Trump’s decline was on full display

At 4 p.m. Eastern Time today in Washington, D.C., the president and his wife walked onto the stage for what was supposed to be a Women’s History Month event. While standing in the gold-drenched East Room of the White House, Melania Trump stepped to the podium in front of a handpicked room full of women, pulled the microphone close, and declared herself a “visionary.” Behind her stood Donald Trump, shifting on stiff legs, sucking in air, and trying not to look bored as she launched into a four-minute speech about her rise as a mother, entrepreneur, and creative force. She talked about solitude, inspiration, instincts, business skills, and the sacrifices she’s made as a mother and a mogul, a woman who had done it all. But it wasn’t just what she said. It was what she didn’t. Because none of that would’ve been possible without a staff at home and a billionaire husband funding the whole thing. Her entire speech was a performance. She was there to sell the story of a self-made female icon. And it was all theater.

She ended with the same delusion as she started, introducing her husband as a champion of women in leadership. The same man who has been found liable for sexual assault and named repeatedly in the Epstein files, including in the account of a woman who says she was thirteen when she encountered him. And as she smiled and gestured toward him, Trump leaned in, kissed her, and then led her to her seat like he was moving a prop off the stage, before returning to the podium with the practiced air of a man who knows this moment isn’t about her. It never was. It was about the illusion.

“Movie star,” he said, grinning. “Can you believe it?” He paused for effect. “We were supposed to have a nice, normal life.” As if the chaos had come from her ambition, not his power grab. As if this whole charade of a women’s history event was not just a soft-focus campaign stunt. As if the past eight years hadn’t happened. Melania’s documentary, funded by Amazon to the tune of forty million dollars, had suddenly become the pivot point of their lives, not his presidency, not his indictments, not the erosion of democracy playing out in real time. Not the fact that the man she had just called a champion of women had said on stage, without shame, “We love women. Women are the whole deal.”

There was no history at the Women’s History Month event. There was no mention of the suffragists, no honoring of labor leaders, no acknowledgment of the cost of liberation. Just a 30-second list of names read off a teleprompter and then 37 minutes and 37 seconds of Donald Trump talking about himself, railing against Democrats, and begging the crowd to deliver him a Republican majority come midterms. What was supposed to be a celebration of women became a performance of delusion, a propaganda reel meant to recast Melania as America’s everywoman and Donald as her noble benefactor. But we know better. We always have.

What followed was not a celebration of women. It was a casting call. Trump turned the podium into an audition stage and brought up woman after woman, each one selected not for what she had accomplished, but for how well her story made him look.

First came a single mother. Trump talked about how his tax cuts had put an extra $4,000 in her pocket. And then he looked at her and said, “Spend it wisely, right?” It was insulting to every hardworking woman for a billionaire to say that to someone who just shared how much she struggles and how even just $4,000 extra could make that big of a difference. As if the problem is how she spends her money and not that the economy, his economy, is dragging her down. He didn’t actually see the person before him. He just saw another prop.

Then came Nora Pruitt, a mother of seven and a sheet metal worker from Baltimore. Trump introduced her as proof that his “manufacturing renaissance” was working. Nora stepped up and told the crowd that because of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” her factory was able to buy a new piece of machinery, which somehow led to her being able to buy a five-bedroom house on an acre of land. Trump leaned in, locked eyes with her, and oddly gave her a pouty look that did not meet the moment. The crowd clapped anyway. And then he was done with her. That was the whole point. Share your simple story. Thank Trump. Say thank you and sit down.

Trump used the language you’d expect. He called women “so powerful, so important, and so beautiful.” Then added, “I’m not allowed to use the word ‘beautiful,’ but I’m using it anyway.” He said this as though he were some kind of rebel, breaking a silly rule that only the overly sensitive care about. As if calling women beautiful were the bravest thing a man could do. As if the reason people have a problem with how he talks about women has anything to do with the word “beautiful” and not with the fact that he was found liable for sexual assault, and that he told the world, on tape, that he could grab women by their private parts and get away with it. That’s who stood at that podium and told America, “We love women. Women are the whole deal, okay?”

And then came the moment that crystallized how far this has all gone. Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, a six-time medalist, walked to the front of the room and presented Trump with her Order of Ikkos medal. This is a personal honor that every Olympic medalist receives to give to someone who made a meaningful contribution to their journey. She gave hers to the President of the United States, praising him for protecting “biological women in women’s sports” and for his policies on IVF. She called him the first president in history to receive one.

His whole presidency has turned into a race to give him prizes. Gold medals. Stickers. Awards. Trophies. It’s the most blatant culture of tribute we’ve ever seen from a sitting president, and there used to be standards to prevent exactly this. There used to be dignity in this office. But he’s made a mockery of it. And it’s not just embarrassing. It’s dangerous. Because if our adversaries know that all they need to do to get what they want is flatter him, hand him a shiny object, and tell him he’s the greatest, then we are all exposed.

And then he kept going. What had already become a campaign rally went deeper. He reiterated past election lies. He continued to scapegoat transgender people. He pushed the Save Act, which he calls the Save America Act but which is really the Save Trump from Losing Power Act, because it is the only legislative tool that might protect him from the voters who are turning against him. And then he said this: “I think anybody that votes against it shouldn’t be allowed to run for office.”

The President of the United States said that anyone who votes against his election bill should be barred from holding office. That is not how a democratic republic works. That is an authoritarian saying that dissent should be punishable. And nobody in that room pushed back.

And in between trying to convince the country that Trump is a champion for women and that the event was actually for women’s history month, Trump addressed the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. His response? “It’s a terrible thing, but it goes on. It’s absolutely incredible that things like this happen.” He called an attack on a synagogue “incredible.” That’s the word he reached for. Not horrific. Not an act of hate or a failure of the country he is supposed to be leading. Incredible. That is not a man choosing his words carefully. That is a man whose mind is grabbing whatever word floats by, and “incredible” is the one that landed. That word tells us more about where his cognitive ability is than any cognitive test ever could.

And while they were staging that performance in the East Room, here’s what was actually happening to women in America.

Today, the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America released a survey showing that one in three Americans, more than 82 million people, are cutting back on food, utilities, and basic daily expenses just to afford healthcare. To put a face on that number, consider Sheila Nesbit, a 65-year-old retired librarian in Illinois, who had to decline orthopedic inserts that cost roughly $250 because she couldn’t afford them. She uses discount cards to try to bring down the cost of a $90 medication that Medicare doesn’t cover. And sometimes, she skips meals and medicines to save money. Across income groups, 62% of uninsured Americans reported making similar sacrifices. Nearly one in ten Americans has postponed retirement because they can’t afford to stop working and lose their employer coverage. Healthcare costs now outweigh food, rent, and utilities as the top concern for American voters. That’s the real state of women in this country. Not the fantasy on that stage.

We also learned that instead of making sure all Americans have access to affordable healthcare, we’re now spending more than a billion dollars a day on Trump’s Iran war. And the cost keeps going up, in human lives, and in military assets like the Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker that went down in western Iraq on Thursday after a mid-air collision with a second tanker during operations. Six service members were aboard. The second aircraft, badly damaged, made an emergency landing in Israel. As of tonight, the crew’s status is still unknown.

The billions being spent on this war could have gone to permanent housing. They could have paid for schoolchildren to have free breakfast and lunch. They could have brought back the subsidies so people could access affordable healthcare. Instead, they went to bombs. And the women in that room today, the ones who were supposed to be celebrated, will go home to a country where one in three of them can’t afford to see a doctor.

And even though Donald and Melania Trump forgot the true meaning of what that event was supposed to be about, we know that Women’s History Month doesn’t belong to them. It doesn’t belong to any one person or party. It belongs to everyone, men and women, who has stood up and pushed for women to be seen as equals. We remember the suffragists who were beaten and jailed so women could vote. We remember the labor organizers who fought for safe workplaces and fair wages. We remember the women who walked into courtrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, and operating rooms when every door was closed to them and opened those doors anyway. That is the history this month was made for. And no staged photo op in the East Room can erase it.

Each day I sit down and watch these performances by the Trump regime on video. I’m not in these rooms. I’m not a member of the press. But I watch the videos. I stop them and rewatch them. I study the body language, the word choices, the reactions of the people standing behind him. The White House posts many of these videos themselves. So do NPR, C-SPAN, and PBS. You can find transcripts online. I share this because some of you have asked where I get my information and whether you can see it for yourselves. You can. And you should. Because the more eyes on this, the harder it becomes for them to control the narrative.

I started writing these nightly posts because, like so many of us, I felt helpless watching the country I love unravel. I kept asking myself what I could possibly do that would matter. And eventually, I realized that we all have a part in this resistance. For me, that meant using the skills I already had as a writer for the past two decades. I knew how to break things down in a way people could understand. I knew how to research and pull together information. So I decided that this would be my way of showing up. My last trip to Europe before the pandemic was six weeks focused on trying to understand how fascism took hold before World War II, and that trip set off almost five years of learning everything I could about that period of time. I sit down every night, still learning with you, looking at the bigger picture, because none of these stories sit in isolation. They are all connected. Every staged event, every lie, every distraction. It’s all one machine. And the machine has one purpose: to hold power.

I want you to know that I read all of your comments, and each one means more than I can say. By the time I finish writing each night, I’ve already lived through all of it once during the day and then written through it again. It’s my therapy, but it also means I don’t always have the energy to reply the way I’d like to. Just know that I see them, every single one.

And with each one of these staged events from the Trump regime, it becomes clearer to me that someone deep in this administration knows the writing is on the wall. They can see the polls. They hear their own MAGA-aligned influencers splitting from them. People like Joe Rogan, who said on a podcast earlier this week that the military operation “seems so insane based on what he ran on.” Rogan’s criticism of Trump has been building for months. He’s spoken out against the immigration raids, the handling of the Epstein files, the tariffs on Canada, and the Venezuela operation. But the Iran war appears to be the breaking point. He went on to say, “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘no more wars,’ ‘end these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.” This is coming from Rogan, who hosted Trump on his podcast and endorsed him in the 2024 election. This 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.