Trump is escalating again

At 10:25 this morning, the President of the United States entered the East Room of the White House to the sound of “Hail to the Chief.” As he walked down a red carpet lined on either side by members of the military standing at attention, he struggled to walk in a straight line to the podium, his steps wavering from side to side. Once at the podium, the room grew quiet in anticipation of what was meant to be a remembrance ceremony for Angel Families, parents and relatives who have lost loved ones to horrific acts of violence. But what followed was yet another deeply embarrassing moment in his presidency. He even went so far as to tell families who have faced the most unimaginable loss a human being can endure that he has “suffered for the country,” comparing the weight of a presidency he campaigned for, fought for, and demanded, to that of having a loved one murdered.

As he spoke, it was hard to ignore how much he physically struggled to get through his written remarks. It wasn’t just exhaustion, and it wasn’t the kind of visible weight or heaviness you might expect at a ceremony like this. It felt more like irritation, like he was angry he was being forced to be there and to have to act like he actually cared, as if this were a moment he had to push through rather than honor. And although he seemed more alert than we have seen him in other recent appearances, he just looked deeply unwell.

His very first words were “We gather here today for a truly solemn occasion,” and within seconds he was calling the press “sick people,” rambling about “millions and millions of people from countries that we don’t want to know about,” and throwing out the claim that “11,888 murderers were allowed into our country by the Biden administration,” a weirdly specific number with no sourcing, dropped at a ceremony that was supposed to be about the human beings those families lost. He couldn’t even hold the tone of a memorial for a full minute before it became about his enemies.

And the families sitting in that room, the mothers and fathers who had flown across the country, who had gotten dressed and prepared themselves emotionally to sit in the White House expecting this to be one of the greatest honors of their lives, expecting to feel that their children were remembered, that their names mattered, that their lives were not reduced to statistics or headlines, had no idea what they were about to sit through. You can’t help but wonder if, at some point, they will look back at the footage of that day and realize that the honoring of their loved ones made up only a fraction of what actually happened. Instead, they were brought to the microphones to praise him, their grief folded into his narrative, their children’s names spoken briefly before the focus shifted back to his election, his enemies, his suffering. Beyond saying some of their names, he said very little about who those people were and what was lost when they were taken from their families.

Because just minutes into what he called a “truly solemn occasion,” this is what the President of the United States said to a room full of mothers and fathers who will never see their children again: “And think of it, I’m not talking politics, I’m just talking life. If that election, if it was not rigged, it was a rigged election, millions and millions of votes. A guy that never left his basement, all run by crooked people. COVID was a little bit of a shield. We had a lot of things going on. But it was rigged by millions. We did great in that election. If that election was not rigged, every single one of the people in this room right now would not be here. They would be home with your son, daughter, family.”

He told grieving parents, to their faces, at their memorial, that their children are dead because Democrats stole an election. And he was just getting started. He went on to say he “probably got 85 million votes,” called Democrats “professional cheaters” who receive “three, four, five, six, even seven ballots,” said “they cheated in this election too, it was just too big to rig,” attacked the media, attacked sanctuary cities, attacked governors, went after Minneapolis, and went after anyone and everyone who wasn’t him. He ranted about voter ID. He ranted about mail-in ballots. He ranted about men in women’s sports. All of it, at a remembrance ceremony for people who were murdered.

Of course, this was never truly about horrific murders or a serious effort to stop violence altogether. This was about painting undocumented immigrants, and increasingly all immigrants, as the root of every problem in our country and the source of some broader moral decay. Because this event wasn’t structured to meaningfully remember the people who were murdered. It was intentionally structured to frame those crimes as proof of a much larger narrative.

There is not a single person in this country who believes that violent criminals, of any status, should be free to roam and commit heinous crimes. And every single person who was murdered should be here today. None of this suffering should have happened. We can hold that truth without turning millions of people into scapegoats.

We can also agree that common-sense immigration reform is needed. We should want a system that protects people from harm and prevents violence wherever possible. But we should also want a system that is not rooted in cruelty toward those who are simply trying to build a better life. Those two goals are not mutually exclusive.

But Trump said none of that. Instead, he drifted somewhere no one expected: “But the Angel Families, I realized early on, never change. I could see how you change. You have to go through this stuff. But never changed. I thought they were among the greatest people I’ve ever met. I met the heads of countries. A lot of them, not so nice, but they do have some power. We have done very well with all of those people.”

He compared grieving parents to foreign dictators at a remembrance ceremony for murdered Americans. In the same breath. Mothers who lost their daughters ranked in the same sentence alongside strongmen he admires, all just characters in the long and fascinating story of Donald Trump and the important people he has met in his very important life. And then he moved on, like it was nothing, because to him it was nothing. None of it was real. None of it was sacred. None of those families, none of those children, none of that pain mattered to him beyond what it could do for him in that moment.

What we watched in the East Room today was not a memorial. It was a political operation designed to look like one. And the cruelty of it is that the families at the center of it may never fully realize how they were used, because their pain is real, their loss is real, and the man standing at the podium knew exactly how to fold that pain into a narrative that had very little to do with them and everything to do with his grip on power.

This is yet another example of Trump and his enablers using one of the oldest tactics in the authoritarian handbook. Hitler used the same strategy. He took the rare instances where a crime involved a Jewish person, or even the perception of one, and amplified it relentlessly until it looked like a systemic threat. He built an entire propaganda infrastructure around the idea that Jewish communities were the source of Germany’s suffering, the reason for economic pain, moral decay, and national weakness. He didn’t need the numbers to support it. He just needed the fear. He needed people to believe that one group of people was responsible for everything that had gone wrong in their lives, and that removing them was the solution. Trump is running the same playbook. He is parading grieving parents to podiums where the talking points are already loaded.

And the numbers tell a completely different story. Violent crime committed by undocumented immigrants is not the driving force behind murder in this country. It never has been. Study after study shows the data does not support the picture he is painting. If he truly cared about preventing murder, he would have talked about the Americans killed by other Americans, too. He would hold a ceremony hundreds of times this size for the victims of all violence. But he won’t. Because those deaths don’t serve his narrative.

And that is what makes today so dangerous. He is not just lying about the scale of a problem. He is creating an environment where Black, Brown, and Asian communities, anyone who does not fit his narrow ideal, are treated as inherently suspicious, inherently criminal, inherently less than. That is what he wants. He wants that divide.

I am truly heartbroken for each one of those senseless murders. They should not have happened, and we must do better to end all such violence. Period.

Tomorrow night is Trump’s State of the Union. I know it will be difficult to listen to, frustrating, and un-presidential. I plan to watch it so you don’t have to. If it feels like too much, if you need to protect your peace, then please don’t tune in. Do something that reminds you of what makes this country worth fighting for in the first place. I’ll make sure you know everything that actually matters. Tomorrow night’s post may be later than usual because I won’t just be watching, I’ll likely be re-watching, pausing, taking notes, and collecting my thoughts before I write. But it will be there.

As I think about what the following months will bring, the continued division, the chaos, and the escalation before the midterms, I keep going back to 2020 and 2021, when the world felt so uncertain and fragile, and when Trump’s incompetence was on full display. There were refrigerator trucks outside hospitals and an insurrection that left many of us wondering whether our government itself would survive. It all felt overwhelming.

I needed a way to hold onto that truth, so I started taking a “picture of the day”. It wasn’t profound or curated. It wasn’t meant for anyone else. It was just a quiet promise to myself that no matter how heavy the headlines were, I would find one small thing worth remembering, some evidence that good still existed in the world around me. Sometimes it was a box of tea on the counter because the grocery store had finally been able to restock it. Sometimes it was a hummingbird that visited our yard. My simple daily picture turned into something the whole family looked forward to, often competing to see if they could be my inspiration for the day. And here I am, nearly six years later, still taking a picture every single day to remember the beauty of simply being allowed to experience this often troubled, but still beautiful world.

I’m going to start sharing my picture of the day with you. They won’t be anything grand. Some days it will be a cup of coffee. Some day it might be my cat sleeping beside me while I write. Or a blooming flower from my daily walk. But maybe, if we build our own daily reminders to look back on when the hard days start to pile up, we can find the strength to counter the chaos this administration is trying to create around us. We are at risk of emotional exhaustion, of burnout, of shutting down from the nonstop noise and manufactured crisis. We counter that by grounding ourselves in something real, steady, and good.

Everything Trump is doing right now shows a clear pattern of escalating propaganda and division. It will intensify before the midterms. We have to expect that and brace ourselves for the next round of chaos without letting it consume us. And I also know that with every line he crosses, more people are seeing what is actually happening. I know that we are building our resilience, our willingness to push back, and our refusal to normalize what should never be normal. This is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

The picture of the day is from our walk in the neighboring town of Solana Beach.

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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.