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it “the quiet part out loud.” And she was right. They don’t care. This war isn’t about protecting us. It’s about doing a favor for Netanyahu. It’s about Trump getting to play wartime president without following the law that comes with it. It’s about enriching his allies while the rest of us pay for it at the pump and at the grocery store and in the lives of service members who never should have been sent there.

Trump showed us who he is today in front of the entire world. And he’s not the wild card anymore. We know exactly who he is. We know who his enablers are. I watched him today across every event, surrounded at every stop by the same rotating cast of yes-men nodding along, and I realized something that’s been building in me for a while now. My disappointment stopped being about Trump a long time ago.

Every day I wake up and watch hours of footage of this man to write these posts. And nothing he does surprises me anymore. It doesn’t shock me. It doesn’t raise my blood pressure. I expect it. He is exactly who he has always been, just without the mental capacity to even project competence anymore.

Where it still hits me, where I still feel something heavy that I don’t quite have the right word for, is with the people around him. The ones who know better. The ones who spent years presenting themselves as people who actually care about this country. Watching them stand behind him, nod along, enable every lie, and pretend that what the rest of us can see plain as day isn’t happening. That’s where the heartbreak still lives. And some days it feels like all hope is lost when it comes to the people inside our government who could stop this and choose not to.

But then I look at the one branch that is still, imperfectly but stubbornly, doing its work based on the Constitution. Our courts. They aren’t perfect. They alone can’t secure our future. But they are holding. And this week, they held in ways that matter.

On Monday, a federal judge blocked RFK Jr.’s effort to gut childhood vaccine policy. The judge cited likely violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Administrative Procedure Act and ordered that Kennedy’s reconstituted advisory committee cannot meet and its decisions are on hold. No child in this country, or anywhere in the world, should die from a disease we know how to prevent. This fight isn’t over, and there will be appeals, but a judge stood between this administration and our children. That matters.

Then came Voice of America. Today, a judge ordered the reinstatement of 1,000 employees cut under Kari Lake. And this one is bigger than most people realize. Voice of America broadcasts in more than 40 languages to countries where free press doesn’t exist. For decades, it has been the sound of American credibility reaching into places where people are desperate for truth. In authoritarian countries where state media is the only media, VOA has been a lifeline. Gutting it was never about saving money or government efficiency. It was about silencing an independent voice. And a judge said no.

And then Chief Justice John Roberts did something rare. He spoke publicly. He said the hostility being directed at judges is “dangerous, and it’s got to stop.” This came after days of Trump going after judges on social media, attacking anyone who ruled against him. Roberts doesn’t speak out like this often. When he does, it carries weight. And the fact that he made this statement tells us how close to the edge things really are.

These judges are starting to understand something that I’ve been hoping they would see for a long time. This isn’t a presidency they can wait out. This isn’t like the first term, where there were some guardrails and people in the system told themselves it would all go back to normal eventually. Judges across this country are realizing that if they don’t hold the line now, there may not be an independent judiciary left to protect. And that awakening, quiet as it is, may be one of the most important things happening in America right now.

This morning, before I sat down to watch Trump meet with Prime Minister Martin and attend the luncheon, my youngest and I decided to take a little adventure. Today was one of the hottest March days on record here in San Diego and I needed to clear my head so we hopped in the car to drive up the coast and get french fries and a drink. We had the windows down and the waves crashing to the side of us. It was exactly what I needed. It was a “touch grass” moment as so many talk about. Not sticking my head in the sand that none of this is happening, but taking an hour to see and remember the beauty of this country and why we all are putting up such resistance.

My hope tonight is coming from the promise of better days. Of never giving up, even if we need to take a moment to reflect on what we are up against and remember what we are fighting for. And my hope comes from your continued support of this work and the work of other independent voices. You are what is ensuring that the truth is reaching more people and not being drowned out by the propaganda and lies. My hope is coming from the courts, who are continuing to hold the line in greater numbers than before. It is also coming from the fact that even inside this administration, the war has become indefensible. Joe Kent’s resignation was not heroic, but it was real. And when even the true believers start breaking, it tells you the foundation is not as solid as they want us to believe. We are seeing more and more people in these positions realize what’s at stake and finally say no. 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- Today was gorgeous. We went for a walk in Del Mar during low tide and just enjoyed the moment.

Sources:

Ireland’s leader defends Starmer from Trump's insults in White House meeting:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-leader-micheal-martin-defends-uk-keir-starmer-versus-donald-trump/

White House Video: President Trump Participates in the Friends of Ireland Luncheon

White House Video: President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting, Mar. 17, 2026