Trump’s most serious attack on our country starts now

Tonight, at 5:44 p.m., the White House press pool gathered outside the Oval Office, before being ushered in to stand just a few feet from the President. Weary, struggling, and slurring his words, Donald Trump sat behind his desk with representatives from the state of Utah standing on either side of him. He struggled to stay awake anytime he wasn’t talking and slowly worked his way through the executive actions he was there to sign, slashing the protective status from nearly three million acres of public land in Utah.

For more than twenty minutes, Donald Trump spoke about Utah and public lands, but mostly about things that were either not real or simply made no sense.

“When you see a young former soldier, walking around with no legs, no arms, a face that’s been horribly, horribly hurt. That was done by Iran.”

“The flags are at hask, half, mask until Saturday evening.”

There was even a moment that caused awkward concern when, just minutes after introducing Utah Governor Spencer Cox, Trump finished signing the executive action, looked around the room, held up the ceremonial pen, and asked, “Who should I give this to? Maybe the governor’s representative, right?” Before handing the pen directly to Governor Spencer Cox.

The governor had already spoken. He had been standing in the same place the entire time. No one had moved. Yet the President of the United States no longer appeared to recognize the man he had just introduced only minutes earlier.

This was not the only thing Donald Trump said today. It was not even the most alarming. Over the course of a single Monday, across two separate media interviews, 35 Truth Social posts, and this Oval Office signing, the President of the United States constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed reality so many times that by the end of the day, no one, not his allies, not his enemies, not the press, not foreign governments, nobody could say with confidence what was real and what was fabrication. And that is no longer just his problem. It is ours.

There is a clinical term for what we are watching. It is called confabulation. I was recently reminded of it by a retired physician who emailed me after reading one of my posts. He suggested that much of what Donald Trump says might be better explained by confabulation than by intentional lying.

Confabulation can happen when a deteriorating brain fills in gaps with fabricated information the person genuinely believes to be true. It is not lying. A liar knows the truth and chooses to say something different. Confabulation is a mind constructing its own reality to paper over what is missing.

And tonight, after watching Donald Trump cycle through an entire day of public appearances, I think we are watching confabulation, deliberate lies, and political spin merge into something indistinguishable. Something that has poisoned the entire government and that has trickled down to every one of us. And is now being aimed directly at the midterm elections.

It started this morning with a phone call to Fox & Friends. Trump called in to honor Lindsey Graham. He called Graham a “nice man” and a “great guy” who “loved playing golf,” and then promptly insulted his golf game. Within two minutes, he had veered into a rant about terminating the filibuster, the SAVE America Act, voter ID, and mail-in ballots. The hosts tried four separate times to steer him back to the subject of his dead friend. He talked over every one of them. At one point, he turned his attention to Spencer Pratt, the reality television star from The Hills, and his failed bid for mayor of Los Angeles. “Look what happened to the kid in California,” Trump said. “They sent a million ballots. Nobody knew where they came from.” He claimed Spencer Pratt had come to his office and told him he thought he won. He said “they found millions of ballots.” There is no evidence of this. None of it is true.

While Trump was rambling, Fox aired a memorial montage of Graham photographs. He talked through the entire thing. When the montage ended, the producers had nothing left to show, so they put up a static photo of Trump with the words “On the phone: President Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States.”

He gave Graham a “99 out of 100” friendship score. He docked him one point for the moment after January 6, 2021, when Graham stood on the Senate floor and said about Trump, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” There was increased concern for Trump’s health online after this call. The Mirror reported that even his own conservative base thinks he is about to get “crazier.”

And that was just the warm-up. Because later in the day, Trump called into the Salem Radio Network for an interview with Hugh Hewitt, and that is where the day turned dangerous.

“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door,” Trump said, describing a potential strike on an Iranian nuclear mountain complex. He was announcing a military target on live radio. “We’re going to hit them very hard tonight and we’re going to hit them hard tomorrow and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it,” he continued. “They have nothing going other than they have big mouths. I got to know them, and they’re stone cold crazy people.”

He called the Iranians “cuckoo.” He said, “These people are crazy. To them, deals are made to be broken. They are extremely unreliable people, and, frankly, if they ever had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it within one day.” His own intelligence agency said that there was no evidence to support that claim.

When asked about the Memorandum of Understanding he had signed with Iran to end the war, Trump dismissed it entirely.

“It was a test,” he said. “We didn’t know. Look, memorandums of understanding when you’re dealing with sleaze bags don’t mean much. It was sort of a test, and they weren’t there. They didn’t honor the test.”

So either he knew the agreement was never meant to succeed, meaning the signing ceremony was little more than political theater while diplomacy took a back seat, or he is rewriting history in real time to explain why his own peace agreement collapsed. Either way, he is constructing a version of reality that cannot be reconciled with the facts. And he is doing it on the same day the United States is actively bombing Iran.

And then came the moment about Graham. When asked about his friend’s death, Trump said, “They talked about a certain part of his body literally blowing up.” That is how the President of the United States described the aortic dissection that killed his friend of nearly a decade. As if he were narrating an action movie.

And then Hewitt asked about Thursday. Trump had announced earlier in the day on Truth Social that he would be delivering a primetime address to the nation at 9 p.m. Eastern. When asked what the speech would be about, Trump said something odd, even for him.

“I’d rather not say,” he told Hewitt, “because if I say maybe, it’s going to take some of the guilt off.” Guilt. That was the word he chose. Maybe it was a revealing slip. Maybe it was just another cognitive misfire from a man who increasingly struggles to hold a coherent thought. Either way, it left more questions than answers.

(Edited to add: A number of readers have pointed out that the word he was reaching for may have been "gilt," not "guilt." His speech was slurred and difficult to make out. I heard "guilt." But if the word was "gilt," that is just as revealing, because gilt means a thin gold coating over something cheaper underneath. Either he is telling us he feels guilt about what he is planning, or he is telling us the whole thing is gold paint over something hollow. Both are equally concerning.)

Between the Fox call and the Hewitt interview, Trump posted 35 times in approximately 90 minutes. He shared the same three-week-old Newsmax story six times. He reposted a month-old clip of Jack Posobiec calling for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He shared a meme comparing a sitting Democratic senator to Pee-wee Herman. He posted a photograph of a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn, on the same day that American flags were flying at half-staff for Lindsey Graham, on his orders. He thanked Dr. Phil for an article in The Epoch Times about the “deep state,” as though shadowy forces are working against him 18 months into controlling every branch of government. He posted a photograph of his algae-covered reflecting pool with new allegations of sabotage to cover for his own botched construction project. And he shared a post from Benny Johnson, a far-right influencer, that read: “There has been an energy shift. Did you feel it? We are going to win. Libs have been set back 1000 years by this. They have no answer. And yes, Patriots are in control.”

And then he reposted a tweet from Senator Rand Paul, dated June 18, that read: “The same voices now attacking Trump’s Iran deal are the architects of every failed intervention of my lifetime. This war must end. I stand with President Trump on peace.”

He shared this while actively bombing Iran. The deal is dead. He killed it. And he reposted praise for the peace he never actually delivered because his brain cannot hold the contradiction. Or will not. And we can no longer tell the difference.

He also posted: “To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

He was referring to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter on June 29, which gave the president the authority to fire the heads of nearly all independent agencies and regulatory bodies at will, for virtually any reason.

But it was one phrase that stood out above all the rest. “At a time when it is most needed.” That is the language of emergency authority. It is the language leaders use when they are preparing the public to accept extraordinary powers. The obvious question is: needed for what? What is he planning to do next?

And all of this happened on the same day that another person died from a bullet shot from an ICE officer’s gun. In Biddeford, Maine, at approximately 7 a.m., an ICE agent shot and killed a 26-year-old man named Joan Sebastian Guerrero. He was from Colombia and was authorized to work in the United States. He had a Social Security number. He was reportedly heading to work. An eyewitness says he was killed in front of his three-year-old daughter, who was wearing Bluey pajamas.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin initially told Senator Angus King that Guerrero was the target of the warrant. Hours later, Mullin called King back to correct himself. The victim was not the target. They killed the wrong person. ICE is a rogue agency. The president’s own military force, and people are dying.

Hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Biddeford afterward. They marched to the office of Senator Susan Collins, just a seven-minute walk from the intersection where the shooting occurred. They chanted “Vote her out!” and “ICE out now!” Collins voted last month for a $70 billion funding package for ICE and Border Patrol. She is running for her sixth term and is one of Democrats’ biggest flip targets in the midterms. Several Democratic Senate candidates showed up at the protest.

And while people were laying flowers on the sidewalk in Biddeford, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, announced a “whole-of-government campaign” to “systematically disable” the International Criminal Court. “We will dismantle the ICC, brick by brick, if necessary,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Sanctions. Travel bans. Visa revocations. Threats to cut foreign aid to any nation that cooperates with the court. He accused the ICC of being “backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments.” And he specifically rejected allegations that the administration’s deportations to El Salvador and its deadly boat strikes violated international law. He rebuffed calls for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes in Iran.

Why would you want to dismantle an international body with jurisdiction over war crimes unless you know your people are committing them?

And still, the McConnell situation hangs over all of it. Senator Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since June 14. His office released a photograph of him on Sunday, alongside his wife, Elaine Chao, apparently in a hospital bed, holding a copy of the Washington Post. The photo was supposed to silence the speculation. But it had the opposite effect. MAGA influencers and Democratic Content Creators called it fake or AI-generated. TMZ ran it through OpenAI’s detection tool and found no signs of AI. But it did not matter. Because the environment has been so thoroughly contaminated by Donald Trump that no one knows what is real anymore, and everyone is primed to be lied to. Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin even went on Real America’s Voice and said, “I just heard from some other source that was an older photo. So, I really don’t know,” about the authenticity of the image.

The most alarming revelation to come out of today arrived when both MS NOW and Washington Reporter reported what Trump’s Thursday primetime address could actually be about. MS NOW reported what Trump’s Thursday primetime address is actually about. The 2020 election. According to MS NOW’s Jake Traylor, Trump will use the address to claim that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal foreign interference in the 2020 election. The election he lost six years ago. The election that every court in the country, including judges Trump himself appointed, said was valid.

As Nicolle Wallace put it: “Donald Trump appears to be taking his assault on the truth, and democracy, and American elections, to primetime.” She noted that these claims “conveniently obscure that he was the President of the United States. All of his handpicked people ran every facet of the government in 2020. His handpicked Attorney General Bill Barr ran the Justice Department. His handpicked replacement for Jim Comey, Chris Wray, ran the FBI. Both of them have repeatedly and publicly debunked these lies that there was any foreign interference.”

The Washington Reporter, a far-right publication that has shared insider information in the past about the White House, posted on X, “President Trump is planning to announce that Georgia’s two senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are illegitimate because of fraud, a well-placed source in Georgia tells us. Announcement could come as soon as tonight.”

On Thursday night, at 9 p.m. Eastern, he is going to go on national television and claim that American democracy itself has been compromised by foreign governments, using “intelligence” declassified by his own handpicked people, to tell 330 million Americans that their elections cannot be trusted. Four months before the midterms. He might also tell us that we have fraudulent senators serving right now. Neither is true. The actual crime is what he is doing: spreading these lies.

He knows the midterms are the one thing that can stop him. If he loses either chamber, subpoena power comes back. Oversight comes back. Investigations come back. The arrangement falls apart. And so he is going to use the full weight of the presidency, on primetime television, to build the case that elections themselves are broken. And he is going to dress it up as intelligence, patriotism, and national security. But he already told us how he really feels about what he is about to do. He used the word himself. Guilt.

Today Donald Trump unleashed his next attack on our country and our constitutional republic. And also today, our country pushed back. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams voided Trump’s IRS settlement. She sanctioned his attorneys. She referred his personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for disciplinary action. She sent her order to the bar associations where Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward are members. She blocked attorney Daniel Epstein from practicing in her district for a year. She barred Trump and the government from even calling the deal a “settlement.” And she found that the lawsuit was never about seeking justice or resolving a dispute. It was, in her words, “an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

The suit, she wrote, was “improperly employed.” The “action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute.”

She wrote that “even the Fund amount, $1.776 billion, speaks of a ‘branding’ effort rather than a deliberate and thoughtful calculation of damages.”

When Trump’s lawyers tried to escape consequences by dropping the case, she held firm, ruling that a court retains power over sanctions even after a case ends. Because otherwise, she wrote, a party could “abuse the judicial system” and “get off scot free” by pulling the plug.

And she closed with the words of John Adams. “Facts are stubborn things. Thus, whatever may be the Parties’ wishes, inclinations, or the dictates of their passion, they cannot alter the state of the facts or evade the rule of law.”

Tonight the law still holds. There are still people in this system who are willing to look at the full weight of corruption and say: this was wrong, and there will be consequences. And on Thursday, the President of the United States of America will go on television and try to convince this country that its own elections are a lie. That its democracy is broken. That the truth is whatever he says it is. But today, a judge proved him wrong. Facts are stubborn things. And so are we. 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: What appeared to be a young crow on flying lessons with its parents and nestmates came crashing into our glass window today. It was dicey for a while as it lay upside down in distress on the ledge of our roof, but after about 30 minutes it made its way to a nearby tree before flying tree to tree back to its parents, who were there nearly the entire time. They disappeared for a few minutes with the other young birds and then came back, just the two of them. Hoping for the best for this little guy, and for all of the animals that will be negatively impacted by Trump's assault on protected lands.

Sources:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/politics/darline-graham-nordone-south-carolina-trump

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/us/live-news/maine-ice-shooting-houston-minnesota

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/politics/trump-irs-judge-ruling-settlement-sanctions

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/13/judge-trump-irs-settlement-anti-weaponization-fund

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/politics/rubio-dismantle-international-criminal-court

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5966795-ron-johnson-mitch-mcconnell-photo

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-will-use-primetime-speech-to-claim-newly-declassified-intel-reveals-foreign-plot-to-interfere-in-2020-election-ms-now