We can’t let Trump keep doing this to us
At 8:06 this morning, the President of the United States posted a message from inside the White House that sent shockwaves around the world within seconds. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” And for the next 10 hours and 26 minutes, the entire planet held its breath.
In Tehran, the government called on all young people to form human chains around the country’s power plants. Iran’s president said 14 million citizens had volunteered to give their lives to defend their homeland. Mothers held their children. Families said goodbye. An entire nation of 92 million people prepared to die because a man with a phone and no conscience threatened to wipe them out.
In the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV called the threats “truly unacceptable.” In Paris, France’s Foreign Minister warned that targeting civilian infrastructure is barred by the rules of war and international law. In London, the British government announced it would not allow its military bases to be used for strikes on civilian targets. In Washington, the offices of the Republican Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader didn’t even return a reporter’s request for comment.
And the rest of us? We did what we’ve been doing for months now. We sat in front of our screens. We refreshed. We watched the clock. We waited to find out whether the man with the nuclear codes would follow through on a promise that a former State Department legal advisor said could be interpreted as a threat to commit genocide.
Then, at 6:32 p.m., roughly 90 minutes before his own deadline, he caved. Thankfully, he once again folded at the last moment, in what many now call “TACO’d.” He posted that he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire, brokered not by American diplomacy or congressional oversight, but by the Prime Minister of Pakistan. He called it a victory. Iran called it a victory too, claiming the United States had agreed to lift all sanctions, withdraw all forces, and accept their nuclear enrichment program. We lost 13 of our service members. Iran lost nearly two thousand people. And at the end, we gained nothing beyond Trump once again embarrassing the American people. Iran, on the other hand, comes out more powerful than it started.
We can’t keep living like this.
Two or three years ago, most of us could go days without thinking about the president. You could wake up in the morning, make coffee, get your kids ready, go to work, and never once feel like the stability of the entire world depended on a single post.
You weren’t checking your phone the second you opened your eyes to see if the President of the United States posted something catastrophic overnight. You weren’t going to sleep hoping tomorrow would be a day that the President or one of his enablers gave us even just one day of peace. There wasn’t a constant, low-level hum of dread running in the background of daily life.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was normal. And that’s what a functioning government is supposed to feel like. You’re not supposed to notice the people in charge every single day. When it’s working, it just works.
But we’ve been living in crisis mode for so long now that most of us have forgotten what that even feels like.
While the rest of the world was holding its breath, the Vice President of the United States was in Budapest, Hungary, standing inside a soccer stadium, campaigning for Viktor Orbán.
While 92 million Iranians were preparing to die and the Pope was pleading for peace, the man who is one heartbeat away from the presidency stood on that stage instead of doing the one thing within his power to stop the chaos. He could have stepped in. He could have invoked the 25th Amendment. Instead, he urged a foreign crowd to re-elect a leader accused of dismantling press freedom, corrupting institutions, and offering, in his own words, to be a “mouse” to Vladimir Putin’s “lion.”
Here’s what JD Vance said from that stage today: “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you.”
At a joint press conference earlier in the day, he called Orbán’s leadership “a model for the continent.” He accused the European Union of “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or even read about.” He said this while standing in a foreign country, openly campaigning for its leader and telling people how to vote. He claimed, without evidence, that Ukrainian intelligence was trying to influence the election. And then, back at the rally, he pulled out his phone and called Trump live from the stage. Trump let the first call go to voicemail. The second time, Trump picked up and called Orbán “a fantastic man,” told the crowd he was “a big fan of Viktor,” and said, “I’m with him all the way. The United States is with him all the way.”
The President of the United States threatened to end a civilization with one hand, and with the other, his Vice President campaigned for a strongman in a foreign election. On the same day. At the same time.
And the thing about Orbán that makes this even more revealing is that he’s losing. The polls show him trailing by double digits against a center-right challenger named Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party is running on a simple platform of ending corruption and restoring democratic norms. The Hungarian people may be about to do what so many of us keep hoping to see here: reject the strongman and choose something better.
Magyar responded to Vance’s visit with something that should be read by every American: “No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country. Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels.”
That is what leadership looks like. That is what sovereignty sounds like. And it’s coming from the opposition leader of a country of 10 million people, not from anyone in our own government.
I’ve shared before my love for Hungary, how I went there as a travel writer multiple times and watched the deterioration of the country and its democratic norms between visits. I’ll be watching this election this weekend closely, because if they can do what so many of us feel desperate to do here, it says something about what’s still possible. My heart is with the Hungarian people, and I hope they succeed in taking back their country.
I keep thinking about who spoke up today, and who stayed silent. Because today, something cracked. Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of Trump’s most loyal defenders before their public falling out, posted on X: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.” She didn’t stop there. “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. This is not making America great again, this is evil.”
And she wasn’t alone. Even Alex Jones called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, said he didn’t want to see us bombing civilian infrastructure and that he was “hoping and praying” it was bluster. Multiple Democrats called for impeachment or removal.
If they are saying this out loud, then everyone knows. And still, nothing consequential happened. The Speaker of the House said nothing. The Senate Majority Leader said nothing. The official Senate Republican account posted an unsigned statement saying Iran “would be wise to take President Trump at his word.” And that was it. That silence is the sound of a party that has chosen power over people. They know what he is. They know what he’s doing. And they’ve decided that as long as they stay quiet, they can ride it out and hope no one holds them accountable. But we will. Every single one of them who couldn’t find the courage to make a phone call while the President of the United States was threatening to destroy a nation’s power grid, bridges, and water supply will have to answer for that.
They will have to answer for their silence in the face of a direct threat against an entire civilian population. For choosing political survival over human life. For standing by while the most powerful man in the world openly talked about destroying a civilization, and doing nothing to stop it.
We will hold them accountable for that. At the ballot box in November, and in every election that follows. But it won’t stop there. This moment will follow them. It will be written into the record. It will be remembered in hearings, in investigations, and in the history books that document who stood up and who stayed silent when it mattered most. We are not going to forget this.
And underneath all of this, underneath the threats and the countdown clocks and the ceasefire and the rally in Budapest, there is something even more dangerous continuing to take shape, something that goes far beyond any single war or single moment. This isn’t just one more crisis, or even one threat, or just one moment that we narrowly escaped. It’s a pattern. It’s the normalization of instability itself. Today it was Iran. Before that it was Greenland. Before that it was NATO. Before that it was Venezuela, and Cuba is coming. Each time, the same cycle repeats itself. A crisis is manufactured, the stakes are pushed to the edge, and the entire world is forced to sit and wait, trying to calculate whether this is the moment when the line is finally crossed. No one knows who or what is next. No one knows whether the timeline will hold. No one knows if the decision that was made tonight will still be the decision that exists tomorrow morning. That is not leadership. That is a system where the entire world is being held hostage to the impulses of one man.
And at the same time that this instability is being exported outward, something just as dangerous is continuing to be built here at home. And we need to call it out every time we see it taking shape and picking up momentum. Because on the very same day that he threatened to destroy a civilization and then stepped back from the brink, he turned his attention to the press once again, and not in the way a president engages with criticism, but in the way someone begins to redefine truth itself. He accused CNN of fraud. He claimed their reporting was tied to a fake news site. He demanded that they retract their reporting with full apologies. And then he went further, suggesting that authorities should investigate whether a crime had been committed simply for reporting what Iran was saying about the ceasefire. And this didn’t happen in isolation, because just the day before, he stood in front of reporters and made it clear that even asking questions could put you in his crosshairs, reinforcing the same message in a different form. This is not about one network or one headline or one disagreement over coverage. This is about power. Because when reporting the news can be framed as a crime, when journalists are treated as adversaries to be punished instead of professionals doing their job, our democratic norms are at risk of total collapse.
And this has cascading effects. People start to calculate what is safe to say and what is not. Editors start to weigh risk against truth. And over time, the information people rely on to understand what is happening around them becomes thinner, quieter, more controlled. That is how information collapses, piece by piece, pressure by pressure, until what remains is only what those in power are willing to allow.
And I would be lying if I said that hasn’t been on my mind. Every night, I sit down and write these posts because I believe that getting information out matters, because I believe people deserve to know what is happening as it is happening. But I would also be lying if I said there isn’t a part of me that thinks about what comes next, about how long that remains possible, about how long before the pressure, the threats, and the hate extend beyond comments and messages and into something more real, something that reaches beyond a screen and into the lives we are actually trying to protect. I know I’m not the only one who feels that. I know there are people reading this right now who have felt that same calculation, that same quiet question in the back of their mind about what speaking up might eventually cost, not just for themselves, but for their families, for the people they love, for the life they are trying to build and hold together in the middle of all of this.
And there is a part of me, if I’m being completely honest, that understands what it would look like to step back, to be quieter, to focus only on what is directly in front of me, to protect my own family from whatever comes next, to not take on the weight of saying things out loud that others are choosing not to say. That instinct is real. It’s human. And I know that many, if not all carry it. But that is exactly why it matters that we don’t stop, because if the institutions that are supposed to carry this information aren’t fully doing it, then it doesn’t just disappear, it narrows, it reaches fewer people, it becomes easier to ignore, easier to distort, easier to control, and that is how moments like this slip past the people who need to see them most.
I saw that today. I spoke to someone who had no idea that our president had threatened to erase an entire country. And when I told them, the reaction was exactly what you would expect. Shock. Concern. Disbelief. But they didn’t know, because the information never reached them, and that should not be possible, not in a functioning system, not in a country where decisions like this can reshape the entire world overnight.
This is something we all have a part in fixing. It comes down to what we pay attention to, what we choose to share, and the voices we decide to stand behind, especially the ones doing the work to document what’s happening and make sure it isn’t ignored. Because the truth is, the more pressure there is, the fewer people are going to be willing to keep taking that risk, and when that happens, the only voices left are the ones that have enough support to keep going. And that’s what determines who can keep speaking, who can keep digging into what’s actually happening, and who can keep putting that information in front of people who would otherwise never see it.
So what we can do in this moment is support independent voices, the ones who don’t have corporate backing, the ones who aren’t as vulnerable to the whims of whatever the President says and does next. Not just me. All of them. If you’re able to, support the people you trust with a paid membership. That’s what keeps this work going. That’s what allows me to keep these posts accessible without paywalls. And it’s what makes sure the people doing this work can keep doing it at all.
If we want people to understand what is happening, if we want the truth to reach beyond the spaces that are already paying attention, then we cannot rely on the system to carry it for us anymore. We have to carry it ourselves.
And even with how heavy today was, and with how uncertain everything can seem, there are still moments that remind us that better days are coming. That Trump’s hold on our country is slipping. In Wisconsin, voters just elected Chris Taylor to the state Supreme Court, expanding the court’s liberal majority to 5-2 and likely securing it through the end of the decade. That majority will shape decisions on reproductive rights, on voting maps, on the very structure of elections themselves. It happened not because of one speech or one moment, but because enough people paid attention, because they showed up, because they decided that the outcome still mattered. And this is especially important because it helps secure a court that will be in place not just for the 2026 elections, but for 2028 as well. At a time when Trump is actively working to undermine the integrity of our elections and erode trust in the system itself, having courts that will uphold the rule of law matters more than ever.
And that’s the part that’s easy to lose sight of in moments like this. The same system that feels like it’s being pushed to its limits is still one where people can step in and change the direction of where things are headed. It’s slower than we want. It’s messier than it should be. But it’s still there. And we still have time. And we’re not going to waste it. That’s 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: This is what normal looks like. A bird in a tree. A quiet evening. No countdown clocks. No threats. We can never forget how life should look and feel.
Sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-iran-war-israel-9.7154434
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/07/iran-accepts-ceasefire-trump-hormuz-10-point-plan/
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/07/trump-vance-orban-hungary-iran-war.html
https://www.euronews.com/2026/04/07/orban-offered-help-to-putin-in-any-way-that-i-can-reports-say
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5819417-greene-25th-amendment-trump-iran-threat/
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/07/politics/25th-amendment-trump-iran-war
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-launches-investigation-into-cnn-over-iran-ceasefire-11796760
He cannot outrun Epstein.
Hi Heather,
Thank you for putting it out there as it really is. The stakes could not be higher, both abroad and at home. We desperately need independent journalists and commentaries more than ever. What you say resonates so strongly with me. I might not be an American, but I know an Authoritarian regime when I see one and the powers of censorship at play. Keep strong, keep the faith and we love and support you 100%!!