Trump’s power is slipping and he’s scrambling to keep control

“Eye of the Tiger” had been blaring so loud you could barely hear the crowd, their fists high in the air like it was a dive bar dance floor in the 1980s. Red hats everywhere and signs with propaganda, waving to the beat. “LOWER PRICES.” “BIGGER PAYCHECKS.” Some even upside down. On cue, the music shifted to a booming voice announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th and the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” Before Trump even emerged from the backstage curtains, the song switched to “God Bless the USA,” and he took a single step forward before stopping, caught in the glow of the stage lights. For a moment, he just stood there, motionless, his face frozen in a strange grimace. Not a smile or a frown. Just that strained, uncertain look he gets when he’s trying to locate himself, both in the room and in his own head.

The camera stayed tight on purpose, close enough that you couldn’t see how empty the room was. But the show was already underway. He reached for the handrails, pulled himself up the short three-step platform like it was a steep climb, and then stood at the top as if he’d conquered something. His chest rose sharply, over and over, as if trying to pull in as much air as possible from the exertion through his pursed lips. His eyes darted sideways, scanning for someone to tell him what to do next. And then it came, as expected, a small, tight smile. Rehearsed and forced. Like someone backstage had just signaled him. He took a few steps forward and gave a single pointed finger to the crowd. “Thank you,” he mouthed. Not beaming or energized. Just barely holding it together.

He slapped his own stomach three times with his right hand, as if trying to psych himself up. As if telling himself he could pull off another one of these events without collapsing under the weight of it. He moved slowly, dragging himself forward, stopping every few feet just as two men in the audience began arguing on live TV because one accidentally blocked the other’s phone while holding up a sign. The illusion cracked for a brief moment. Just long enough to remind everyone what this crowd really is. Not a movement of ideas or a cross-section of America. But a collection of egos and impulse control problems bound together by resentment, and a man whose presence barely disguises the emptiness behind it all.

On stage, Trump kept going. His mouth slightly open as he struggled to breathe evenly, standing there in the harsh spotlight while the crowd erupted into synchronized chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” But there was nothing patriotic about it. This wasn’t about pride for country. It was the ritual incantation of a movement that believes loyalty to Trump is patriotism. That submission to one man is the highest form of love for the nation. This was a sermon, and he was the pastor, prophet, and golden idol rolled into one.

He didn’t speak for a while. He just stood there, soaking it all in, letting the song play out like it was written for him. Then finally, he leaned forward toward the mic and launched into it. What followed was somehow both more coherent than usual and more disjointed than ever, a nonstop torrent of grievances, distortions, and mythology. “After a rigged election, we had a rigged election,” he began. “I had a, I said, do we do it again? And I said, I think we better do it again. Not too many people would have said that. But we did so well the second time, I said, well, we won twice, we got to do it a third time. Should we do it a fourth time, four victories? Four victories.” (Side note: the second time he is referring to is when he lost to Biden.)

He claimed he made people rich, even people he didn’t like. He claimed he personally secured $18 trillion in investments. “I made a lot of people rich that I don’t even like,” he said. “I’ve doubled their net worth. But after four years, of which Biden got less than $1 trillion… we secured commitments for a record-breaking $18 trillion.” The crowd cheered like it was real. He cited John Deere stock prices as evidence of national greatness. He talked about excavators like they were sacred machinery. And he added, almost proudly, “If it doesn’t pay off, I have nothing to do with it. But if it does, I’m going to take full credit.”

He painted Biden as a hollow figure, but really, he was projecting how he sees the world himself: empty, transactional, and stripped of empathy. “You think Biden was thinking about it? He just was thinking about how the hell to get off the stage.” Then paused, waiting for the laughter. “Remember, the guy could never find it.”

He bragged that under his own leadership, America was no longer a “dead country.” That even the king of Saudi Arabia told him so. That he was the reason it came back to life. He warned of Democrats raising taxes, then falsely claimed he had cut hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to improve unemployment numbers, saying that “The reason our job numbers are so good, and remember this, I’ve cut hundreds of thousands of federal jobs. Now, if I didn’t do that, our numbers would be even more through the roof, or I could get them. You know what they do, in order to have decent numbers, they hire a million people. You hire a million people all of a sudden, you’re down to 3.5 percent. We don’t do that. We get rid of that job where you have 10 jobs for every, You have 10 people for every job, and they are all now, and they hated me. They hated me. Now they love me. You know why, they all got jobs in the private sector making twice as much money as they made from the federal government, sometimes much more than that.”

He mocked Kamala Harris, recycled his “Crooked Joe” nickname, then slid into one of the strangest analogies of the night, talking about a conversation he had with UFC president Dana White, “it’s like taking a fighter, putting him in, he’s getting the hell beat out of him.” Like watching a fighter get replaced mid-match. “That’s what happened to me,” he said. “The stuff that happened to me can only happen to me.”

And then, like clockwork, he ranted about people who are unhappy about his leadership. “You do know they’re paid agitators, right? They’re paid; they get paid. You know, do you ever see their signs? You know, we used to have protests, and you’d have guys making a sign in a basement. These are all paid agitators, that’s all they are. They get paid to go, and they don’t even know what, when they interview them, why are you here? I don’t know. They have no idea. They’re paid insurrectionists, really, in some cases, they’re sickos.”

The audience laughed and nodded because they had heard it all before, and that was the goal. He was not trying to convince anyone. He was trying to create the feeling that everyone in the room was on the same side. The laughter signaled belonging, and the nodding signaled agreement. Once that mood is set, anyone who disagrees no longer seems normal.

That is how he wants it to work. If people like him, it proves he is right. If they do not, it is not because of what he has done or said, but because something is wrong with them. He turns disagreement into a personal flaw, so opposition feels isolated and small even when it is not.

This was not just a rally about the midterms. It was a rally about survival. His survival. His grip on power and his place in history. He knows the economy is breaking down for ordinary people. The data is clear. A Siena Research Institute poll released January 26, 2026 found that 70 percent of Americans rate the economy as no better than fair or poor, 51 percent say they cannot afford the life they believe they should reasonably be able to live, only 35 percent feel better off financially than their parents, and 39 percent say they are worse off. A CNN poll from January 16 shows a majority of Americans agree. Fifty-eight percent call the first year of Trump’s term a failure, and 55 percent say his policies have made economic conditions worse, not better.

But even under the lights, with the music blasting and the crowd performing their part, the lies didn’t make him look strong. They made him look desperate. And more Americans see the truth now. He doesn’t care about this country or the American people. He only cares about himself.

“We can never forget what that group of morons did to this country. We can never forget. And we’ve got to win the midterms. That’s why we’ve got to win the midterms.”

He knows what happens if he loses both chambers. His deck of cards crumbles quickly. And he looks like a fool. That’s why he’s going hard on the economy. He wants to make everything about the economy. He knows it’s bad, so he’s doing what he can to try to cover it up with lies. He feels that if he can’t convince people that it’s better than it is, he can at least keep them angry, distracted, and scared. Then he can make enough promises about what’s to come that they’ll forget what’s happening today.

But we have one thing going for us: Trump does not like it when things get messy. His optics are everything. When he walked onto the stage in Iowa, he paused and patted down his coat jacket, then body-checked himself to make sure he was presentable. Only after that did he take a step forward. His image is everything. He knows he can’t project the image of a powerful authoritarian if his body is visibly crumbling. And the same is true of everything happening around him. He doesn’t care about anyone, let alone American citizens who die in these ICE raids. He doesn’t care about unrest. He doesn’t care about destruction. He doesn’t care about the federal occupation of an American city. What he does care about is how it makes him look.

That’s why optics are his weak spot, and we need to exploit them. He is obsessed with watching television; he’s known to sit for hours, flipping between channels, waiting for validation. If even his apologists on Fox start to question him, or the headlines start to shift in the slightest, he notices. He doesn’t stop cruelty because it’s wrong. He stops it if it looks messy, if it looks like he’s lost control. Not because he cares about being seen as a bad person, he doesn’t, but because he can’t handle looking weak.

And that’s exactly why I feel hopeful today. Because it’s starting to look VERY messy for Trump. He’s losing control. He’s floundering. The streets look messy. The country looks unstable. He looks small and ill-equipped to handle the chaos he has created. And for Trump, that’s the worst thing you can say. That’s when he starts to retreat, and the cracks begin to widen.

And we are seeing the response to the pushback. There’s talk of Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who is known to channel a fascist aesthetic in his choice of clothing, being reassigned back to El Centro, California, where he’ll be quickly retired with full benefits. That doesn’t happen unless they’re feeling heat. Even Stephen Miller commented on what happened before Alex Pretti’s shooting to CNN, “We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol.”

This is the same Miller who just days earlier called Alex Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents” on social media, with Vice President JD Vance reposting the same message on X. That tells us they’re scrambling. Miller doesn’t care about protocol. He doesn’t care about Alex Pretti. What he cares about is control. And he sees that slipping.

They know talk won’t be enough this time. So they’re trying to find a fall guy. That’s what this is. It’ll be Bovino, or whoever they think they can sacrifice to keep the rest of the machine intact. But it won’t be enough. People are already calling for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s impeachment. And if things keep moving in this direction, they might go along with it, not because they want to, but because they’ll have no other choice.

Trump does not want to get rid of her. He doesn’t want to get rid of anyone. Because he knows that’s where his last presidency started to fall apart. The second people start getting fired, it signals weakness and instability. And he surrounds himself with people just like himself, people free of any sense of real loyalty, so he knows that if he cuts them loose, they’ll cut him loose. And that never ends well for Trump.

And the person supposedly replacing Bovino? That would be Tom Homan, and he’s a perfect example of what’s really going on. This isn’t cleanup. This is doubling down. Homan was at the center of a federal bribery investigation after undercover agents allegedly recorded him accepting $50,000 in cash inside a Cava restaurant to-go bag from people posing as business executives seeking government contracts. After Trump came back into office, the probe was quietly closed without charges—and Homan began working closely with Trump’s immigration team to expand enforcement authority and reshape ICE from the inside out. The swap from Greg Bovino to Tom Homan isn’t reform. It’s rot moving sideways. One evil man out, another evil man in. And we are not going to celebrate that.

What we are going to celebrate is this: people are speaking out. You can’t open a social media app right now without seeing people speak up. And I’m not just talking about activists or political accounts. I’m talking about regular people. Food creators. Book reviewers. Artists. Parents. Crafters. People who usually stay out of it. And now they’re making it known that they don’t stand with Trump. They don’t support ICE. They don’t believe cruelty makes us strong. And they’re doing it in their own way, in their own voice, from the platforms they’ve already built. It’s amazing to see.

Because this is how we reach people. And when they see others speak up, it gives them permission to do it too. It makes it safer to say, “No. I don’t agree with this.” That’s how the tide turns. And I’m seeing it increase exponentially with no end in sight.

And finally, I just want to say thank you. The support I’ve received for these posts has been overwhelming, and I mean that. These are now reaching upwards of two million people a day. That’s not something I take lightly. That’s a responsibility. And I know it’s working. I know we’re reaching people who didn’t realize the extent of what was really happening. So thank you for allowing me to do this. For helping me share it. For using these words in your conversations, your comments, your families, your friend circles. It matters.

And to those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions, your support is allowing me to focus nearly 16 hours a day on this work and still keep it free for everyone. That’s the only way this works and the only way we reach as many people as we do. I don’t ever want the truth behind a paywall. I want it out in the world. And the only reason that’s possible is because of you.

So please, use these posts. Share them. Use the numbers, the facts, the statistics. Use the language when you’re talking to people who don’t see it yet. This is how we take the narrative back. This is how we stop the disinformation and fight for the truth.

We have less than ten months to flip both chambers of Congress. Every second matters. Every word matters. And you matter. We are in this together, and we are going to make sure that our children and grandchildren don’t have to fight through fear and chaos like we are. We are building a better future for them right now. These coming months are going to feel both short and long. But once we take away Trump’s manufactured, violent grip on power, we can finally shift to building a country rooted in the promises it was supposed to be built on. One that is free and fair for all people. Where future generations grow up safe, informed, and never afraid of their own government. That is why I have hope for America, and you should too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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