Trump is working every possible angle

At 3:08 p.m. this afternoon, the President of the United States emerged onto the stage from a makeshift tent draped with blue curtains to loud cheers and applause at General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan. He stopped and fist-bumped towards members of the audience, took a few steps to encourage even more cheering, slapped his upper right thigh before making his way to the podium, where he spoke for more than an hour. The highlights of his speech included him being genuinely excited about little cars being sold in the United States, calling a protester a communist after the man yelled that he was a “pedophile protector,” and telling the audience that he had done more for them than their own parents.

“I’ve done more for you than your parents. Okay? Your parents are good? I’m not going to knock your parents, but I have been better to you than your parents. That I can tell you, too. And they would agree with me. Wherever they may be, they would agree.”

This is how Donald Trump sees his relationship to the people standing in that room, and to his devoted fanbase as a whole. These are midwesterners. People who wake up early and work hard every day. People with a strong love of family and country. Whose parents instilled in them their strong work ethic, patriotism, and family-first values. And the man who has never built anything with his own hands, who inherited his wealth, who has spent his entire life surrounded by people paid to tell him he is right, stood in front of them and told them he has been better to them than the people who raised them. And then insisted that their parents would agree with him.

What he was really saying was that he sees himself as more important than anyone else in the room, no matter what they may mean to us. He is attempting a takeover. He is inserting himself into one of the most important relationships any of us will ever have, the relationship between a parent and child. He wants to commandeer the emotional attachment generated by the people who provide, protect, sacrifice, teach us right from wrong, and stand between us and danger. He is telling his supporters that it wasn’t their parents who gave them the foundation to build their lives. It was him, and only him.

And he started the whole speech preparing us for this exchange of thought, when he opened with a story about his own father, Fred Trump. He told the room that the senior Trump was a man whose one luxury was a brand new Cadillac every two years. “This was to him the sign of luxury. This was the greatest thing.” It was warm and human, meant to connect the parent figure with the very cars these people build.

And once he had that out of the way, he shifted into fear and to remind the audience that he was the one standing in the way of terrible things happening to them. He told the CEO of GM, Mary Barra, “You wouldn’t have an auto industry right now if they got elected. You wouldn’t have an auto industry.” He said, “One year ago, our country was dead, and now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.” And then, almost wistfully, “I’m a little bit upset because in two and a half years, you may have a different president. May. And that president will be saying how great the economy is doing.” He rambled on, calling President Biden an “idiot.” Before saying about the next president: “They’ll screw it up. It won’t take them long to screw it up.”

Once he felt that he had convinced the audience that he was the one protecting them, he had to convince them they were still in danger.

He jumped at a moment early on in his speech, just around the 11-minute marker, to prove that our country was under attack from inside our own border. When a man yelled from the audience that Trump was a “pedophile protector,” Trump’s immediate response was not to deny the accusation. It was to declare that the protester was a communist. “He’s a communist. He’s a communist. We’re running against communists now.”

From there, the communist label spread across everything. He extended it to the entire Democratic Party. Speaking about Joe Biden, he said, “He wasn’t, because he had no idea what the hell was happening. They said, Joe, let’s go communist. He said, what is that exactly?” He told the crowd, “You go communist, nothing good happens. That’s been proven for a thousand years using different names.” And then he took his scare tactic up to a whole new level within that building, telling the people there that everything they value, that makes them feel safe, they were at risk of losing to Democrats. “They want to take your houses. They want to do things that nobody’s ever even thought of before. They want to take your money. They want to raise your tax up to 80 percent.”

And then came the dramatic lie he hoped would erase any remaining doubt. “In one year, the country will be absolutely bankrupt. You’ll live in squalor. You’ll live in fear. You won’t have police. You won’t have firemen. You won’t have anybody.”

Then he escalated the fear campaign even further by reaching for some of the greatest tragedies in American history. “Communism is the greatest threat to our country in history, including even World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11.” He told that room an imaginary communist takeover is a greater threat to America than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th. Millions of Americans lived through those events. Millions of families lost someone they loved because of them. They are not campaign talking points. They are some of the greatest tragedies in our nation’s history. Yet he invoked all of them to convince his supporters that the greatest danger America has ever faced is his political opposition, the Democratic Party and its supporters. Their fellow Americans. Their neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Even members of their own family.

There is no large communist movement in the United States trying to take away our private property. There is no communist movement in the United States threatening to take over the government. What there is, though, is a president who cannot run on the reality of what he has done to our country or to our lives, so he is running on how terrified he can make us feel about the alternative. Costs are rising. Affordability is what most Americans are talking about as they struggle to pay for the basic necessities of life. We are involved in a war after he promised there would be no new wars. We have armed, masked men detaining people on our streets without identifying themselves and taking them to detention centers. He cannot run on that reality, so he has chosen to run on lies and fear of a communist takeover instead.

This is much like what the strongmen of the twentieth century did long before Trump decided to use their playbook. They took a word that already carried fear and emotion and manufactured a national emergency around it. It is one of the oldest chapters in the fascist playbook itself. They convinced ordinary people through nonstop propaganda that an internal enemy was on the verge of destroying everything they loved. And once they accepted that fear, they were told there was only one person who could protect them from it, the person who created it.

But maybe the most dangerous part of his speech was what he was building underneath it, his backup plan. If fear of communism doesn’t work, and people vote against him anyway, he has already built the story of why that vote shouldn’t count.

“Every single Democrat, they don’t want to have voter ID. They don’t want to have a thing called proof of citizenship. So why doesn’t somebody want voter ID or proof of citizenship? Because they want to cheat. Okay? There’s only one reason.” He said, “Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt.” He added, “We’re the only country in the world that in this form does them. There’s no other country in the world, because they’re crooked.” And he pointed to specific states: “You read recently in New Jersey where tremendous numbers of people were found out that they were on the voter rolls totally illegally. And that’s all over the country. That’s nothing compared to what’s going on in California and Minnesota.”

We already know where this road can lead because we have already lived through January 6th 2021. The difference now is that he holds far more institutional power than he did in 2020. He now leads the executive branch, including the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the federal agencies that would ordinarily play central roles in responding to disputes over federal elections.

The Trump regime is working every possible avenue they can imagine to keep Republicans in power. We have 99 days until the midterm elections, and they are feeling the pressure. There are no limits to what they may try in this moment. Some of what they say is designed to create outrage, some to create chaos, and some is meant to make us afraid. None of it should distract us from their larger strategy. We cannot afford to dismiss any of it because recognizing the pattern is how we keep others informed, and how we keep this movement growing so more people understand and care enough to vote. And this is how we get to November stronger than we are today. Because Trump does not care about the candidates on the ballot; he only cares about holding onto unchecked power.

We have read the playbook Trump is following in our history books. We know how this story ends when people stay silent. And we know how it ends when they do not. And in November, our voices will be heard. 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: Something simple today. The moon breaking through the clouds as the sun was setting.

Sources:

President Trump Delivers Remarks, Jul. 27, 2026: White House YouTube Channel

https://www.c-span.org/event/white-house-event/pres-trump-remarks-at-general-motors-proving-grounds-in-michigan/445489

https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/fact-check-president-trump-says-michigan-thriving-auto-industry-back/

https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/president-trump-visit-general-motors-michigan/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/08/politics/fact-check-trump-new-wars

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/07/g-s1-126826/trump-iran-wars-campaign-message

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677712/ice-surge-sparks-fear-and-resistance-in-minneapolis

https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/18/us-masked-federal-agents-undermine-rule-of-law

https://newrepublic.com/post/213581/trump-rally-protester-pedophile-protector