Trump will do it his way

In the middle of the night, while most of the country was sleeping, the President of the United States was wide awake, in a dimly lit room deep inside the White House, posting relentlessly on social media. For nearly six hours, when most presidents would have been resting ahead of another day at war, Donald Trump was instead flooding his personal platform with a stream of conspiracies, self-promotional imagery, and disjointed messages. Buried in the middle of it all was one post that triggered grave worldwide concern for what would come next.

Over the course of those six hours, the President posted nearly 46 times, pushing out conspiracy theories accusing Obama and his “underlings” of treason and sedition, images of himself meant to project power, and movie-like trailers meant to convince viewers that putting “America First” is good for the world and that only he can solve any and all of our problems. And then, in the middle of it all, he shared a live performance of My Way by Frank Sinatra, opening with “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain,” followed by “My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain… I did it my way.” He added no context or explanation. Just the video itself, dropped into the middle of an already volatile stream of posts.

It’s a song most often associated with endings and finality, and played at funerals. Played by people looking back on their lives as something closes. And seeing it posted in the dead of night, without explanation, was enough to send speculation spiraling, and for good reason. The President has shown increasing signs of mental and physical decline at the same time that he has destabilized an entire region of the world with an unapproved war that he himself started.

And then, just hours later, with no indication that he had slept at all, the President gave an interview to Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst that offered a clearer window into his state of mind, and maybe the real meaning behind the video. “If they don’t sign the deal, then the whole country is going to get blown up,” he said.

Taken together, it paints a very different picture. Not of a man quietly reflecting on his legacy, but of a man escalating. A man signaling that no ally, law, or consequence will alter what he does next. This wasn’t nostalgia or a man facing his own mortality; it was a man issuing a warning. It wasn’t about a life lived boldly on your own terms. It was something far more dangerous than that. A man deciding that whatever comes next, he will do it his way.

And Nancy Sinatra saw the post too. The daughter of the man whose voice Trump used without permission responded with “Sacrilege.” She followed that by reminding anyone who asked that her father loathed Donald Trump. That Frank Sinatra, were he alive today, would not have wanted any part of this, that Trump didn’t care, and that he never does.

Trump’s manic night of posting is the thread running through everything we are watching right now. A man operating with no limits, no filter, and no one around him willing or able to say stop. And the more the filters fall away, the clearer the picture becomes of who he has always been underneath.

I’m not saying that Trump is suffering from a neurological disorder, but so much of what he says and how he moves reminds me of my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s. I grew up with it. I don’t think I knew her a single day when she didn’t have it, and she died when I was in my twenties. What I know about that disease, what I watched it do to her over the years, is that it doesn’t create a person. It reveals one. It strips away the inhibitions, the social instincts, the impulse control, and the ability to modulate. And what’s left is the truest, most unfiltered version of who someone always was. My grandmother was, at her core, a very particular woman. And even as the disease took so much from her, what made her ‘her’ kept coming through, sometimes sideways, sometimes in ways we had to learn to interpret, but it was there.

What is coming through with Trump is something else entirely. Nothing he does shows that he is in control. According to a very concerning Wall Street Journal report published last night that cited a senior administration official and people who have spoken directly with the president, he screamed at aides for hours when he learned an American F-15 had been shot down over Iran and two airmen were missing. But let’s be clear about what he was screaming about. Not the pilots, their families, or the men behind enemy lines in the mountains of Iran being hunted down. He was screaming about himself and his presidency. About what this would do to him politically. The images haunting him weren’t of American servicemembers in danger. They were of Jimmy Carter. “If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter, with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” he privately fretted. Two Americans were missing in a war zone, and the President of the United States was doing electoral math.

His aides were so alarmed by his behavior that they made the decision to keep him out of the Situation Room entirely during the rescue operation. They briefed him by phone only at what they described as “meaningful moments.” His impatience, a senior administration official told the Journal, “wouldn’t be helpful.” So who was in that room? The Vice President dialed in from Camp David. The Chief of Staff coordinated from her home in Florida. Nobody was physically present who should have been making these decisions at the highest level, in the same room, with access to the same information in real time. We have no idea what was communicated, what was withheld, what notes were passed that the people on the phone never saw. The commander-in-chief was excluded from his own war room during his own war. And the people who were supposed to be there weren’t even there. So who exactly is running this country? What is the point of a presidency if the president cannot summon the composure to be in the room when American lives are on the line?

What we continue to see are the actions of a man whose last filters are gone. And what’s underneath is what we have always suspected was there. Rage. Grandiosity. A complete absence of concern for anyone beyond himself. No thought of what he leaves behind. No worry about the children, ours or anyone else’s, who will inherit what he is doing right now.

I think about that a lot. Because there are days when I ask myself why I keep doing this. Why any of us keep doing this. It would be so much easier to look away. To take the off-ramp. To sock money away and ride it out, and let someone else carry this and try to stop it. I’ve heard from people who are doing exactly that, people who know what’s happening, who understand it’s wrong, but who have decided that if they can’t beat it they might as well profit from his actions while they still can. I don’t say that with contempt. I understand the impulse. We are all exhausted.

But I keep coming back to the same place. My children. Your children. The country we are supposed to be handing forward. Pete Buttigieg said something yesterday that really stuck with me, because it was exactly how I have been feeling. He said the reason he keeps going is because he found his “why,” his kids. That’s it. That’s the whole answer. Not strategy or necessarily legacy. Not even politics. His kids. And that is the difference between us and the man in the Oval Office posting at 2 in the morning. Trump doesn’t think about what comes after. He has said as much. He doesn’t lose sleep over the world his grandchildren will live in. He is only ever thinking about right now, about not going to jail, about not losing power, about doing it his way for as long as he possibly can.

That is a dangerous thing in any person. In the man controlling our nuclear arsenal, with a war he started now closing in on its second month and a ceasefire expiring in less than 72 hours, it is something else.

The ceasefire is collapsing. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz again, accusing the United States of violating the agreement with its ongoing naval blockade of Iranian ports. The U.S. Navy fired on and seized an Iranian cargo ship, the Touska, blowing a hole in its engine room on its way to an Iranian port. Iran’s chief negotiator said plainly on state television that it is impossible for other ships to move freely through the strait while Iranian vessels are blocked.

Then Iran declined to send negotiators to the latest round of talks in Pakistan, citing what it described as Washington’s excessive demands, constant contradictions, and the blockade itself as a breach of the ceasefire.

Trump’s war is deeply unpopular, and he knows the ceasefire is on thin ice. It makes him look like the one who lost. And when that happens, when control starts to slip, he doesn’t pull back. He escalates. He creates the conditions for something much worse.

And through all of it, the world is reduced to reading Truth Social posts to understand what the President of the United States intends to do next. Foreign governments. Intelligence agencies. Diplomats. All of us, squinting at a screen, trying to decode a six-hour overnight posting spree and a Frank Sinatra video to figure out whether we are headed back to war. This is not how a democracy is supposed to function. This is not how a commander-in-chief is supposed to lead. This is a man who has decided the rules do not apply to him, and a government full of people who have decided to let him keep going.

And piecing the news together is becoming more difficult than it has ever been in the United States. Just as it starts to feel like Trump is easing off his attacks on the media, he escalates again.

On Saturday morning, CBS News correspondent Olivia Rinaldi began asking the President about Iranian gunboats firing on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and a statement by French President Macron at the end of his press conference. She barely got a few words out before he gestured toward her and barked, “OUT,” demanding she leave the room. The entire press corps was cleared shortly after, before a single follow-up question could be asked.

And then, on Sunday afternoon, Trump shared a Washington Times piece outlining the White House’s battle plan to take on the Washington press corps. It wasn’t a breaking news story. The article was from December. But the timing of sharing it, the day after throwing a reporter out of the Oval Office for asking four words about his war, told you everything about where his head was and how he plans to continue his attacks.

The White House’s plan was to take control of press pool assignments away from the White House Correspondents’ Association, making itself the sole arbiter of which outlets cover presidential events and travel. And it did. It also included launching a “media offenders” website to publicly shame journalists it considers biased. And we can’t forget what else they have already done from that plan: the AP lost its permanent seat in the press pool because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Pentagon reporters had their press passes pulled unless they signed a loyalty oath. Congress was pushed to close the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, pulling $500 million a year from the system that guarantees free access to quality journalism.

Trump is continuing the systematic dismantling of the independent press, one credential, outlet, and reporter at a time. Olivia Rinaldi asked about Iranian gunboats firing on vessels in an active war zone and was told to get out. Trump didn’t just lose his temper. He was executing a plan. And then he shared the blueprint for it the very next day. Every authoritarian who has ever consolidated power has done this first. Not with tanks here in our own streets, but by controlling the story, so that you control what people believe is real. And if you can make enough people distrust the journalists asking the questions, you never have to answer them.

I promised to call this unacceptable behavior out every single time he does it. Every time he attacks the media. Both legacy media, when they are doing their job, and the independent media of which I am a part. Because his attack on the spread of truth over propaganda goes hand in hand with free and fair elections. If either of these completely breaks down, we lose the foundation of our democracy, and we cannot let this happen. We must hold the line, and that means we must support each other, our press, reporters, photographers, writers, everyone putting it all on the line to make sure that the information we need reaches us, especially as we get closer to the elections.

So please take a moment right now, and if you are able, look at your favorite voices in this fight and decide how you will be in the resistance with them. If they offer a paid membership, and you can comfortably support them in that way, please do. Not just mine, but as many of the people you go to day in and day out for fact-based reporting. I would not be able to do what I do without those on the ground making sure I have the truth in front of me to formulate my thoughts and opinions. If history tells us anything, it’s that Trump and his enablers will be taking drastic steps to limit what we see and hear in the coming months. We have to get ahead of this now. And supporting those taking a stand to push back against his lies and assault on the truth is one of the best ways to do it.

Trump staying up all night, during an active war, and posting on social media instead of working towards a solution shows us he is deeply concerned about what is going to happen, not just in Iran, but also in November. We have to keep reminding ourselves that there will be an end to his cruelty and madness. That we are not powerless and that there are still so many things we can do to slow-roll what he is doing to our country. Some nights it’s enough to remember that this will not last forever and that pendulums always swing farther than where they started. They will this time too. 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: This is Crownelius, my husband Pete’s friend. For nearly a year, he came to have breakfast and lunch with Pete when we lived in our prior house. I had a surprise birthday party for Pete one night, and even though we never would see him after dark, Crownelius came that night and brought a screw with him as a gift. He tried to drop it next to Pete and nearly dropped it on our daughter’s head instead. We think we saw him on our walk today, and it brought back so many memories.

Sources:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-iran-war-decisions-inside-story-a1b2c3d4

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/19/nx-s1-5790378/iran-us-hormuz-closed-impossible

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanon-ceasefire-hezbollah-strait-hormuz/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-renews-bridge-power-plant-threat-against-iran-push-deal-mocks-tough-guy-irgc

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/19/world/live-news/iran-war-us-trump-hormuz

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/19/trump-navy-iran-ship-gulf-of-oman.html

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/nancy-sinatra-slams-donald-trump-201717320.html