Trump isn’t all there anymore

This evening, at 5 p.m. local time in Hebron, Kentucky, and after making the crowd wait for nearly 45 minutes in a sweltering warehouse, the 47th President of the United States gripped the railing with both arms and pulled himself up the steps to the stage. His signature song, God Bless the USA, blared from the speakers as a way to signal that no matter what he was about to say, this man loves his country and the people he was elected to serve. And as he made his way slowly to the podium, he paused every few steps to suck in air, his face slick with sweat. Once at the podium, he stopped to bask in the applause before beginning what would be yet another embarrassing and disturbing rambling appearance as he spoke for the next one hour, seven minutes, and thirty-eight seconds.

During that time, Donald Trump declared that the United States had won the war in Iran. “We won,” he told the cheering crowd. “In the first hour, it was over.” And then, just minutes later, he asked them, “We don’t want to leave early, do we? We’ve got to finish the job.” The war was over and not over in the same speech, delivered from the same podium, to the same crowd, and not a single person behind him flinched.

He admitted, without seeming to realize what he was admitting, that he is the reason Iran has a nuclear program today. “The Iran nuclear deal gave them the right to have a nuclear weapon as of three years ago,” he said. “If I didn’t terminate that deal, they would have had nuclear weapons, and this world would right now be a different place.” He meant it as a boast. But what he actually told us is that the deal was the constraint, and he’s the one who removed it. He pulled out of the agreement that was preventing Iran from going nuclear, and now he’s bombing the consequences of that decision and calling it a victory.

He mocked a man for having dyslexia, telling the crowd that California Governor Gavin Newsom “admitted he has mental problems, that he’s not a smart person, that he is mental and mental lack of ability. He’s unable to read a speech. He can’t read.” He said, “I don’t want the President of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency.” Dyslexia is a learning disability that roughly one in five Americans lives with. Children are diagnosed with it every day. And the man who couldn’t form the phrase “mental lack of ability” into an actual sentence didn’t even have the cognitive ability to see the irony in his words.

And when a woman collapsed on the floor behind him, he paused the rally, called for a doctor, and asked if the people backstage could play Ave Maria by Pavarotti over the loudspeakers while she was being treated. Ave Maria. A song most associated with funerals, with death, with the final moments of a life. His request was denied. It was never played. And when she was finally brought to her feet, she reportedly looked at Trump and said, “You’re the best president there’s ever been. I’m sorry.” She apologized to him. For having a medical emergency at his rally. Later, when the CEO of the host company took the stage, he asked the audience to pray. And I thought for a brief second it was for the woman who had collapsed. But instead, he prayed for Trump. “I’m going to say a quick little prayer for President Trump if I could. May God bless and keep you healthy and safe and may God bless our beloved United States of America, and everything it stands for.”

And then he went right back to attacking people. What followed over the next hour was a window into the mind of a man who has no business leading anything, let alone what was once the free world. He bounced between boasting about the destruction of Iran’s military and treating the war like a game show. He told the crowd he had been angry at his own generals for sinking Iranian warships instead of capturing them for our Navy. “I said, why the hell did we kill them? Why didn’t we just capture them and use them in our Navy?” he recounted. “And one of my generals said, Sir, it’s a lot more fun doing it this way.” The crowd laughed. He moved on. But not before framing their deaths as entertainment.

This is not just inappropriate. It is unbecoming of any leader, in any country, at any point in history. And it’s not just what it says about him. It’s what it teaches everyone watching. We went into this war claiming we were going to liberate the Iranian people. And now we’re laughing about the ones we’ve killed. The majority of those sailors were not masterminds of a regime. They were people stuck under the control of one, following orders the same way soldiers in every military on earth follow orders. Do I think they needed to be neutralized so they couldn’t harm our military? Absolutely. But under the laws of armed conflict, the goal has always been to neutralize the threat and, whenever possible, take combatants as prisoners of war. Not to kill them when capture is an option, and certainly not to laugh about it afterward. Trump himself said it: he asked why they didn’t capture the ships. The answer he got wasn’t that capture was impossible. It was that destruction was more fun. That tells you everything about how this administration wages war. And it raises a question we cannot afford to ignore: how can we expect them to show restraint with our military members’ lives when we treat theirs as a joke? How do we ask Iran not to target our people when we’re not just killing theirs but laughing about it afterwards?

There is a line between doing what’s necessary in war and finding it funny that people died. And when the President of the United States crosses that line, and a crowd cheers him for it, he is pushing his own moral collapse onto an entire country.

Then came the vendetta. Trump spent a long, vicious stretch of the speech attempting to tear apart Rep Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman whose district he had traveled to Kentucky specifically to humiliate. He called Massie “the worst person,” “a loser,” “a nutjob,” “stupid,” and “a disaster for our party.” He accused him of being “disloyal to the Republican Party, disloyal to the people of Kentucky, and most importantly, disloyal to the United States of America.” He said, “There’s something wrong with him.” He mocked his education: “He’s got one thing going. He went to a good college, but I know a lot of stupid people that went to a good college.” He called him “Rand Paul Jr.” and added, “At least I like Rand a little bit.” He told the crowd he wanted “somebody with a warm body” to beat him.

And what was Massie’s crime? He pushed for the release of the Epstein files. He voted against the war in Iran. He voted against Trump’s own spending bill. He voted his conscience on every one of those issues, and for that, the President of the United States flew into his district, stood in front of his constituents, and tried to end his career. Massie wasn’t even there. He said he had prior commitments and posted on social media that Trump’s team was busing people into the district to fill the crowd. “What they’ll discover,” Massie wrote, “is Trump fans in KY-4 and across the entire Commonwealth also support my work on the Epstein files, reigning in spending, ending forever wars, draining the swamp, and food freedom.” That’s the part Trump doesn’t want anyone to hear. That even his own base, in one of the reddest districts in the country, supports the very things Massie is fighting for. That’s why the attacks were so vicious. Because Trump knows his shrinking grip on the country is at great risk of collapsing come November.

In the same speech, Trump invited Jake Paul, a YouTuber and professional boxer who lives in Puerto Rico and cannot even vote in presidential elections, onto the stage, called him “a courageous guy” and “a hell of a fighter,” and then gave him his “complete and total endorsement” for a future run for political office. Paul hasn’t announced a run of any sort. But this off-the-cuff endorsement was based entirely on the fact that Jake Paul had shown up, said nice things, and looked like a character from a reality show. “What Mr. Trump has taught me is courage,” Paul told the crowd, sweating heavily through his suit. “We never back down from a fight, even if they’re much bigger than you.” This is what Trump wants, performative loyalty, no matter how unserious or absurd it is. A seven-term congressman who pushes for the release of the Epstein files gets branded disloyal to America. A YouTube celebrity who flatters him gets anointed as the future of the country. Because competent people see through him, and honest people call him out. So he surrounds himself with clowns and crowns them kings. Because at the end of the day, he doesn’t care if the country burns, as long as he’s still holding the camera.

And this gets to the heart of what today really showed us. This entire administration is a facade. None of them are tough, smart, or know what they’re doing. So they control the image, with absurdity and reality show theatrics, because image is all they have. Not strategy. Not substance. Just the illusion of strength, held together by spectacle. That’s the entire operation now. If it looks good on camera, they’ll do it. If it keeps the audience cheering, they’ll say it. And if it falls apart when the lights go off, they don’t care. Because for them, the image was always the point.

And nowhere was that more clear today than at the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff banned press photographers from his last two briefings on the Iran war after complaining that images from a March 2 press conference were “unflattering.” Photographers from the AP, Reuters, and Getty Images had been in the room, as they have been at Pentagon briefings for decades. But after the photos were published globally, Hegseth’s team shut them out. No explanation was given. News organizations are now told to use government-provided images instead. The National Press Photographers Association called it “stunning” that “one of the nation’s highest officials is more concerned with his personal vanity than with complete and accurate reporting of briefings during a war in which Americans have lost their lives.” The New York Times has filed a lawsuit to restore access. They are banning cameras during a war because the Secretary of Defense didn’t like how he looked. That is what this administration is. If reality doesn’t flatter them, they try to erase reality.

But no matter how much they try, it won’t work. Maybe for their core “believers,” but for the rest of us, and the world, we see it. Today, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a formal warning that derogatory language and immigration crackdowns by U.S. leaders are fueling human rights violations. The panel cited at least eight migrant deaths during enforcement operations or in detention, a surge in detainees from 40,000 to nearly 73,000 this year, and urged Washington to suspend enforcement operations near sensitive sites and conduct a full rights-based review of every law adopted since January 2025. It won’t stop Trump. Nothing from the UN will. But the record is being kept. The world is watching. And when the time comes for accountability, and it will come, there will be no one left who can claim they didn’t know.

I had this very conversation with my youngest daughter today, about how the rest of the world sees how horrible things have gotten in the U.S., even if so many Americans still pretend not to. But then the conversation went deeper. We talked about how we balance trying to live the fullest life we can while still acknowledging and resisting the atrocities happening around us. She asked me how I don’t let it all completely weigh me down.

I told her the truth. That some days I don’t know how I carry it. But that I believe, even on the hardest days, that it will be okay. I told her that sometimes you don’t need all the answers. That sometimes, hope is enough to carry you through the moment. That hope is what tells you the next step is possible, even when you can’t see the path. And I told her that the people on the right side of history, the ones who care, who act, who speak up, are the 70%. And the ones who will be written about in the books as more loyal to one man than to their country or their Constitution, they’re the 30%.

I told her that in her life, she’s going to see times like this. The worst people will be in charge. The worst people will make decisions that cause real harm to people she loves, and to people she will never meet. And her job, every single time, is to call it out when she sees it happen. And to keep the faith that better days are always on their way. Because the good guys always win. Sometimes it just takes a very long time. And maybe I told her all of that not just for her to hear, but as a reminder for me as well.

I look at that rally today, and I see the people in the background, cheering and nodding along, and I wonder how they don’t see what the rest of us so clearly see. How dangerous this man is. How deranged. How he has quite literally set the world on fire. There was no widespread war in the Middle East twelve days ago. There was an elementary school full of children still alive in Iran. I went to get gas today and paid over six dollars a gallon for the first time in my life. Just a week or two ago, it was in the high four-dollar range. That jump didn’t need to happen. He calls it a “brief disruption.” And maybe it is if you are in the Epstein billionaire class, but for everyday Americans, that could be the difference between your rent being paid or not.

But here is what gives me hope tonight, and it is real. The reporters have been pushing back. Not the networks or the executives. Not the money people still clinging to access and afraid of losing it. The reporters on the ground and in the press pool. The ones standing on the South Lawn and flying on Air Force One. Over the past few days, they’ve been asking real questions, pressing for real answers, refusing to let him slide. They’ve been disrespected. PBS White House correspondent Liz Landers was even called “rotten” earlier today on the South Lawn of the White House before Trump left for Kentucky.

She asked why the FBI seized election records in Arizona. Trump said, “Probably thought the election was rigged, right?” Landers replied, “It wasn’t rigged, though.” Trump shot back, “Really? How do you know?” She cited his own former Attorney General, who said there was no measurable voter fraud. And Trump’s response: “I think it was rigged, and if you say it wasn’t rigged, you’re a rotten reporter.”

The press doesn’t have an easy task. They have to walk the line between keeping the Trump Regime happy and delivering factual reporting. The past couple of days, they seem to have found their footing, and they deserve our appreciation for pushing back.

And our resistance continues to work, too. The SAVE Act appears to be stalled right now, with Trump unable to find the votes needed to advance it. We need to keep the pressure up and continue to have our voices heard in opposition to it.

When I watch the president, clearly decompensating in front of the world, I’ve started to shift my reaction. It’s no longer just shock or embarrassment. I see it for what it is. He is on a sinking ship. And that is exactly why they keep parading him around like this. If they were confident they were going to hold power after the midterms, he’d be sitting comfortably in a chair somewhere inside the White House, watching television. But instead, they’ve propped him up in a desperate show of strength that only reveals how far this administration continues to fall.

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: My daughter and I stopped at the mall today and saw the Tesla Dealership had permanently closed. It reminded me that economic protests work. Our voice and our dollars still carry more power than they want us to believe.