We are watching Donald Trump implode

At 5:08 this evening, with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blaring through the speakers at Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada, the President of the United States emerged from behind the bright blue curtains with a noticeably fuller head of hair, freshly dyed the familiar shade of orange he was known for in the past. As Donald Trump made his way to the podium, he stopped several times to catch his breath through pursed lips, staring off into the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak about “Working Families Tax Cuts.”

He spoke for an hour and sixteen minutes, but very little of that time was spent on working families or tax cuts. Instead, he delivered a speech that marks an all-time low for any American president in our nation’s history. He bounced from one outlandish claim to the next, attacking Democrats by saying their cities are “filthy dirty all the time. The cities stink, they smell.” He claimed that people who drive electric cars are “diseased.” And once again, he turned his attention to one of our closest allies and neighbors, calling Canada and the Canadian people “nasty.” That was just the beginning of a speech that disgraced the office of the presidency.

Trump opened with a moment of silence for Officer Austin Abdelnabi, a 30-year-old Marine veteran and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty just the day before. Trump called him “an incredible young man” and said, “Austin died a hero and he will never be forgotten.” It was exactly the kind of thing a president should do. But later, when Governor Joe Lombardo spoke to the crowd and mentioned Officer Abdelnabi’s name, the audience loudly booed. The Governor had to pause his remarks to correct them: “No, no, we’re not booing him. He’s the officer that passed away here recently.” That moment was shared all over social media within minutes.

The general consensus was that the crowd heard an Arabic-sounding name and responded negatively because the president had just spent a considerable amount of time attacking Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee. He said he was a communist, said he was “full of shit,” called him “a man of hate,” and said, “He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people, he hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and there’s not a fricking thing he can do about it.” That is why a fallen officer’s name got booed while the Governor was honoring him.

From there, Trump went deeper into his unhinged public meltdown. He complained to UFC executive Dana White, who had welcomed him onstage, that “I’m not getting credit from the fake news for what I’ve done. I never have gotten credit. I don’t get any credit for anything.” This earned boos from the audience for the press, feeding into his groundwork for dismissing any critical or negative coverage they may give him. He continued, “Well, this is all on live television. Every word, if you make one little mistake, one little exaggeration, they go after you with, now, when Biden made mistakes, that’s all he did is make mistakes, nobody ever went after him.” After nearly 19 months in office, Trump is still obsessed with Biden.

And then the lies really started to come. He claimed that “440,000 tipped workers right here in Nevada saved an average of $10,000 on their taxes” and told the crowd that Democrats would terminate the policy if they ever took office. What he did not mention is what independent tax policy groups have been saying for months: that most Americans are paying more, not less, under his second term, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will result in roughly 10 million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, including about 70,000 from Nevada. The bill cuts $911 billion from Medicaid, a program approximately 800,000 Nevadans rely on. But inconvenient facts never mattered much to Trump.

He told the crowd he had “lifted nearly 100,000 Nevadans off of food stamps” and added, “they don’t want to be on food stamps because they’ve got new jobs.” Another lie not supported by any facts or evidence. He retold his story about a Las Vegas waitress who inspired the no-tax-on-tips policy, and he could not help himself: “beautiful waitress came over. I’m not allowed to say that today, but I’ll say it anyway. She was beautiful. What can I say, she was beautiful.”

He gloated about the Fertitta brothers, who own Red Rock Resorts, and Phil Ruffin, whom Trump called “a money machine.” Pointing Ruffin and his wife out in the crowd, he shared that they were “loaded.” And when Governor Lombardo was at the microphone, he took it farther, saying with no apparent irony: “Quite often, when the press and the media run him (Trump) down, they think about, you know, he’s taking care of his billionaire friends, but those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent.” He stood at an event about tax cuts for American families and said that taking care of billionaires is how the economy thrives. And the crowd cheered. That is what a cult rally looks like.

Trump then moved on to what he is now calling “a big military complex” at the White House, which is really the ballroom and bunker that he is building where he tore down the East Wing of the White House. He has recently started changing the language used for this project because “military complex” sounds like a necessary national security concern and “ballroom” sounds like a vanity project for a man who enjoys creating shrines to himself. He also told the crowd, “I’ve been sued, I think I’ve been sued more times than any human being in history,” as though this were evidence of the unfair persecution he faces, as opposed to the natural consequence of his own actions. He wants to be seen as a martyr, a good man who is constantly being taken down by evil, rather than the reality that he is sued more than most people on this planet because he deserves to be sued.

He also admitted, without even realizing what he said, that Republicans are greedy. While talking about the Big Beautiful Bill, he said: “And now we’re asking for more because, you know, we’re greedy and we’re asking for a lot of other things.”

He told the audience that Melania “hates it when I use the term” for what he sees on the sidewalks of Democratic cities, that “she hates it when I imitate no men in women’s sports,” and that she told him his weightlifter impression “is not presidential.” His response: “Well, it may not be presidential, but I won the election in a landslide, so I don’t know, right?” He said “Melania says hello to everybody, by the way,” and mentioned her movie as if she was now a Hollywood Star. What he did not say was where she was. Melania Trump has barely made a dozen appearances all year. Journalist Joanna Coles described it as a “vanishing act.” She didn’t attend Lindsey Graham’s funeral, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or Trump’s trip to China. There are speculations that she is trying to distance herself from her husband ahead of the midterm elections and the investigations that could soon follow.

He went off on a bizarre rant about electric vehicles, saying that their drivers “have a disease. You know, it’s a disease, it’s called, like, they get screwed up. They’re driving and they realize their battery’s getting low, and they start thinking about it when it’s three-quarters full.” He called them “crazy.” Then, immediately after, he declared, “And I like electric cars.”

He told the crowd that “the radical left wants to ban a thing called gasoline.” Yet there has been no call by Democrats to ban gasoline. He said this to scare people, and like nearly everything said today, offered no evidence or proof.

He stood in front of working families and lied about the Trump Accounts, the baby savings program where newborns receive $1,000 from the government. He told the crowd: “Think of it, a child, in many cases, they’re born into pretty close to poverty, or they’re poor, they don’t have money. They start off with $1,000 and it’s going to duplicate, and they can end up with $100,000, $200,000, $300,000.” The government’s own website, TrumpAccounts.gov, estimates that the $1,000 with no additional contributions would grow to approximately $6,000 in 18 years. Newsweek calculated about $5,560 at a 10% annual return. NPR cited a financial analyst who put it at just under $4,000 at 8%. To reach the $200,000 figure Trump threw around, a family would need to contribute the maximum $5,000 every single year for 18 years. The families he is targeting, the ones “born into pretty close to poverty,” do not have $5,000 a year. They are living paycheck to paycheck, and he is selling them a lie that has real consequences.

He talked about elections. He said, “If you had fair and strong elections, they would lose 25 percent of their base. They would never be elected again. And I’m trying to explain that to Republicans, but some of them don’t quite understand it. They don’t understand it because they’re good people. They don’t know how crooked these people are. I’ve dealt with a lot of crooked people in my life. They don’t know how bad these people are. We got to get the Republicans to be tougher.” He is openly saying that if elections were run the way he wants them run, which he calls “fair and strong,” Democrats would never win again. He is calling for the elimination of political competition and democratic election procedures.

He said he wants to fire Supreme Court justices. Speaking about the three liberal justices, he said: “They’re like glue, they never veer. And in many ways, I respect that, I must tell you. They’re horrible for our country. It’s too bad they’re on, a couple of them just don’t belong. I’d like to fire them; I’d fire them if I could.” Then he realized what he had just admitted and he tried to walk it back immediately: “I’m just responding for the meeting. I’m just responding to them. They’ll say Trump wants to fire the judges.” The President of the United States told a cheering crowd of people that he would fire Supreme Court justices if he could. He just shared his desire to dismantle a co-equal branch of our government. Once again reminding us that he wants to be an autocrat plain and simple.

And then he started down the most dangerous part of his entire speech. Donald Trump called Democrats “communists” more than a dozen times. He said, “Communism is the greatest threat to our country in its history, including even World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat.” He said, “I could be the greatest communist in history,” then explained what communism (Democrats in power) would mean for our country: “At the end of the year, you’ll have nothing but death, squalor, poverty. You’ll have a life of hell.” He declared, “Together, we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America once and for all.” He kept going from there with his made-up scare tactics about the “communist platform.” He said of Democrats/Communists, “They have officially endorsed defunding the police, defunding the United States military, abolishing and giving up prisons, they do not want prisons. Because nobody deserves to be in prison, even a person that’s killed 10 people.” He claimed “the Communist platform also calls for legalizing heroin and fentanyl,” and then, he trailed on about fentanyl coming in by sea is down 97%. He even called the remaining 3% of drug runners “the bravest human beings on earth,” prompting someone in the crowd to shout “You’re braver” at the President of the United States, who smiled at the “compliment”.

What we saw in this speech was the president imploding from within. He knows his approval ratings are close to the lowest at any point across both of his terms. He knows the economy is destroying American lives, and that he is running out of scapegoats to blame for his own incompetence. He has already gone after immigrants, transgender people, the press, courts, democrats, and the “deep state.” And none of it has helped with his popularity or the Republicans’ odds of keeping control of Congress. So now he is desperately grasping for anything that might help. Including calling half the country communist.

Communism is not just a word. It carries the weight of an estimated 100 million deaths in the 20th century under brutal regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, communism was a very real threat. It was the great enemy of many of our childhoods. Like so many others, I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall on television and seeing the relief in the faces of adults who believed a dangerous chapter of history was finally coming to an end. On a trip to Germany just before the world shut down in 2020, I took my family to trace the history of that era. We visited Checkpoint Charlie and stood beside the remnants of the Berlin Wall. We saw the architecture that kept the people of East Berlin from even seeing the other side, and we heard stories of families separated for decades. Vietnam is still a living wound for our parents’ generation, with many who never fully recovered from what they experienced and witnessed. The word triggers something deep and visceral, and Trump knows it. That is why it has become such a central part of his strategy to divide us and create a fear that only he can claim to save us from.

But what he is calling communism has no resemblance to what any elected Democrat in the United States has ever proposed. The furthest-left organization with any meaningful presence in American politics, the Democratic Socialists of America, advocates for universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions, and a regulated market economy with a strong social safety net. This is what exists in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Germany, and Australia. These are capitalist countries with private property, free elections, free press, and individual rights. They also have universal healthcare. Democratic socialism is not Marxism. It is not Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism. It does not call for the abolition of private property, one-party rule, or the elimination of markets.

Trump does not care about any of these distinctions because he knows his most diehard followers will just take him at his word. The Washington Post reported that the communist messaging push is coordinated across Trump, Vice President Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News, “This is not your granddaddy’s Democrat Party. These are communists.” Johnson said on Fox News, “It’s communism, socialism, those are deviations of Marxism. This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called progressive movements “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.” Stephen Miller said, “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.”

What we can call this moment is McCarthyism. It is the same tactic Senator Joseph McCarthy used in the 1950s when he destroyed careers, ruined lives, and created a climate of fear where simply being accused of communist sympathies was enough to lose everything. McCarthy did not need to prove anyone was actually a communist to destroy them. The accusation was enough.

This is the tradition that Trump is drawing from when he stands at a podium and calls more than half the country communists. The irony of this moment is that the party that resembles communism the most is the Trump-led Republican Party. Because Trump’s own administration has demanded and been given U.S. equity stakes in private corporations.

He ended the speech by once again awkwardly dancing to YMCA and making kissing faces into the crowd as the song played. It was, in its own way, the perfect closing to Donald Trump’s state of mind. He attempted to portray enormous strength while underneath the act everything is falling apart.

We are watching Donald Trump implode. Every new target and lie to create fear is evidence of it. And in some sad and twisted way, that should give us hope. Not the kind of hope that means everything is fine, because it is absolutely not fine. But the desperation he is showing is real. He knows that when Democrats take back Congress in November, his unchecked power ends. He knows that there will be hearings, oversight, and a constitutional path to his removal through impeachment. That is what he is most afraid of, and it is why he is willing to say anything just to keep his base angry enough to show up in November. But what he forgets is that we are seeing all of this too, and more people are sick of the lies and the chaos, and they too will be showing up in November. 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: My middle daughter taking a photo at Checkpoint Charlie late one evening while we were exploring the city. Berlin was one of our favorite stops in Germany. Full of opportunities to learn, with a vibrant, welcoming population.

Sources:

President Trump Delivers Remarks, Aug. 5, 2026: White House Official YouTube

Congress.gov: CBO estimates 11.8 million will lose health insurance under the OBBBA

Public Citizen: $911 billion in Medicaid and CHIP cuts

This Is Reno: 70,000 Nevadans could lose Medicaid coverage

Nevada Independent: 800,000 Nevadans rely on Medicaid

FactCheck.org: Trump Accounts claims are misleading

The Mirror: Melania’s “vanishing act”

US Polling Data: Trump approval at 39.1%

Reuters/US News: Communist messaging is a coordinated GOP strategy

Conservative Institute: House Republican memo instructs members to brand Democrats as communists

Washington Post: Trump tries out midterms message focused on communists