Trump Thinks We’re All Stupid

Imagine hugging your mother and father goodbye for what could be the last time. The people who raised you, who knew your voice before you had words, who love you with every ounce of their being and feeling that hollow ache tear open in your chest as you let go. You promise you’ll write, even though you all know the truth: letters take months, and most never make it. You leave with a few coins, a worn photograph, and the heaviest promise a person can carry, not just to survive, but to build a life worthy of everything they gave up so you could try.

For years, you watched your family scrape and starve to make this moment possible. Neighbors passed a hat at church just to help you buy one steerage ticket. Every extra shift, every skipped meal, every coin stashed beneath a floorboard went into this chance for a better life. And now it’s all resting on your shoulders. You’re not leaving for adventure. You’re leaving for survival. For everyone.

You board a ship that smells of salt, sweat, and sickness, crammed below deck with strangers for weeks. You don’t speak the language of the country across the ocean. You worry about making a life in a world you’ve only heard about in stories. But you go anyway. Because you believe in what you’ve been told, that there’s a place called America where anything is possible with hard work. A land of opportunity, where freedom belongs to everyone. A place where you will not be persecuted for your religion. Where all are welcome.

You arrive with a name in your pocket and a dream in your heart. And when your feet finally touched the dock, your heart broke from homesickness and swelled with possibility at the same time. Because you were in America.

You came from a place where the law was something to fear, where power was inherited and justice bent for the rich and vanished for the poor. Where speaking the wrong words, praying the wrong way, or simply being born into the wrong family could erase your future before it began.

But America? America was different. This was the land where the law mattered. Where no man, not even the president, stood above it. Where power answered to the people, not the other way around. Where you could worship without fear, vote without violence, speak without whispering. Corruption happened in broken governments, not here.

That was the promise. That’s what generations believed, what they gave everything for. It’s why so many of our own ancestors came here.

But it’s not like that anymore. And my heart breaks for the sacrifice they made, for the hunger they endured, the goodbyes they never got to take back, just to give us better lives, only to have it all stolen by corruption, cowardice, and unchecked power.

America is no longer the place people flee to. It’s the place people are fleeing from. Because we have become the very thing we once swore we’d never be, corrupt, lawless, and led by a man who sees power not as responsibility, but as leverage for his own gain.

We fought wars to save other countries from what we are now facing ourselves: a fascist government led by an authoritarian dictator.

The thing we never thought could happen here has happened. We’ve become the country our ancestors once fled. We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here because we had checks and balances. Because we had elections. Because our Constitution wouldn’t allow it. But laws don’t protect us when there’s nobody brave enough to enforce them. Democracy doesn’t save itself.

We’ve seen this story before. It always starts slowly, then all at once, with the silence of bystanders and the steady erosion of consequences. This is how autocracies grow: not just through violence, but through pardon. Through immunity. Through power made permanent by forgiving the guilty and punishing the truthful.

And now, it’s happening in front of us.

Late last night, while the nation watched the fate of the Affordable Care Act play out on Capitol Hill, Donald Trump’s pardon attorney quietly released a list of names, seventy-seven of them. People like Giuliani. Powell. Meadows. Eastman. Every dictator needs accomplices. Not just to carry out the plan, but to protect him from the consequences. That’s what last night was. Not mercy. A message.

These aren’t just political allies. These are the architects of the Big Lie. The ones who lied for him, covered for him, sued for him, and smeared our democracy for him. And now, they’ve been handed full and unconditional pardons. It’s as if the crimes never happened.

And that’s the point.

Trump isn’t just rewriting history, he’s erasing consequences. He’s building a wall of immunity around the people who helped him attack this country from the inside. And it doesn’t stop with them. Over 1,600 pardons so far in this term alone. That’s more than Bush, Obama, and Nixon combined.

And we’ve seen this before. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson issued blanket pardons to Confederate leaders, letting them return to power and destroy Reconstruction from the inside. The cost was civil rights, justice, and decades of systemic violence.

And now Trump is doing the same, but for darker, more personal reasons. Forgiveness as currency. Like Hitler’s inner circle or Mussolini’s Blackshirts, he’s building a loyal criminal network, bound by corruption, and poised to once again do his dirty work.

And while he builds a wall of protection around himself and his allies, he’s still selling fake promises to desperate people. Because that’s how this works, you keep people scared, struggling, and just hopeful enough to believe your next lie.

This week, Trump said every American would get $2,000 from his new tariff plan. And to someone who hasn’t been paid in over forty days, whose SNAP benefits are frozen, whose health insurance just got 70 percent more expensive, that sounds like a lifeline. But it’s not real.

Tariffs are taxes. And we’re the ones who pay them, not China or any other country he slaps them on in a fit of rage. He has no mechanism and no intention to send checks to anyone but his cronies. Trump doesn’t care about helping anyone. He just wants control.

But some people still believe the lie. Probably the same ones still waiting for the $5,000 DOGE checks he promised. Or for him to release his tax returns. Or his health care plan. Or, my personal favorite, the Epstein Files he campaigned on releasing. With Trump, it’s all smoke and mirrors, meant to trick his favorite people: “the uneducated.”

This is the same playbook dictators have used for generations. Hugo Chávez promised big checks from oil profits that never came, while inflation wrecked families in Venezuela. Hitler told Germans that tariffs would restore prosperity, even as he quietly stripped away their rights.

Trump is doing the same thing, making promises he knows he won’t keep, just to see who stays loyal when they don’t come true. He tells you the money is coming. Then he blames someone else when it doesn’t. And he lies because it works. Because he knows there are millions of people who will believe him, repeat him, defend him—no matter how nonsensical, how dangerous, or how cruel his words become.

And today, he gave us yet another example. On his state-run propaganda platform, Trash Social, at 2:55 PM, the President of the United States wrote this:

“The “Pay Back” Numbers being quoted by the Radical Left Lunatics, who would love to see us lose on Tariffs because of how bad it would be for our Country, are much higher than those being stated by our Fake Opposition — Opposition mainly from Foreign Countries that would do anything to be allowed to charge us Tariffs without retribution. The actual Number we would have to pay back in Tariff Revenue and Investments would be in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars, and that, in itself, would be a National Security catastrophe. Those opposed to us in the United States Supreme Court are giving low Numbers so that the Court will think it is easy to get out of this terrible situation that these Anarchists and Thugs have put us into!”

This is not the language of a president. It’s not the voice of someone stable, informed, or trustworthy. It’s propaganda. He calls half the country “Radical Left Lunatics,” “Anarchists,” and “Thugs,” while tossing out imaginary numbers as if repetition alone makes them true. He spews hate like Hitler did, again and again, until his followers believe it. It’s not just dishonest. It’s a con. A desperate man lashing out, trying to control people who are already hurting. And that’s what makes it dangerous. Because some Americans read that and believe it. They don’t question the math. They don’t recognize the manipulation, because for too long, we’ve let this behavior pass as politics. But this isn’t politics. It never was. This is a man who has never led with humility or character. A man who has never accepted responsibility or told the truth when a lie could serve him better. He is not fit to hold the office he occupies.

And as I am writing this, I’m watching the Senate vote to reopen the government, 60 to 40. The House is expected to follow. And yet, even that came with strings. None of which will be good for America. Only what is good for Trump and his enablers. This is what surrender looks like. Just a slow retreat from every line we said we’d never cross.

And maybe the scariest part is how many of us have grown numb to the atrocities. We watch babies get pepper-sprayed by Trump’s personal army, ICE, and we feel the tears fill our eyes, and then we move on. Because there’s always another horror. Another cruelty. Another betrayal.

We are learning to live with the ache of watching our country become something else. Something colder. Something hollow. We watch even the so-called “good guys” vote with those on the wrong side of history, and the rage we feel burns hot and fast, then fizzles into exhaustion. Because the ones who should be standing up for us aren’t.

So what does that mean for the rest of us, those of us who have called, protested, voted, donated, screamed? What happens if it was all for nothing? The answer is this: we let ourselves feel it. The grief, the fury, the despair. And then we pick ourselves back up, and we keep going. Because in every dark chapter of history, the ones who made it to the other side were the ones who refused to stop fighting.

The road to victory is not a straight line. It’s made of deep valleys and brutal climbs. And we may not see the finish line until we’re standing right on top of it. But I know this, those of us who have walked where evil once lived, in Europe, here in the States, across the world, we feel it now. We feel it in our bones. That same electric warning humming under our skin. We need to let it guide us, not crush us. We have to remember what history has taught us, and then fight like hell to make sure that this time, we win too.

It’s our turn to carry the fight. To be the ones who didn’t look away. Who didn’t give up.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can help keep this work going by subscribing to my Substack; there’s a free option, or you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. Paid subscriptions help me reach more people, cover more ground, and keep telling the truth about what’s happening to our country.