At 9:08 PM tonight in Dallas, Texas, an exhausted Donald Trump slowly emerged from behind the stage and clapped four times as Lee Greenwood again serenaded him on the final night of the first-ever Republican Midterm Convention. On his way to the podium, he stopped to hug J.D. Vance, tapping his forehead to J.D.’s as he made his way to the podium. As Lee sang an extended version of Trump’s favorite hype song, “God Bless the USA,” Trump used the time to stop directly in front of the women in the front row, making sure not to get close enough for them to touch him. As he grabbed the microphone, a woman could be heard screaming “Yeaaw Trump” right before he began his 25-minute final speech.
While struggling with slurred speech for the second night in a row, Donald Trump barely started his speech before telling the crowd that he is “getting a little tired of politics now.” But that was nothing compared to what was to come. As a final act of the night, the President of the United States of America told his supporters, in front of cameras and the entire world, that they needed to cheat in the midterms, that they would go to hell if they didn’t vote, before ending the convention by demanding they pledge their allegiance to him and not their country:
“Raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. I am gonna go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family and we are going to vote on November 3 or we are going to vote before that.”
Then he added: “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell, you know that. And I don’t want that to happen to you, so please go and vote.”
His reasoning for demanding this oath was simple. They owed it to him. “You’ve got to do me the biggest favor you’ve ever done,” he said. “You’ve got to do this for me. Pretend I’m on the ticket. I’m on the ticket.” He wasn’t asking them to defend their country or the Constitution. It wasn’t to safeguard the future of our great republic, either. This was all for him. He ended the pledge with all he had. Once again evoking God. “If you vote, you vote Republican. So help me God.” In a speech just 25 minutes long, he brought up God twice. The first time to make his demand seem like a biblical necessity, and the second time to enforce divine punishment against anyone who fails to vote as he demanded. He showed his desperation in this moment by fusing politics with scripture and obedience with salvation, turning a midterm election into a sacrament of devotion to one man, as if voting for him and his party had somehow become a test of religious faith.
The depths that this man just took our country to tonight cannot be overstated. Our President made American citizens raise their right hands and pledge their loyalty to him, not to the country. To “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” a title he fabricated and wrote for himself. And told us all to cheat at the midterms. To vote even if we are not registered to vote. This was not a joke or him trying to be funny. This was his battle call to his most radicalized base, and it was exactly like the loyalty oaths that have preceded authoritarian consolidations of power throughout modern history. This was also another dark day for those of us who love our country.
His remarks were not the only deeply concerning ones to come out of the final day of this desperation convention. Earlier, during a speech by Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who spent his time calling Democrats “evil” and warning that “communists and Islamists” had taken over the Democratic Party, Ted Cruz said the names of three Democratic politicians: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. After each name, a person in the audience could be heard shouting, “He should be shot!” The words were loud enough to be heard on the live video feeds.
Ted Cruz never stopped to address someone in the audience calling for the shooting of his fellow politicians. It is impossible for us to know whether he heard what was happening, but if he didn’t, why did nobody in the room tell him? Why did nobody in the arena discourage political violence?
Right before Donald Trump came on to give his closing remarks, Vice President J.D. Vance had his time on stage, where he delivered his keynote and spoke about the American flag and what it now symbolizes, or at least his spin on it. After a protester walked down the arena stairs waving a Mexican flag, J.D. Vance deviated from his planned remarks and instead said, “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” and continued with “I’ll buy you the plane ticket.” He called the protester “an idiot waving a Mexican flag at a protest when he should be waving the flag of the United States of America.” He called it “the symbol of the far-left.”
Vance and the whole Trump regime have constantly perverted not just our own flag, but the flags of so many other countries. They have commandeered something so deeply woven into our shared national identity and turned it into political ammunition. They are using our flag as both a weapon and a dividing line between who they believe belongs in this country and who does not. In that moment, Vance was not defending the American flag; he was using it to draw a line between who gets to be considered American and who does not. He took a moment of protest and tried to make it proof that displaying the flag of another country somehow makes someone less American, when America has, and always will be known as the melting pot of people, cultures, traditions, and histories from every corner of the world. That has never made us less American; it is part of what has made us extraordinary. It is who we are and who we have always been. We are the country where people from every corner of the world have come carrying pieces of the places they left behind and woven them into something distinctly American. That was the promise behind this country, where our strength has never come from everyone looking the same, worshipping the same, or tracing their families back to the same place. It came from all of us becoming part of something larger together, with our differences celebrated, not feared or erased.
To see our flag perverted in this way over and over again, commandeered by people willfully trying to destroy all that it stands for, is a different kind of pain. Like so many of us, I have seen and felt what our flag really means. I remember a moment a few years back, as my family and I walked through the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, feeling lost in the concrete blocks that rise and fall in patterns that make no sense. I remember trying to make sense of what made no sense, which many say is the point of that memorial, because you cannot make sense of what happened in the first place. I felt disoriented, and nothing felt stable.
When we came through to the other side, the first thing we saw was the American flag, flying high above the American Embassy building. It was the feeling of relief that I had never been fully able to realize until today. My whole family felt it, and we all walked towards it. I remember feeling such immense pride not just in the flag, but in being American. It wasn’t that we were a perfect nation or that we always got it right. I felt pride because we were always trying and working towards it. We were respected and “the good guys”. It was never about being better than others; it was always about the promise our country held. Standing there, the flag flying high above, we felt grounded again in something real and something safe. The flag was not a weapon or a threat. There was no loyalty test or oath to a man being demanded of us. The flag represented the country that helped end the horror we had just spent hours learning more about. That is what the flag meant to me and my family in Berlin. That is not what it meant tonight in Dallas.
I keep coming back to that feeling tonight, that need to be grounded in something real, because watching those people waving cutout squares of our flag in that arena made me feel such shame and sadness. And as difficult as it is to see, maybe we need to witness these moments to remind ourselves what this country was actually built on. Maybe it has to break terribly like this to remember that it was built for this exact moment. The founders designed it deliberately and painstakingly to prevent exactly what happened tonight.
This country was built so that no American would ever have to swear allegiance to a single person. The founders had just fought a war against a king who demanded personal loyalty. They created the entire framework of our government to safeguard us from a madman or a king. The oath of office for the President of the United States does not ask the country to serve the president. It asks the president to serve the country. The words are: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath the president takes flows upward from the people, not downward from a throne.
George Washington understood this. At one time, he was one of the most powerful and respected figures, and there were people who wanted to make him king. He said no. Instead, he served our country and chose to honor our republic instead of choosing to wear a crown. He established the most important precedent in American democracy: that power is temporary, that it belongs to the people, and that no man, no matter how popular or powerful, is bigger than the nation he serves. That single act of restraint is the reason this country survived its first century. It is the foundation everything else was built on.
I keep asking myself what George Washington would have thought if he had walked into that arena in Dallas and watched an American president make his own citizens raise their right hands and swear an oath to him. I have no doubt that he would have recognized it immediately for what it was and been horrified by what this country has become. Maybe not surprised, but disappointed nonetheless.
Even Ronald Reagan understood this. At the 1988 Republican National Convention, he said: “When people tell me that I became President on January 20th, 1981, I feel I have to correct them. You don’t become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.” Ronald Reagan saw himself as a custodian holding something sacred in trust for the American people. Trump sees himself as a king who deserves worship.
In his 1967 inaugural address for his first term as Governor of California, Reagan warned: “Freedom is a fragile thing, and it is never more than one generation away from extinction.” And in his presidential farewell address from the Oval Office, he reminded Americans: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us.”
Tonight, September 10, 2026, in Dallas, Texas, the sitting president of the United States of America told the American people before him to raise their right hands and pledge an oath to him. History is never far away, and maybe never has it felt as close as today.
Because on August 2, 1934, the day German President Paul von Hindenburg died, the German military oath was rewritten. Before Hitler’s rise, German soldiers had sworn loyalty to the Constitution and its institutions, never to any single leader. Hitler had already begun reshaping that oath after taking power, but Hindenburg’s death gave him the opening to finish the job. The new oath read: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
The shift was from allegiance to a nation and its laws to unconditional obedience to one man. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calls this “a key element in the Nazification of the German military.” The American journalist William Shirer wrote that this oath “enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of a Supreme Commander.” This was one of the final guardrails to fall.
We are not Nazi Germany. We don’t have to let our country fall to an authoritarian con man. History is there to teach us and remind us of lessons hard-learned in the past. The fundamentals of this country have not been changed; they are still holding. They have not rewritten the Constitution, and they have not erased what Washington did when he chose the republic over the crown, nor what Reagan understood when he called himself a temporary custodian. The foundation is still exactly where the founders left it. We just have to remember that, and remind others who we really are, and the evil that has us dangling off the edge of a cliff. There are more of us than there are of them. None of this, even when it feels insurmountable, is permanent. We have come back from harder times before, and we will come back from this. This time, we will come back better than we ever were. We are Americans. That is just what we do. 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: I took this picture right as we saw the American Flag in Berlin. We always felt so much pride seeing this flag flying above embassies on our travels. I remember walking along the tree-lined streets of Bratislava, Slovakia, on a warm summer night, eating ice cream without a care in the world, and seeing our embassy and stopping to think how lucky we were to be born in such an amazing country that gave us a passport that allowed us to travel so freely. I’m sad for where we are today, but I’m never without hope, even on the bad days.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
Campaign 2026: Republican Midterm Convention (Day 2): C-SPAN YouTube Video
https://www.newsweek.com/read-pledge-trump-made-rnc-convention-attendees-take-12429340
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/11/politics/takeaways-from-night-2-of-gop-midterm-convention
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6083597-trump-midterm-pledge-vote-convention/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-military-oaths
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/pledging-allegiance
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/speeches/farewell-address-to-the-nation-1989
That raising arms in pledge to trump? A bit like the Nazi salute but with a bent arm, eh
Dear Heather,
I can only imagine how it feels for you to have to write those words. It must be soul destroying but they had be said. DT is becoming an extremely desperate man, staring into the abyss of his own demise. You can just feel the fear. Then you have JDV with his hideous mocking of a protester. Sickening. A typical demonstration of Nazism by the two of them. Obey or else.
Where is the Humanity? America, (and the world), has just been remembering the tragedy of 9/11 and we get utterly selfish rhetoric from them as if they haven't learned a thing.
Thankfully, people aren't all bad! With you Heather, and all the other amazing writers, there is hope.
Lots of love and support from the UK.🇬🇧