Trump is trying to distract us from his dangerous deal
At 3:33 p.m., Donald Trump walked across the temporary stage in the school gymnasium at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia, as his theme song, God Bless the USA, blasted over the loudspeakers. He took just a few steps at a time, stopping to catch his breath, clap his hands, and point at people in the crowd. Although his eyes were swollen and he struggled to keep them open, he was remarkably energized and had a lot to say. He jumped right in by lashing out at the press, saying, “They are sick individuals. They’re the fake news.” Later, he stoked fear by claiming that “communists” are trying to blow up national monuments, saying they “try taking Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up,” while insisting Democrats are the communists he is warning about and that “communism is the single greatest threat to our country and history,” even more so than the greatest attacks and tragedies our country has ever faced.
He was there to celebrate and promote Trump Accounts. Instead, he turned the event into a Trump appreciation rally, taking nearly 25 minutes to even mention what he was there to celebrate. “The great big beautiful bill that we’re celebrating today. It’s something that’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because it takes care of our youth. It’s called the Trump Accounts. And it’s hot as a pistol. It’s hot as a pistol.”
Over the next 77 minutes, the author of The Art of the Deal put on a master class in distraction. He wasn’t interested in facts or truth, he was interested in spectacle, absurdity, and chaos. His objective was simple: be loud enough that everyone focused on him, whether in agreement or disgust, instead of looking at what was happening off camera.
His opening also included attacking the last administration, setting the tone for the entire afternoon. “Sleepy Joe Biden and the radical left Democrats. They’re Democrats. DUM Democrats created the worst inflation in 48 years.” Within minutes, he launched into a tirade so packed full of unverifiable claims that it was nearly impossible to pick which one was the worst. “Wide open borders with millions of people even from the world’s worst prisons from all over the world. They were pouring into our country all over the globe they came prisons and gang members, drug dealers, child predators and 11,888 murderers. Many of whom committed more than one murder. More than 50% committed more than one murder. We had transgender for everybody, men and women sports came ravaging through our cities and the whole world was laughing at us.” These were all recycled, old talking points designed to make us feel like the world was on fire and that he is the only one who can save us.
Then came maybe one of the most disappointing moments, especially coming from the President of the United States. Having just come from Dover Air Force Base, after attending the dignified transfer ceremony for four service members killed in the conflict with Iran, his words showed what is really in his heart. He brought one of the families with him on Air Force One to Georgia. And this is what he said about their son’s service record, while they stood there listening: “I read charts on all of the young people and some are unbelievable. Some were a little bit, you know, they got a little bit of a little couple of little bad things put in.” That is what he said when talking about the four military heroes we just lost. On the same day their remains were returned to American soil. At the same time, he also called Dover Air Force Base “an incredible place,” as though it were a resort and not the site where we receive our dead. I just hope that family, whose full weight of loss is probably not being felt yet, does not look back on that moment and feel anything but proud of their son. Because they deserve better than what the president said today. They all do.
He went on to talk about the economy in a very odd monologue that was written to confuse the audience, but that also seemed to confuse the man reading it, Donald Trump. “In four long years of the sleepy Joe Biden administration, they got less than $1 trillion of new investment in our country. In four years, much less than one trillion in less than two years. Much less than two years, actually. In fact, at the end of the first year, but less than two years, in my administration, we’ve secured more than 19.2 trillion dollars in new investment from all over the world.” And then he jumped to this: “You see all the theft that’s going on, guys stealing a hundred million dollars. Some guy from the street steals a hundred million dollars. It’s horrible.” The president of the United States, who along with his family has enriched himself by billions of dollars since taking office, complained about some unnamed, and most likely made-up, person on the street stealing a 100 million dollars. We could talk about who is really stealing from whom.
In the middle of the speech, he stopped to acknowledge the groups of supporters who follow him from rally to rally like he is a rock star. “Look at the Front Row Joes. I love these people. I think they’re about 283. I don’t know what the hell they do. I think they make a lot of money, too. I’m hearing they’re very rich. They follow us. It’s a rock concert, right?” Then he pointed out a group of women from North Carolina. “Beautiful women. They follow us and they’re at 218. I think 219. They come and I always say, ‘What the hell are your husbands saying about this?’”
He told the same 401k story about how Americans’ 401Ks are doing so well that he is getting stopped and told how amazing he and their retirement accounts are doing. He has told variations of this at his speeches for months, but this time he added a new angle and a new “story” he supposedly was told. “I have people coming up to me that have 401ks. They said, ‘You know, I was a disaster. My family wouldn’t talk to me. They thought I was a total loser.’ And now I’m like, uh, the one guy said, ‘I feel like Warren Buffett.’” He added a policeman whose wife “loves me much more than she did” because of the stock market. He keeps claiming that families are reconciling and marriages are healing. All because of him.
He quickly moved on to something he knows is the single most damaging issue facing his presidency right now: affordability, and he knows it because he tried to make the word itself illegitimate. “They used the word, first time I heard it, it was a word, you know, made up by the Democrats, affordability.” He is so aware that the cost of living is destroying the livelihoods of Americans that he tried to convince us that the very concept of affordability was invented by his enemies, the Democrats. And then, at nearly the same moment, he admitted, “So, I just want you to remember that if you’re paying a little bit more, a lot of it’s come down now. We got it coming down very rapidly... we inherited something from Biden and we’re giving it back to you thousands and thousands of dollars each family. We gave it to you.” The problem is that he did not give every family thousands and thousands of dollars. None of us got thousands and thousands of dollars from Donald Trump. People know the truth because they see their bank account balances, and they do not show a deposit from him. And they see what groceries cost. No amount of double talk changes what is real.
He bragged about his favorite construction project: “We’re building a tremendous military facility at the White House. It’s a ballroom, but it’s also a big military facility, a drone port on top, and tremendous things underneath,” admitting the real reason for tearing down the East Wing.
He used an official presidential speech to drive sales to a donor’s company. “Go out and buy a Dell computer. Okay? Because as far as I’m concerned, that’s great stuff.”
He invited a family with small children up to the stage to talk about their Trump Accounts, and as they walked up the stairs, he told them: “You can’t fall like sleepy Joe, can’t you?”
And then came the part that was truly disgusting and disrespectful to all Americans living and dead. “Communism is, in my opinion, communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history, including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat that I’ve ever seen to our country.” He said communism, which he has said repeatedly is what the Democratic Party is practicing, is a greater threat than all of those other dark periods in American history. He told his audience that the communists that he is manufacturing are an enemy so extreme, existential, and monstrous, that anything done to stop them will feel justified. He also added later in his remarks that “Jon Ossoff and the Democrat communists want to let the Marxists into power, bankrupt your families, and leave you totally undefended with wide open borders.” His goal right now is to continue to divide us and to make us see each other as existential threats to our safety and to our country.
For a lot of people, this distraction is working. There are still people who believe all of it, even when the thoughts do not connect and the claims contradict each other. Trump’s most loyal followers are a community of people who found something that makes them feel alive when he talks. COVID made people lonely. It made millions of Americans desperate for connection. And it gave Fox News and networks like it a captive audience with nothing better to do. People got accustomed to the entertainment, and they got addicted to the energy. And Trump knows this, even now, even with his visible decline, he can still recognize that entertainment is more important than anything he says. These people do not actually care about Trump Accounts. They do not care about any of the numbers he rattled off today. They just want to feel like they are part of something. And our job, the job of every person who sees what is happening, is to show them they can be part of something that serves truth instead of propaganda. There is a place for them where they can jump in, do their part, and be remembered by history and by their families for standing on the right side when it mattered most. When they realize they have been scammed, and they will, there has to be somewhere for them to land.
The reality is that even without them, the midterms are still going to go terribly for Republicans as long as the message of what is actually happening reaches enough people and they vote. At some point, the gap between what he says and what people experience in their own lives will become too wide to bridge with rallies and lies.
While the President was creating chaos and distractions on stage, his administration was signing one of the most consequential agreements that could have ramifications across the globe for decades to come.
Today, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a thirty-year nuclear cooperation agreement that gives American companies priority access to build Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear program and opens a pathway for the kingdom to enrich its own uranium. The agreement was accompanied by what the administration calls a “bilateral safeguards agreement.” But like most things with the Trump Administration, it is not as clear-cut as it sounds.
When the United States signed a comparable nuclear agreement with the United Arab Emirates in 2009, the UAE accepted what is called the gold standard: no enrichment or reprocessing, and full international inspections through the IAEA’s Additional Protocol. Saudi Arabia refused those terms. And the Trump administration agreed not to include it. In their place is an arrangement where Washington and Riyadh monitor themselves. And because the deal lacks conventional oversight, Trump had to sign a separate national security waiver to make it go forward. He waived the safeguards because Saudi Arabia would not accept them, and he wanted the deal more than he wanted the safeguards to protect the United States and the entire world.
This is the same Saudi Arabia whose Crown Prince told CBS in 2018 that if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will follow suit “as soon as possible.” The same Saudi Arabia that ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside their own consulate because he wrote critically about the regime. That is who the Trump administration just signed a nuclear agreement with.
The original legislation meant to govern exactly this kind of deal, the No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act, was cosponsored by Senator Ed Markey and then Senator Marco Rubio. It required the gold standard, IAEA inspections, and transparency about Khashoggi’s killing. Rubio put his name on every one of those requirements. Today, as Secretary of State, Rubio is defending an agreement that abandons the very safeguards he once argued were necessary.
Nonproliferation experts warn this will trigger a regional arms race. Where Saudi Arabia goes, the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt will follow. Pakistan has already stated its nuclear program “will be made available” to the kingdom if needed. This is all happening while Donald Trump is waging a war against Iran for the stated purpose of preventing them from having nuclear capabilities, while potentially handing enrichment capability to Iran’s chief rival.
With all of the disinformation and distraction being thrown at us, maybe the most important thing to remember right now is that the truth is the truth and the facts are the facts. No amount of spectacle by the President can change that. No rally, 77-minute performance, or manufactured outrage about communists and Mount Rushmore can change the truth. The truth has a way of finding its way out. It always does.
And today is proof of that. The Trump administration did not announce this deal to the American people. Days before the signing, someone inside the government, close enough to know the agreement was ready and close enough to understand why it was being held back from the public eye, chose to talk to a reporter. That person did not have to do any of that. They chose to. Somewhere inside the system, someone saw what was being done, and at great risk to themselves, they made sure the rest of us found out. 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: The kids were all off having fun, so Pete and I went out to dinner tonight. It is hard to believe that this street was the scene of a violent ICE raid many months ago. Someday I hope we can have remembrance plaques or some sort of memorial in places like this, so that what is happening is never forgotten, and so that we never let it happen again.
Sources:
White House Official President Trump Delivers Remarks, Jul. 22, 2026: YouTube Video
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/politics/us-saudi-nuclear-deal
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/22/nx-s1-5903293/trump-saudi-arabia-nuclear-deal
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-deal-saudis-enrich-nuclear-program/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/18/politics/saudi-arabia-trump-nuclear-enrichment
Perhaps those gullible people so willing to listen to the snake-oil salesman‘s pitch will wake before the his damage is irreparable. There are still many people who love the daily entertainment Trump and his sycophantic tribesmen perform as though they were living action comics. The only thing in this mixup missing, is a superman just as dynamic to take on this ‘joker‘ and destroy his lies and ‘powers of persuasion’. It won’t be easy and time is running out.
Trump is truly evil, and that is becoming more clear every time he speaks. Talk about divisive rhetoric! Where is the media, and why aren't they calling him out? HE is the sick individual.