Trump told on himself today

Just after midnight last night, shortly after I had fallen asleep, I was woken up by a loud sound outside. I jumped out of bed, and I was on my feet before I had even finished the thought. My brain immediately went to our family safety plan, a sequence of steps we take in the event of any number of threats to our safety. And before I go any further, I want you all to know that my family is fine. We are absolutely okay. But in that moment, nothing felt okay. My heart was racing, and I was responding with instinct and adrenaline only. Thankfully, a quick look out the window showed someone getting into their truck out on the street. I must have just heard them loudly closing their door. That was all. There was no danger.

But once my heart rate finally came back down and I got back into bed, I couldn’t fall asleep again. I spent the rest of the night lying there thinking about the fact that a year or two ago, that same sound would have meant absolutely nothing to me. A noise in the middle of the night was just a noise. I still would have checked what it was, but it never would have crossed my mind that someone might want to hurt me or my family because of words I had written online. That is not the country I grew up in. But it is the one we are living in now. And I know I am not the only person lying awake at night feeling the psychological weight of what this country has become. We are surrounded by violence now. Threats, rage, political extremism, and constant instability.

I finally fell back asleep sometime before dawn. And when I woke up, I did what I have done almost every morning since Trump was re-elected: I reached for my phone and braced myself for what he had done while I was asleep. And after spending nearly the entire night thinking about the culture of violence and fear spreading through this country, I opened my phone to see that the President of the United States had woken up thinking about violence, too. The difference is that I am horrified by it, and he is entertained by it. Because on a Sunday morning, Donald Trump opened Truth Social and shared a fake image of a bombing. A plane carrying the American flag, firing missiles into boats as flames erupted across the water, bodies flying through the air beneath the word “Adios” written in giant red letters across the top of the screen.

The image was not subtle. It was yet another digital war fantasy posted by the man who actually commands one of the most powerful militaries on earth. He was once again treating the killing of human beings like the punchline to a joke he could not wait to tell.

And that was just one of many disturbing posts he made just today. He started his morning by posting a pretend movie poster featuring fake mug shots of his political enemies in orange prison jumpsuits. He called it “The Shady Bunch.” There were 8 people shown, including James Comey, and “Barack Hussein Obama” in a tan jumpsuit. He added the caption “This is a bad (Sick!) group of people. Very destructive to our great Nation. Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization! President DJT” The irony of the man who has actually been convicted of 34 felony counts, posting pictures of people who have not, is not lost on any of us.

He also shared an image captioned “China Loves Trump,” showing himself walking through a crowd of adoring Chinese citizens waving American and Chinese flags. Followed quickly with an image of him clasping hands with Xi Jinping on a grand staircase. And staying with the China theme, he posted a photo of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Xi, under giant text that read, “President Trump gets YOUNGER.” He turns 80 next month.

Stepping back and looking at all of these posts tells us a great deal about where Trump’s mind is right now and what his biggest concerns are. We are seeing someone who is aligning himself, in image after image, with one of the most powerful authoritarians on the planet. A man insisting, in giant letters, that he is growing younger, when he is weeks away from 80, and the entire world has watched him struggle to finish sentences and fall asleep in meetings. A man posting his enemies in prison clothes while he is the one with the criminal convictions. Every single thing he posted today shows us exactly what he is most afraid of. His own decline. His own irrelevance. His own crimes catching up to him. He might not even realize how obvious he is making it.

And then there is the thing all of it was built to distract us from. Iran. Because underneath the war memes and the strongman photos and the fountain-of-youth fantasy, there was a real story unfolding, and it is the one he least wants us to look at. At 10:10 in the morning, in a long and unusually careful statement, Trump tried to sell the country on a deal with Iran that does not exist yet. He spent most of it attacking the deal Barack Obama negotiated, the one he himself tore up, calling it one of the worst deals ever made by our country and a direct path to a nuclear weapon. He insisted his version is the exact opposite. And then he admitted the part that undoes the whole performance. He said the negotiations were still proceeding, that he had told his representatives not to rush, that time was on our side. By 2:16 in the afternoon, in a shorter and angrier post, he said it plainly: nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. He told the critics, the losers, as he called them, to stop talking about something they know nothing about.

He was telling on himself. There is no deal, and if there is one, he is actively negotiating it, and it will likely be worse than any deal we have had in the past. He is trying to get ahead of the optics of that. He pulled the United States out of the prior agreement and has spent the time since fumbling for a replacement. And he now stands in front of the country bragging about a triumph that exists only in his imagination. And here is the detail that proves how shaky the ground beneath him really is. The White House has reportedly been urging Republicans to publicly tweet their support for this Iran deal, the one that nobody has seen and that may yet fall apart entirely. A leader confident in what he has built does not need his own party to pre-load their applause. That is the behavior of a man bracing for the thing to collapse, trying to lock in loyalty before the floor gives out.

Trump thought he could go into Iran, wreak havoc, and come out a war hero. Trump thought he could convince us all that immigrants are destroying our country. Trump thinks he can threaten allies and still be accepted as a strong world leader. He is learning the hard way that we see right through him. Because we know that this is what authoritarian leaders have always done when they have nothing real to offer. They manufacture spectacle. They pick simple, frightening words, and they hammer them, because simple solutions to complex problems are easier to sell than the hard work of governing. Mussolini staged grand parades and Roman pageantry while the economy buckled beneath the show. The Soviet leadership announced record harvests to a population standing in bread lines. The performance of strength becomes the entire job, because strength is the one thing they cannot actually produce. Trump campaigned, over and over, on ending wars. And here he is, on a holiday weekend, posting bombs and boats and the word “Adios,” because the deal-making he promised has turned to dust in his hands, and a war meme is so much easier to post than an admission of failure.

I think a lot about why I started writing these posts every night. When I began, I told myself I was either going to be documenting the fall of what could have been one of the greatest countries this world has ever seen, or I was going to be documenting her greatest comeback. I did not know then which one it would be. I still do not know for certain. But a year in, I know something I did not know at the start, which is that I am not doing it alone. I have met people who read this every single night, in person, out in the world, and there is nothing like that feeling. Because it tells me what I suspected all along. We are not on the fringe. We are the majority; they are just louder. We are people who want the best for everyone, who want our neighbors to be safe and our kids to grow up free, who do not want to wake up every morning and check a phone to see whether the President has marched us into a new war overnight. That is not radical. That is just decent. And there are so many more of us than they want us to believe.

Which brings me back to that sound outside my window, and the reason it kept me awake. The truth is, I knew this risk before I ever wrote a word. I sat my family down, and we talked about it, all of it, before I started, because speaking out publicly does not just put a target on you, it touches everyone you love. And I talk about the emails I receive. So many lovely ones. People sharing why they still have hope for America. Their fears and concerns, and what they are doing to push back in their own ways. How they are building the resistance. But a small and very ugly handful are full of the kind of words I will not repeat here. I laugh most of them off, because they come from deeply broken people, but I would be lying if I said the weight of them does not settle somewhere underneath, quiet and heavy, in the part of you that hears a noise at night and assumes the worst. And it has been weighing heavily on me. I know that this is not unique to me. Nearly every other person who is taking a public stand against this evil regime gets much of the same emails that I do.

And I’ve had to accept that this is the country he is building. One where violence is the background hum of life. There have been more threats and acts of violence swirling around this presidency than around any in living memory, including real attempts on his own life. This is what happens when the man at the very top treats violence as entertainment and posts a bomb as a joke. It gives everyone permission. The cruelty flows downhill, into inboxes, onto streets, and outside ordinary people’s windows at midnight.

And if I sound upset, know that I am. But also know that it fuels me. It sparks a flame in me to push harder. I know that the path to better days is not an easy one to walk. We are going to have to climb mountains to get there. But we are not alone, and there are more people speaking out every single day. Including Congressman Thomas Massie, who appeared on Meet the Press this morning. When he was asked whether he would name more names from the Epstein files in the weeks and months ahead, he said yes. He accused acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of violating the law by sitting on millions of files that the Epstein Files Transparency Act requires the government to release. He said he does not believe convictions are even possible with Blanche running the Justice Department and Kash Patel running the FBI, because, in his words, both men have effectively perjured themselves by claiming there is nobody else in the files. Nobody else. Epstein acted alone, case closed. And then he said the line that must have infuriated Donald Trump, because he took aim at that claim with the most damning witness he could find. “Even Melania doesn’t believe that,” he said. “The First Lady knows that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone.” He was pointing to Melania Trump’s own public statement, in which she acknowledged that Epstein was not alone and that several prominent men resigned their positions once the matter became politicized. Massie’s argument was simple and brutal.

Massie said he would be reading more names from the files for the country to hear. And Trump has no one to blame but himself for whatever comes next. Because in one of his fits of wounded ego, Trump backed a challenger and helped end Massie’s career in the House. He thought he was eliminating a problem. What he actually did was take the last restraint off a man who now has nothing left to lose and a legal shield to say whatever he wants. Trump did not silence the threat. He unleashed it. And as Massie himself pointed out, it does not even matter whether he is in Congress, because the Transparency Act is the law, and it runs for years. If this Justice Department will not release the files, the next one is legally obligated to. The cover-up that the entire day of memes and bombs and strongman photos was designed to distract us from has a hole in it, and the President widened that hole himself, with his own thin skin.

That is what his insecurity does. It makes him careless. It makes him lash out at the very people he most needs to keep quiet. He is on his way out, whether he understands that yet or not, and a cornered man making enemies he cannot afford is a gift to the rest of us. 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: Looking back through pictures from our trip to Washington, D.C. earlier this month. I took this looking out the window as we lifted off from San Diego, and I remember thinking how beautiful this country is, and that this, right here, is what we are fighting for.

Sources:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rogue-republican-massie-drops-melania-epstein-files-bomb/

https://www.newsweek.com/thomas-massie-melania-trump-epstein-11808442

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/24/trump-assassination-attempts-timeline