Trump’s desperate plan to destroy our country from the inside
After abruptly clearing his weekend travel schedule, opting to stay in Washington, D.C., missing his own son’s wedding, the President of the United States has once again locked himself away inside the White House. He has made no public appearances, and his schedule today showed no meetings or events except for what appeared to be an urgent visit from Vice President J.D. Vance at 12:49 pm. And while much of the country remains focused on Trump’s continued threats of violence and war, along with the increasingly erratic posts he continues to share on social media, a story was published this morning that every major news outlet in America should be covering as breaking news. Because what happened is a warning of how dangerous the days and months ahead are about to become.
Yesterday afternoon at 1:34 pm, Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield exposed the quiet and deliberate erasure of records related to the January 6th insurrection from the Department of Justice website. But what she really uncovered was far more disturbing than a missing webpage or deleted press release. The Trump administration had begun scrubbing prosecution records tied to the people who attacked our Capitol, including one involving a man accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol attack who was also facing child solicitation charges.
Kornfield shared the discovery publicly on X, and the Department of Justice Rapid Response account responded directly. Yet instead of expressing concern or acknowledging the seriousness of the allegations involving a minor, their response began with five chilling words: “Nothing ‘quiet’ about it. We are proud.”
They were proud to erase the public record. Proud to help rewrite the history of January 6th. Proud to scrub information connected to people who violently attacked police officers defending the Capitol. And even after being reminded of the allegations tied to the solicitation of a child, they still said they were “proud.”
Everything they said was intentional. “Proud” was placed at the very beginning of the statement, and the rest of it tells us exactly how they want this moment remembered. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” they wrote. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
Every phrase in that statement should concern us all, because every phrase is doing work. The prosecution of people who attacked the Capitol becomes “weaponization.” The men convicted by juries become the “persecuted.” And the public record of their crimes, the sentencing documents, the charges, the evidence, becomes “partisan propaganda.”
This is the whole project in three sentences. They are not denying what they did. They are renaming it. They are telling us that the record itself was the lie, and that erasing it is justice. That is the language every authoritarian movement eventually reaches for, the moment it stops fearing the truth and starts calling the truth the enemy.
And this was not just a single page removed. Meryl Kornfield caught one example, the Houston man, Andrew Taake, was sentenced to 74 months for attacking police with bear spray and a metal whip while a child solicitation case sat pending against him in Texas. But the deletions swept far wider than one defendant. Among the records pulled were the prosecution releases for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the men convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep Trump in power by force.
And here is the part that turns this from another abuse of power by the Trump administration into something far more dangerous. On Thursday, a federal appeals court vacated those seditious conspiracy convictions. On Friday, the Justice Department moved to dismiss the cases entirely. And on Friday, that same department began scrubbing the press releases documenting those crimes from public view. Pardon them. Vacate the convictions. Dismiss the cases. Then erase the record that any of it ever happened.
A government methodically removing evidence of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. Not because the attack did not happen, but because they need Americans to forget who carried it out, who encouraged it, who benefited from it, and what it was truly meant to accomplish. And this is only the beginning of our shared history they intend to erase.
It’s the oldest tool there is for controlling a population. Before there were television networks to capture or websites to scrub, every regime that wanted to control the future started by seizing control of the past. Stalin’s government did not just imprison the people it purged. It removed them from photographs, cut them from the history books, erased their faces from the official record until it was as if they had never stood next to the leader at all. The Nazis burned the books first, and then rewrote the textbooks. Because a population that cannot remember what was true yesterday cannot resist the lie they are told today.
George Orwell put it as plainly as it can be put: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
I am not saying this is Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. But what I am saying is that the move is always the same, and it always means the same thing. When people in power start deleting the past, it is always intentional. Either they plan to do again the very things they are trying to erase, or they do not want us to remember, compare, or have proof of how things used to be done before they changed them. Either way, or both ways, they do not want us to be able to measure what they are becoming against what once existed before them.
And they are not only erasing the record. They are erasing the debt. When Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in the January 6th attack, he did not just set them free. He released them from the court-ordered restitution they owed for the damage they caused. The full cost of that day to the American taxpayer has been estimated by the Government Accountability Office at 2.7 billion dollars. Of the nearly 3 million dollars in restitution the rioters personally owed, a CBS investigation found that only about 437,000 dollars, roughly fifteen percent, had ever been repaid. Now even that is gone. The people who smashed the windows, assaulted police officers, hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress, and helped bring the peaceful transfer of power to the edge of collapse walk free, owe nothing, and watch the bill land on the rest of us.
And we were already being set up for the next part. The 1.776 billion dollar compensation fund, which, unless stopped, will compensate people who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted under the previous administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has refused to rule out that January 6th rioters convicted of violence could be eligible to collect from it. So we must follow the full arc of what they are building. Erase the record of the crime. Erase the debt for the crime. Then take taxpayer money and hand it to the people who committed the crime, while calling them the victims. And make sure everyone watching understands the message being sent. If you are willing to carry out the next order given by Trump, even if it is illegal, harms the country, or turns violent, he will protect you, too. January 6th was not just a pardon. It was a signal. A promise to future loyalists that if they stay faithful to the regime, the regime will stay faithful to them.
This latest round of corruption is so blatant that even Republicans are struggling to defend it. Senator Thom Tillis called it bad policy, bad timing, and bad politics. Mitch McConnell called it “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong.” Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick vowed to kill it outright. And when the very people who have spent the last year defending Trump are openly calling this corruption, it tells us something important. Something is starting to crack. But we are up against the clock to preserve what they are trying to destroy before the damage becomes permanent.
And while all of this unfolds, the man who set it in motion has sealed himself inside the White House and is building something beneath it that looks less like a safety feature and more like a post-presidency contingency plan. We learned the details this week from Trump himself, who walked reporters through the construction. Beneath the new 90,000 square foot ballroom, a complex is being carved six stories into the ground. He described a drone base on the roof, a military hospital below, and a fortification that rivals anything we have seen built for an American president before.
And now, as we watch his administration continue to erase and rewrite this country’s history, it becomes impossible not to ask exactly what he believes he is preparing for. Because this bunker he is building could very well be where he plans to ride out his years after his presidency is supposed to end, if his efforts to hollow out the Constitution are not stopped in time. We need to think about how his mind works and what he wants, not simply what is legal or constitutional. Because everything they remove from the public record is a stepping stone toward whatever they plan to erase next. And the logical path this takes eventually leads to our founding documents, our institutions, and the constitutional amendments that protect all of us from authoritarian power.
He does not want to leave office. He has said as much repeatedly, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. And this bunker increasingly feels less like emergency preparedness and more like insurance. Insurance against accountability, insurance against unrest, and insurance against a country that may one day finally refuse to comply.
I try not to let my mind wander to these worst-case scenarios because I still hold on to the belief that our lawmakers and courts have lines even they will not cross. But at this moment, I think it is necessary to say all of this out loud. We have to be prepared for anything, and we need to continue reminding our elected officials that this is not politics as usual. Administrations that were truly committed to protecting our country would never have done any of the things Trump’s administration is doing now. And we need to stop playing by the same rulebook we have relied on for centuries. Trump isn’t.
We are living through another day in America that should never have happened. Governments built around democratic norms do not erase public records, and they certainly do not reward the people responsible for political violence while rewriting them as victims. And as much as I would love to say that we should rest and simply gear up for November, we do not have that luxury. We need to ensure that what they delete is never forgotten. They are betting that if they erase enough pages, pay off enough loyalists, and bury enough of it six stories underground, we will get tired and let it go. We cannot do that.
We need to keep our own records, including the names of the people enabling this corruption. They cannot delete the entire internet. The more facts, screenshots, archived pages, videos, and evidence we preserve and share, the harder it will be for them to finish their revision of history. Because one day this evidence may be needed not just for the history books but also for investigations, accountability, and eventual trials. Future generations deserve to know exactly what happened here, who enabled it, who resisted it, and how close this country came to losing itself entirely. Authoritarian movements survive by destroying evidence and exhausting the public memory. Our job is to make sure the truth outlives them.
This is one advantage we have that people resisting past authoritarian takeovers did not have. The people who opposed regimes like Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Franco’s Spain often relied on hidden journals, whispered testimony, underground newspapers, and whatever scraps of evidence they could smuggle past censorship before they were arrested or killed. Evidence was often formed from the memories of the survivors who lived long enough to tell the story.
But now millions of us carry cameras and publishing tools in our pockets. We can preserve documents instantly, duplicate records across the world in seconds, and document abuses as they happen before they can fully disappear. That matters. Because authoritarians depend on isolation and memory holes. They depend on people feeling powerless and alone, and on future generations never fully knowing what was done in their name. We do not have to let that happen here.
Every record, screenshot, downloaded document, recorded statement, and shared video becomes part of a collective record that they cannot fully erase. And one day, when this period of American history is studied, investigated, and judged, that record may become the difference between accountability, impunity, and stopping it from ever happening again.
And maybe that is what scares them most. That even if they erase the records, they cannot erase the people who lived through it. They cannot erase our memories. We watched January 6th happen with our own eyes. We watched Trump point his supporters toward the Capitol, and we watched them go. We heard them chant “Hang Mike Pence” inside the halls and outside the walls while the Vice President was rushed to safety just feet ahead of the mob. We watched them injure more than 140 police officers who stood between them and the lawmakers they were hunting.
We know that Congresswoman Madeleine Dean had to rip the identifying pin from her chest because being a member of Congress that day made her a target inside her own Capitol. And we know what she saw when she walked back in to finish the constitutional duty she had sworn an oath to carry out. Shattered glass. Splintered wood. Feces smeared across the walls.
There was nothing American about that day. There was nothing patriotic about it. And the people closest to him knew it as it was happening. Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked as the right-hand person to his own chief of staff, said it under oath, with the whole country listening. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American,” and we were “watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
We need to hold onto her statement as proof that the loyalty around this man was never real. It never has been. The people he surrounds himself with are loyal to exactly one thing: their own survival, the same way he is loyal only to his. He learned that lesson the hard way in his first term, when person after person walked out and told the truth, and he swore he would never let it happen again. Yet here we are. Four members of his Cabinet have already left, along with others in leadership positions. And there is a very real possibility that they, too, will eventually speak publicly about what was happening behind closed doors, just like so many before them have. And he will not be able to silence them either. So even if he keeps deleting evidence, the truth still lives inside the people who witnessed it firsthand.
Cassidy Hutchinson already showed us exactly what happens when one of them decides that telling the truth is safer than protecting his secrets. The men and women who built their careers around his protection will, one by one, eventually decide they would rather save themselves. And when they do, there is no website to scrub and no fund large enough to buy back their silence. 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: Saw this bumper sticker today. They are right.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/trump-wedding-donald-bettina-anderson-bahamas.html
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-anti-weaponization-fund
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5891044-tillis-slams-trump-anti-weaponization-fund/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5816555-trump-bunker-ballroom-lawsuit/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/tulsi-gabbard-resigns-as-trumps-national-intelligence-director
Don’t ask me why, but I only started watching ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ last night.
The book by  Margaret Atwood was published in 1985, 40 years ago, and televised between 2017 and 2025.
So far I’ve only watched the first few episodes and I can’t believe what I’m watching. It’s like the daily news coming from the U.S.:
The unofficial police force is called ‘The Eyes’ (ICE), people are taken from the street (sounds familiar?), women are only useful to bear children (no abortion rights etc), and everything that was normal in the past, has been erased …
And then this morning I wake up to this, another excellent, post, this time regarding erasing the past.
I feel hugely unsettled and worried. And I’m not even an American, nor live in the USA.
There are a number of organizations and networks of independent journalists, academic research centers, and digital archivist coalitions that have built comprehensive, permanent backups to preserve the full prosecutorial and historical record of January 6th since the DOJ is scrubbing this horrible event.
One is The Data Rescue Project: Following the broader removal of over 130,000 public federal agency pages, a loose coalition of data librarians, scientists, and archivists have formed decentralized backups. These volunteer groups actively clone and mirror vulnerable civic datasets, ensuring that the historical footprint of public prosecutions cannot be permanently erased from the internet.
Yes, it’s worth feeling, thinking and preparing that he will not be leaving and will hole up in that bunker..