Trump’s New Year’s Eve post was a warning

It is New Year’s Eve in Florida. Fireworks crackle in the distance. Families are gathering. A few blocks from the beach, inside a private estate lined with velvet rope and tacky gold lamé, the President of the United States picks up his phone.

He does not draft a message of hope. He does not thank the voters who returned him to power. He does not promise relief for the families about to lose their health insurance, or mourn the lives lost in a year of renewed disease outbreaks, mass shootings, and foreign wars.

He opens his social media app and writes: “The Democrats are a bunch of cheaters and thieves that never want to do what’s good for America. As an example, they refuse to even consider Voter Identification. Why??? Because they want to cheat, and the Republicans should not put up with this, and many other such things, any longer!!!”

But what do we expect from Donald Trump? He claims to believe in family values. He claims to fight for the forgotten American. He claims to stand for law and order, freedom, and truth. He is also a convicted felon, a fraud. A man whose presidency has become a never-ending performance of resentment and blame. A man who governs through deception. Who spends taxpayer dollars enriching himself and his inner circle? Who attacks the very systems he was elected to protect? And on the final night of the year, he chose hate. Again.

He didn’t stop there. In another post, he mocked George Clooney for withdrawing support from President Biden, misspelled the Vice President’s name as “Jamala (K!),” and then turned his attention to the governors of Minnesota and California, sneering at the idea that anyone from those states could lead the Democratic Party. What began as a tirade against voter ID laws quickly unraveled into personal insults, racist dog whistles, and attacks on entire communities. Amal Clooney, an internationally respected human rights attorney who has risked her life defending journalists and war crimes victims, was reduced to a punchline. Somali Americans were indirectly smeared through his comments on Minnesota. It wasn’t just incoherent. It was deliberate and ugly. And it came from the President of the United States.

This is how Trump ends the year. Not with grace or a message of unity. Not with hopes to build, fix, or protect in the year to come. But with more lies and scapegoating. And while some will dismiss it as just another unhinged rant, this is not harmless. This is the top elected official in the country using his platform to manufacture enemies and stoke division at the precise moment he should be showing restraint and leadership. There is no plan to heal the country because Trump doesn’t want healing. There is only chaos. That is his strategy.

And while he posts from the safety of his fortress, real people are suffering under the policies and systems his administration continues to dismantle. In the past year alone, we’ve watched Trump’s allies in Congress block the extension of ACA subsidies, which means that by this time next week, over 20 million Americans could see their health insurance premiums double or triple. This isn’t a theoretical debate about healthcare policy. This is people losing access to their doctors. And Trump doesn’t care. He never has. His latest statement on health policy? “No more money to fat cat insurance companies. The money must go directly to the people to buy their own health care.” It sounds fair. Until you realize it’s just another lie. Stripping subsidies from insurers doesn’t help working families. It just gives insurance companies more freedom to jack up prices with no guardrails in place. He is not fighting for the American people. He is fighting for a narrative, one that keeps people angry, misinformed, and exhausted.

And then there is the fallout from Trump appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with a long, well-documented history of vaccine disinformation, to lead the nation’s public health infrastructure. Now, we’re seeing the consequences. Measles cases in the United States have hit their highest level in more than thirty years. Over two thousand confirmed infections. Three deaths. And the numbers are still rising. Nearly all cases are in people who were unvaccinated. This was not a surprise. It was the logical outcome of handing over a public health system to someone who has spent decades undermining it. Measles was once eliminated in this country. But now, because of choices made by people who valued political loyalty over medical science, we are on the verge of losing that eradication status. They knew what would happen. They did it anyway. And the suffering of children is just another acceptable cost.

It doesn’t stop there. As of December 24, 2025, the U.S. Postal Service no longer guarantees that mail dropped off on time will be postmarked the same day. This is not a minor clerical change. This is a deliberate shift that affects millions of ballots, tax filings, legal documents, and bill payments every year. Voters who rely on postmarks to prove their ballots were cast on time may now find themselves disenfranchised by a delay in mail sorting. The people most likely to be harmed by this? Low-income Americans, disabled voters, elderly residents in rural areas, and shift workers who vote by mail because they can’t take time off. This is how modern authoritarianism works. It doesn’t always break the law. It rewrites the rules just enough to tilt the system.

And as the year ends, another quiet cruelty is being set into motion. The Trump administration has announced it is freezing child care funds to all states until they provide additional verification and administrative data about their programs. The harm this will cause is immeasurable; the scale of it is something I haven’t even fully wrapped my head around yet. No doubt this will trigger multiple lawsuits, and like so many of you, I’m holding out hope that the courts will intervene and the funding will be released before it’s too late. Because without child care support, parents will be forced to cut their hours or leave the workforce altogether. And when parents can’t work, children lose the very stability those benefits were designed to protect. This is not budget management. It’s not policy reform. It’s targeted harm, Trump and Project 2025 doing exactly what they set out to do. A person who truly cares about children does not gut the systems that keep their homes running. This administration is ringing in the new year by punishing the Americans who need help the most. This has always been the goal. Strip away as many public benefits as possible, force people to keep paying into a system that no longer protects or provides for them, and then redirect the money to his allies, his donors, and himself. Trump and his cronies get richer while the rest of us become more desperate and more dependent on whatever scraps are left.

And perhaps the most devastating truth of all was confirmed under oath today, when the House Judiciary Committee released the full video and transcript of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s deposition. He testified that his team had developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump was guilty, and that the basis for the criminal charges rested entirely on Trump’s own actions. Smith stated that Trump was “by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy” and that “the attack that happened at the Capitol... does not happen without him.” The cases were dropped not because the evidence was weak, but because Trump was reelected and DOJ policy shields sitting presidents from prosecution. The President knowingly spread lies about election fraud, directed fake electors to submit false certificates, encouraged violence against his own vice president, and then tried to delay certification even after the Capitol was attacked, and was declared above prosecution because of his position.

This is the real fraud. Not the kind Trump screams about in all-caps. The governing-by-deception kind. And on New Year’s Eve, with the whole world watching, he reminded us exactly who he is. He is not the solution. He is the scam. He is the one thing he’s spent his whole life accusing others of being.

So if you’re wondering where we are at the start of this new year, here it is. We are living inside the playbook of Project 2025. We are watching the government be reshaped from within. And we are being ruled by a man whose only true talent is manipulation.

And I’ll be honest with you, I’m angry. I’ve been holding it back, trying to stay focused, trying to stay calm. But I’m watching more and more people get hurt by this. I’m watching families lose health care, children get sick, public money funneled to the wealthy, and I’ve had enough. I posted a video earlier today, and you can probably see it when I speak. I’m not hiding it anymore. It’s no longer speculation. The harm this administration is doing is costing lives.

But that anger is also fueling something else. I have a renewed sense of energy and purpose, and I’m funneling it into the work. Thanks to your support, especially through paid subscriptions, I’ve been able to bring on a video editor to help bring these nightly posts to life, so more people can know what’s really happening in this country. And I’ll have even more resources and tools to share with you in the days ahead. We are at a pivotal point in this country, and my goal is to reach as many people as humanly possible before the midterms. Because we have to take back control in one of the last ways available to us. It’s going to take an all-of-us-against-a-modern-day-fascist-regime kind of fight to do it. No one is coming to save us. No one is going to magically do the right thing. It’s us. We’re the ones who will spread the truth. We’re the ones who will build the resistance.

So yes, I’m going into the new year angry. But I’m also going into it ready. Ready to fight. Ready to organize. Ready to bring the truth to every person who will listen. If you’re also angry but determined, you’re in the right place, and we’re just getting started. Happy New Year. Be safe tonight. Rest if you can. And get ready, we have work to do.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can make a difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. There is a free option and the option to help me reach a wider audience with a $5/month paid subscription. Your support allows me to cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in our country.