Trump is losing more power by the day
At 10:34 this morning, Donald Trump was inside the Oval Office of the White House in a meeting with one of his Commissioners, a meeting that directly affects the survival and well-being of millions of senior citizens, children, and disabled Americans. But instead of focusing on that responsibility, his anger over losing yet another vote put before the American people got the best of him, and he lost control. Because after a night where millions of Virginians showed up and made their voices heard, Donald Trump did what he always does when the outcome slips beyond his control. He went to the one place where he can distort reality, control what’s said, and protect himself. Truth Social. And without evidence and without hesitation, he wrote, A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!
And the lie was just the beginning. Because that was not the first thing he posted this morning. At 8:34, while Americans were still processing the Virginia results, he shared a Fox News opinion piece with a headline that read: “Will President Trump go full Sherman in the war on Iran?” Sherman, as in General William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a path of total destruction across the American South during the Civil War and left nothing standing behind him. Trump didn’t add commentary. He didn’t need to. Just sharing it said everything.
And then, at 8:39, came the screenshot of a New York Times article from 2004, with his own caption above it: “Last Season of my Apprentice Juggernaut!” Rating numbers. Viewership figures. A reminder that he was once on a well-watched reality TV show 22 years ago.
Those three posts show us exactly how his brain operates. This is a picture of a man who, in one morning, laid out his entire playbook in three posts. The Virginia post is the domestic threat. The Sherman/Iran post is the foreign threat. And the Apprentice is the ego underneath it all.
His brain was saying, The elections are rigged when I lose. I’m planting the seed now ahead of the midterms. And then it moved to protection mode by sending a warning to those inside the country and out. I control the military. I will use it. Don’t test me. And then when he started to worry that that wouldn’t be enough, his ego made him start to overcompensate. The insecurity broke through, and so he displayed a desperate show of relevance and importance: I am a winner. I am beloved. I am untouchable.
This is not a president governing a country. This is a man performing dominance because he feels it leaving him. And the Virginia post is the most dangerous of the three, not because of what it says about last night, but because of what it is rehearsing for November.
Here is what actually happened in Virginia. Voters approved a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional maps, a move that could give Democrats a path to winning ten of Virginia’s eleven congressional seats. Democratic state House Speaker Don Scott said it plainly: “At a moment when Trump and his allies are trying to lock in power before voters have a say, Virginians stepped up and leveled the playing field for the entire country.” And Trump, the man who started this entire redistricting war by personally pressuring Texas Republicans to redraw their maps before the usual timeline, woke up to those results and called it a crime.
He built the fire. And now he’s screaming that it burns. But calling it rigged is not a tantrum. It is a strategy. It is a man spending the six months before the midterms conditioning his base to disbelieve any result that doesn’t go his way. We have watched this before. We watched it for months before January 6th, rally after rally, post after post, the slow deliberate poisoning of the well, until millions of Americans believed the lie so completely that they were willing to storm the Capitol to act on it. He is doing it again. Right now. And the people he is installing around him are part of the same machine.
Yesterday, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, sat before the Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing. Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him a simple question requiring a factual answer: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Warsh refused to say. He talked about keeping politics out of the Fed. He said the Senate had certified the election. Warren pushed back: “That’s not the question I’m asking. I’m asking, did Donald Trump lose in 2020?” Warsh still would not answer. Warren called him uniquely ill-suited for the job. She also pressed him on more than a hundred million dollars in assets he failed to disclose, asking whether any of his investment funds had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He couldn’t answer that cleanly either.
This is the man Trump wants controlling the American economy and interest rates. A man who cannot state a fact or answer a simple question. Not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because the machine requires its members to leave the door open to the lie. Always. That is the price of admission. And nothing about the question was political, like he was trying to make it sound. He either won or he didn’t, and we know he didn’t.
There has never been a president in American history who operated this way. Not one. Not even the ones we considered failures. Not even the ones history has judged most harshly. Because there has always been a baseline of dignity, a floor, that every person who held that office understood was required of them, regardless of party or ideology. Even Victor Orban, who held Hungary captive for 16 years in an authoritarian takeover, conceded that he lost the election shortly after the results came in. Hungarians made it too big to rig, came together, and voted him out. Even somebody as horrible as Victor Orban didn’t try to pull the same lies that Donald Trump is already setting us up for once again.
When I think back on true leaders, people with dignity who understood at least that level of what the presidency requires, even those running for president, I think back to John McCain. On October 10th, 2008, in Lakeville, Minnesota, Senator McCain was running for president against Barack Obama. At a town hall, a supporter grabbed the microphone and told him she couldn’t trust Obama, calling him an Arab. McCain didn’t let her finish. He shook his head. He took the microphone back. And he said: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.” He went on to say that Obama was a decent person and no one needed to be afraid of him as president.
That is the bar. A man running against his opponent for the most powerful office on earth, defending that opponent’s honor in front of his own crowd, because it was simply the right thing to do. That moment has never left me. It is the bar that we all should set for the next president. Not the true political side of it, but the dignity, the honor, and the humanity that we must demand our future presidents have.
Donald Trump has never once cleared the bar of dignity, and he has never been someone deserving of the office of the President of the United States of America. He has never shown compassion or care, nor respect for a single person. Not for a single moment. He has called reporters pigs. He has mocked disabled people. He has smeared Gold Star families. He has attacked a prisoner of war for being captured. He has called women dogs. He has used the full weight of the American presidency to humiliate, threaten, and destroy anyone who does not serve his ego. And his followers went with him, post by post, rally by rally, until cruelty became their identity too, and dignity became something to mock.
Nearly everything Donald Trump does, he seems to take a lead from past strongmen, always glossing over the part about how none of them won in the end. And I think about how Mussolini kept scrapbooks of his own press clippings even as his regime was unraveling. He needed to see himself celebrated, needed it the way other men need air, because the alternative was confronting the reality that the adoration had stopped being real. The Apprentice post is that scrapbook. It is a man reaching backward for proof that he once mattered, because the present keeps telling him something he cannot accept. The votes keep not going his way. The people keep not doing what he tells them. The walls keep showing cracks that he cannot plaster over fast enough.
And today, one of those cracks widened further. This morning, the Pentagon announced that Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was departing the administration, effective immediately, with no real explanation. This is after he sat down with reporters just the afternoon before and spoke at length about his plans and priorities for the Navy. And then gone, while the Navy he was overseeing enforces one of the most significant naval blockades in modern American history.
This is the same John Phelan whose name appears in the Epstein flight manifests. He flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane twice in 2006, several months before Epstein’s first arrest on sex trafficking charges. On the second flight, records show he traveled alongside Epstein himself, modeling agent and Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel, and six other passengers whose names remain redacted in the documents released by Congress.
Three Cabinet secretaries gone in the last two months. Kristi Noem. Pam Bondi, whose departure came directly after Trump grew unhappy with how she was handling the Epstein files. And the Labor Secretary out under an inspector general probe. And now today, the Secretary of the Navy, gone effective immediately with no explanation. Ironically, this was one of Trump’s guys. A man whose name also appears in the Epstein files. Twice on the flight manifests. He is not a Cabinet secretary, but the pattern is the same. People are leaving. People who know things are disappearing quietly from this administration.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took a victory lap this morning and sent a warning at the same time. With Florida Republicans preparing to redraw their congressional maps in a special session next week, Jeffries had a name for what they were doing. He called it a “dummymander,” redistricting that ends up harming the party that drew the lines. He said Florida Republicans were about to walk into the same trap Texas did, turning safe seats into competitive ones and handing Democrats prime pickup opportunities. He promised to target eight Republican incumbents in Florida by name. And he didn’t mince his words: “Our message to Florida Republicans is F around and find out.” That message doesn’t just apply to Florida Republicans. It applies to all of them. And it applies to Donald Trump, who started this redistricting war in the first place.
And the cracks we are seeing aren’t just in his carefully selected inner circle, but also in his authoritarian plan. ProPublica and Frontline spent months investigating what happened to the hundreds of Americans arrested during anti-ICE protests across Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. The administration called them domestic terrorists, and part of their blueprint was to silence dissent with these arrests. The Department of Justice threw the full weight of federal prosecution at ordinary people who showed up in the streets to say this is not who we are. And then the cases started falling apart. Out of more than 300 arrests documented by the investigation, more than a third have already collapsed, debunked by video evidence that directly contradicts what arresting officers swore in their official reports. In Chicago alone, prosecutors dropped charges in 75 of 109 cases.
This matters more than it might seem. There is a saying in the legal world that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, meaning the bar for obtaining an indictment is so low, the process so tilted toward the government, that prosecutors almost never lose at that stage. They present only their side. There is no defense. The jurors almost always say yes. So when federal prosecutors themselves looked at what their own officers brought them and had to walk away, when the evidence was so thin they decided it wasn’t even worth bringing to a grand jury, that is not a small thing. That is the system working the way it was designed to work. That is a message to us that we have each other’s backs and that the resistance is holding. And it is a message to Trump and his enablers that the machinery of fear has limits. That you can arrest people in the streets and call them terrorists, but if the evidence isn’t there, if the video tells a different story than the report, ordinary Americans will refuse to be the instrument of that lie.
This is resistance working quietly, in rooms most of us will never see. It doesn’t always look like a protest or a headline. Sometimes it looks like a prosecutor in Chicago looking at a body camera video and an officer’s sworn report and understanding that the two tell completely different stories, and walking away before it ever reaches a grand jury. Sometimes it looks like voters in Virginia showing up on a Tuesday night in April, not for a presidential race, or a Senate seat, just for a map, because they understand that the map is the foundation keeping our democratic republic from total collapse.
We are six months from the midterms. Just six months. And we have proof that when we show up, we win. But we also need to be clear-eyed about what comes next, because we knew this was coming before the votes were even counted. Within hours of the Virginia results, a Republican-appointed circuit court judge moved to block the referendum results. The case now goes to the Virginia Supreme Court, a court that leans Republican, with two justices appointed when Republicans controlled the legislature still sitting on the bench. Briefs are due in the next day or two. The court will have to rule before November for any of this to matter. And the Virginia Attorney General has already vowed to fight it all the way.
Every step of the way, there will be pushback. This is not a surprise. This is the pattern. They lose the vote, and then they run to the courts. They lose the courts, and then they run to the legislature. They lose the legislature, and then they call it rigged. We knew this was coming. We know more is coming. The pushback tells us everything we need to know. If last night’s results didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be working this hard to erase them.
The road to taking back our country, to securing it for our children and making it free and fair and just for everyone, is not going to be a straight line. It is going to have peaks and valleys. Some days are going to look dark. We are going to feel lost. And some days we are going to feel like we are on top of the world and nothing can stop us. Our job is to carry the feeling of the peaks into the valleys. To hold onto what the Virginia win felt like and take it with us into the hard days ahead. Because when we go back and look at the full picture, we will see that even the valleys are getting higher than they were. The floor keeps rising, and the wins keep coming. And they keep running to judges and courts and Truth Social to try to erase what we did, because they have nothing else left.
John McCain stood in front of his own crowd in Minnesota and told the truth about his opponent because he believed this country deserved honesty more than he deserved a win. There are still millions of us who believe the same thing. Who understand that democracy only survives if we keep choosing it, even when it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, or comes at a personal cost. Especially then. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
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: Saw a new friend on our walk today. After hopping around for a bit, it landed right here and just settled in. Like it finally found its safe place.
Sources:
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/topic/calendar/
https://thehill.com/homenews/5843485-trump-redistricting-virginia-democrats-election/
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/22/navy-secretary-john-phelan-hung-cao
https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-ice-cbp-doj-trump-arrests-convictions
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5843210-jeffries-florida-gop-house-map/
The amount of money sloshing around at the top and the courts and their henchmen must be making a fortune too. How on earth is it possible of Joe Public to survive in such a dog eat dog world.
My mantra for the moment is every day pay a bit forward. Be kind to someone, help an elderly person in your area, make a donation to a just cause. Not for you but to help someone who may be feeling even more scared and dissolutioned than we all do.
Smile at the sun and see if you can make someone else smile.
Bless you Heather for making sense of a mad world.
Thank you. I was never a fan of Mc Cain but always respected his integrity and fairness. He was a true acceptable republican politician. But that was the good ‘ol days, forever gone. There is no turning back. To stay in power and consolidate it the actual corrupt rep congress will do anything imaginable (and not yet imaginable) to achieve their goals. No voting anymore, true dictatorship, mixing God in the common human disgusting affairs. A thorough manipulation of We the people Will. Fuck ‘em all.