Trump’s on the road again selling lies

At exactly 5 p.m. tonight, the entire room stood, phones held high in the air to capture the moment while “God Bless the USA” blasted from the speakers. Just then, Donald Trump appeared to the left, and with his right hand on the rail, he pushed himself up and onto the stage before walking to his place at the table. He stopped right behind his seat, where he smiled and said, “That’s a great song, that’s a great song.” And as the music kept playing, he made the entire room stay standing, cheering for him, until the last note of the music finally faded.

And for the next 46 minutes, Donald Trump was surprisingly alert, shockingly able to stay on task, and showed the best impulse control we’ve seen from him in a while. But even that couldn’t save him from himself when he began talking about how all Americans have more money in their accounts, joked that the economy is great in a city that has seen its sharpest drop in visitors in over 50 years, and then laughed about how much seniors love him and how he loves them too, before adding that he himself is not one.

He was there to speak at a Tax Day roundtable in Las Vegas. A “celebration” of the “no tax on tips” policy he signed into law last year. And it ended up being one of the most revealing insights into how he views working Americans and how little he actually understands or cares about their lives. Not because of any one outrageous moment, but because of how clearly it showed the gap between the man on that stage and the people sitting in that room.

A billionaire who has never lived the kind of financial uncertainty most people face. The kind where you’re deciding between buying groceries and paying rent. Standing in front of working Americans, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, pretending to understand struggles he has never lived, while pushing policies that are actively making their lives harder.

He opened by personally taking credit for the large amounts of money that Americans have in their bank accounts. “Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets this week because of the Republican tax policies,” he said. And then came the threat: “And we got to win the midterms. If we don’t, these policies are going to be taken away from you.” That’s his whole playbook in two sentences. Take credit for what he wants us to believe is true, then scare us into compliance.

Every dollar is because of him, and if you don’t vote for him, they’ll take it all away. It doesn’t matter what people are actually seeing in their own bank accounts, whether the money is there or not. He’s telling us a different reality, one he needs us to believe, regardless of what we’re actually living through. One where everyone is doing better. Where the money is already there, whether we can see it and feel it or not. He wants us to believe that everyone is thriving, and if we’re not, then we’re the problem.

And that’s where the real damage happens. Because when the president of the United States declares on camera that every single American, at every income level is doing better, and you’re sitting at your kitchen table that night trying to figure out which bill gets paid this month and which one has to wait, you don’t think “he’s lying.” You think, “what’s wrong with me?” You think everyone else must have figured it out, and you’re the one who can’t make it work. Maybe you’re not budgeting well enough. Maybe you should be working harder. Maybe you should pick up a second job, a third shift, another DoorDash route. The shame settles in quietly. And it keeps you from saying anything, because if everyone else is doing fine, admitting that you’re not feels like a personal failure.

So you don’t talk about it or ask for help. You carry it alone, and so does the person next door, and so does the family down the street, all of them convinced that they’re the exception to the prosperity the president just promised is everywhere. And that silence is exactly what he needs. Because the moment people start talking to each other, the moment they sit down and compare notes, everything changes. They realize that millions of families are having the exact same experience. That they’re all choosing between gas and groceries, watching their paychecks shrink while prices keep climbing. And the moment that realization sets in, the whole story he just told in that room falls apart.

That’s what this kind of messaging does. It doesn’t just mislead people about the economy. It isolates them from each other. It takes a shared crisis, one created by his tariffs, war, and policies, and turns it into millions of individual failures. It breaks the thing he fears most, which is people realizing they’re not alone in this. Communities don’t organize when everyone thinks they’re the only one struggling. Families don’t fight back when they think the problem is theirs to solve. He doesn’t want us comparing notes. He doesn’t want us in the same room together without him at the front of it, telling us what to believe. And when that works, when people are convinced they’re alone and that the problem is theirs, they’re easier to control, easier to manipulate, and more likely to vote against their own interests.

And the truth is, so many Americans are not okay right now. And it’s not their fault. It’s not because they didn’t work hard enough. It’s the result of an economy shaped by his decisions, his tariffs driving up the cost of everything from food to fuel, his war sending gas prices to $5 a gallon in the very city where he stood tonight, his “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting Medicaid and food assistance to fund tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people in this country. But instead of admitting any of that, he stands at a podium and tells a room full of working people that everything is great. And the ones who know it isn’t are too ashamed to say so, because he just told them they’re the only ones.

And here’s the thing about those dollars. He claimed the average refund this season is “over $4,000” and that workers in Las Vegas are seeing refunds of “five, six, seven, $8,000 or more.” The actual IRS data tells a different story. The average refund this season is $3,462, an increase of $346 from last year. That’s not nothing for working families, but it is a far cry from the windfall he described. And even that modest increase is being eaten alive. Gas in Las Vegas hit $5.05 a gallon the week before he arrived. Diesel hit an all-time high of $6.39. A congressional report found that Americans are paying 35% more for gasoline since the attacks on Iran began, costing families nationwide $8.4 billion. Nevada’s share alone is $83 million. So yes, some workers got a bigger refund. And then they filled their gas tanks and watched it disappear.

And where was he standing when he said all of this? Las Vegas. The city that just recorded a 7.5% annual drop in visitors in 2025, the sharpest decline since record-keeping began in 1970, outside of the pandemic. That’s 3.1 million fewer people walking through the casinos, eating at the restaurants, tipping the bartenders and bellhops he was supposedly there to celebrate. The Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Southern Nevada, has a name for it. Workers are reporting fewer shifts, smaller tips, and hours cut. Caesars Entertainment saw Las Vegas profits drop 20%.

And while Trump was setting up his roundtable, the Culinary Union and the Nevada State Democratic Party were holding a counter-event across town, where hospitality workers described what’s actually happening to their paychecks. Ted Pappageorge, the union’s Secretary-Treasurer, named the pattern directly. Workers, he said, are living through what they now call the Trump Slump, and it is showing up in their hours and their paychecks. Joe Spica, a bellman at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas who has worked in the industry for years, put it more plainly. Something has to change, he said, and it has to change fast, because the policies of this administration are hurting Las Vegas. Senator Jacky Rosen, unable to be there in person, released a video address from Washington the same day, calling out the rising costs and the tourism collapse that are hollowing out Nevada’s economy under Trump’s watch.

Trump didn’t mention any of that. He told the room the economy was “booming.” And then he got to the part where his impulse control slipped. He was reading from his prepared remarks, listing the kinds of small businesses that have benefited from his tax cuts: “restaurants, dry cleaners, corner stores.” And he stopped. He looked up from the paper and said, “What is a corner store? I’ve never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described. A corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please?”

That’s the whole post in one moment. A man who has never set foot in a corner store, who has never had to decide between buying groceries and paying rent, who was born into wealth so vast that $5,000 is a rounding error in his day, reading words someone else wrote for him about businesses he has never entered, for people whose lives he has never lived. And he couldn’t even get through the script without exposing it.

Then came “DoorDash Grandma,” aka Sharon Simmons from the McDonald’s delivery stunt earlier this week. Trump talked about how beneficial “no tax on tips” was for her, but again, he couldn’t control himself. He veered off course, describing the whole thing as: “It was a little bit of a, you know, I mean, to be honest, it was a little tacky. You know, they come up with these crazy ideas like McDonald’s. They’re a little embarrassing. They’re a little tiny embarrassing, but we do them and you win by landslides.” Admitting, out loud, just how far he and his administration are willing to go to manufacture moments, spin narratives, and mislead people if it means winning votes.

And the story he’s telling about her is carefully constructed. A hardworking grandmother, out there delivering food, helped by his policy, lifted up as proof that everything is working exactly as it should. And the more we learn about “DoorDash Grandma,” the more it appears that Sharon Simmons may have been part of moments like this before, brought in to help tell that story. These aren’t organic snapshots of everyday life. They’re staged, repeated, and designed to create a version of reality that feels good enough to believe.

But the story still works because people like her do exist. There are real women in this country spending their later years driving for DoorDash, not because they want to, but because they have to. Taking care of sick spouses. Trying to keep up with medical bills. Stretching whatever they have left just to make it through the month. That part isn’t staged; it is very real.

It’s important to say this. Any tax savings help when you’re struggling. $11,000, $7,000, $5,000, even $20 is real money. For anyone who has ever lived paycheck to paycheck, who has had an unexpected expense come up, who doesn’t have a safety net, that kind of money matters. It can be the difference between paying rent and falling behind. It can mean buying diapers without having to choose which other bill doesn’t get paid that month. Not everyone has a safety net to fall back on.

And that’s why what he is saying is so dangerous. A man who has never faced any level of financial hardship where those amounts would make a difference is standing up there acting like he understands how life-changing that money could be in that moment, and taking credit for it as if it came from his own pocket. It’s not just out of touch. It’s terribly disrespectful and disgusting coming from the president of the United States. Especially since he is one of the few people who could actually fix what she is going through.

He could make sure people have healthcare, so someone like Sharon Simmons doesn’t have to drive DoorDash to pay for her husband’s treatment. He could put safeguards in place so people can spend their later years with their families instead of working just to survive. He has the power to change the system that forces people into these positions in the first place. He just doesn’t have the interest. Because these aren’t his people. They never were.

Then came Officer Cruz Littlefield, a Las Vegas police officer whose wife had just given birth to their daughter a week ago. He thanked the president for eliminating taxes on overtime and said he had already contacted his CPA to set up a Trump account for his newborn. He was grateful, genuinely grateful, and it showed. But then he said something that cut through the entire performance of that room without him even realizing it. He said the overtime tax cut was helping his family “stretch every dollar in an increasingly expensive world.”

An increasingly expensive world. He said it himself, and he said it while sitting at the table of the man who helped make it that way. Trump’s tariffs raised the cost of everyday goods. His war sent gas to $5 a gallon in the city where Cruz lives and works. His “Big Beautiful Bill” slashed Medicaid by hundreds of billions and cut food assistance for the families who need it most. And the tax cuts he’s celebrating? They’re not making working families wealthy, building anyone’s retirement or creating generational security. They’re keeping people’s heads just barely above water in an economy his own policies are drowning them in. The extra money in Cruz’s paycheck isn’t a windfall. It’s a life raft. And the man who threw him into the water is the same one standing there taking credit for the rope.

Then Erin Phillips, a nonprofit founder and mother of five, thanked Trump for “protecting women’s sports” and said it helps her daughters know “they’re worth protecting and that they matter.” She’s right about her daughters. They are worth protecting. And they do matter. But they were never at risk while playing sports. Trump’s attack on transgender human beings is just another manufactured culture war used to distract and divide.

But there was a risk, and it was sitting close by. The man whose name appears thousands of times in the Epstein documents was the man she was sitting beside. A man with multiple sexual assault allegations. A man who just this week posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ and got into a public feud with the Pope. A man whose administration has stripped reproductive rights, defunded programs that serve women and children, and cut the very social services that protect families like hers. For any parent to sit in proximity to all of that and say their children are being protected, it’s not just ironic. It’s the thing that keeps me up at night, because people are being convinced of something that isn’t real, while innocent, harmless, and vulnerable people are being put at real risk, and the divide just keeps growing.

Even at his own event, named after his own policy, the truth was still revealed. His no tax on tips did not magically hide a bad economy, nor did it convince people to care about it more than the things they’re actually struggling with.

He asked the room to clap for their favorite tax cut, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, and when Social Security got the biggest reaction, he laughed and said, “So much for no tax on tips.”

For years, Viktor Orbán was the model of the behavior and gaslighting that Trump is now famous for. Steve Bannon called him “Trump before Trump.” The Heritage Foundation, the same organization that built Project 2025, described Orbán’s Hungary as “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” Trump praised him publicly, called him “a true friend,” “a winner,” “a fighter.” Orbán built exactly what Trump is trying to build here: state media capture, judicial control, crony capitalism, a propaganda machine so complete that truth became contraband. He consolidated power for 16 years. He won four consecutive supermajorities. He looked untouchable.

And we now know he wasn’t. Hungarians showed up and took back their country. Péter Magyar won in a landslide. And I’ve been watching what he has been doing closely after his historic win. It’s been nothing short of extraordinary.

Yesterday morning, he walked into the Hungarian state television studio, the propaganda machine that had banned him from appearing for 18 months, that had lied about his family, that had served as Orbán’s mouthpiece for 16 years, and he sat down across from them and said it to their faces. “What has been happening here since 2010 is something that Goebbels or the North Korean leadership would admire. Not a single true word being spoken. This cannot continue.”

And he didn’t stop there. He told them, “One element of our programme is that this factory of lies will end once a Tisza government is formed. The fake news broadcast here must stop, and we will create independent, objective and impartial conditions to end this propaganda.” After the interview, Magyar posted that the staff at the state broadcaster had been “working under constant intimidation and political terror” and that many of them viewed Tisza’s victory “as a form of liberation.” He announced he would suspend their signal until its public service character was restored, and that he would create conditions that rival or exceed BBC standards, where opposition politicians under his government would be able to appear on broadcasts to express their views and engage in debate. “Every Hungarian deserves a public service media that broadcasts the truth,” he said. He didn’t shout or grandstand. He sat in the chair, looked them in the eye, and told the truth. That’s what the other side of this looks like.

Orbán gave them the roadmap into authoritarianism. Magyar is giving them the roadmap out. And he’s giving it to us, too. Because if 16 years of consolidated authoritarian power, state media control, rigged electoral systems, and a captured judiciary can be swept away in a single day by voters who decided they’d had enough, then so can this. A record number of people showed up and said no more. That’s our midterms. That’s our November moment. That’s what we’ve been building toward every single night. That is exactly what we are going to do. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.

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: It wasn't until the end of our beach walk that I realized my husband, Pete, and I were practically wearing the same outfit. Black pants, same brown top, same white shoes. Nobody planned this. I guess that's what happens after enough years together. Please tell me this has happened to you, too.

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