We can’t pretend that Trump is calling all the shots

With puffy eyes, hunched shoulders, and a bruised hand, he sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and told us just how much he despises being the president. When asked why he appears to be sleeping during high-stakes meetings, he said, “It’s boring as hell… I’m going around a room, and I’ve got 28 guys; the last one was three and a half hours. I have to sit back and listen, and I move my hand so that people will know I’m listening. I’m hearing every word, and I can’t wait to get out.”

This wasn’t a joke. And it wasn’t taken out of context. It was the President of the United States, in his own words, admitting he has no interest in governing. That he holds disdain for the people speaking to him. That he fakes his way through the job, pretending to listen instead of leading. That he feels no real responsibility, no curiosity, no desire to understand what’s happening in the country he’s supposed to be running. He’s not tired from the weight of the office. He’s tired of being asked to care.

And then came a moment that said even more than the words themselves. Talking about his father, Fred Trump, he said, “He had one problem… At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He couldn’t remember the word. He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for help. “Alzheimer’s,” Karoline Leavitt answered. “Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.” When asked if it was something he thinks about, he replied, “No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why? Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”

His response didn’t make sense. Not because he misspoke, but because he didn’t care if it made sense. He brushed off one of the most serious medical conditions a person can face while holding the presidency, with a shrug and a deflection. This is a man already under global scrutiny for signs of mental and physical decline, openly refusing to engage with the reality of aging or illness.

And this isn’t just about Trump’s ego anymore. It’s about what kind of danger this puts all of us in. A president who talks like this isn’t running the country. He’s walking away from it. When was the last time he sat through a full intelligence briefing and actually paid attention and contributed like a President should, with care and deep concern for his actions? Or is he just happy to play figurehead while others, like Stephen Miller, are calling the shots?

The fact that he couldn’t remember the word Alzheimer’s wasn’t just strange; it was unsettling. It doesn’t confirm anything about his health, but it doesn’t rule anything out either. What we do know is that he’s already proven to be volatile, impulsive, and erratic, and the public deserves full transparency about his condition. The interview contains even more disturbing moments, including one where Trump warned the reporter that if they wrote a negative piece about his health, he would “sue the ass off” the publication, adding that there might come a time when such a story “wouldn’t matter as much.” His thoughts often drift into incoherence. I highly recommend reading the full interview for yourself.

The interview, published by New York Magazine and titled The Superhuman President: A good-faith attempt to ascertain the truth about Donald Trump’s health by Ben Terris, is careful and restrained. It lets Trump speak for himself, which, in this case, is more than enough. It is behind a paywall. And yes, that’s frustrating. But the old media model is gone. And for me, supporting journalists who haven’t sold out to the far right feels like voting with my wallet. I’ve been subscribing more because of that. I keep my own work free so everyone can read it, and that’s only been possible because of the generosity of those who support it through paid memberships. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. But I understand that for a large magazine, that fee structure wouldn’t work.

But what matters tonight isn’t just what Trump said. It’s that the world is watching him say it, and drawing conclusions, whether we like it or not. It echoed a long pattern in authoritarian regimes: the refusal to admit vulnerability. In dictatorships throughout history, from Stalin to Mussolini, admitting weakness or illness was considered an existential threat to power. The regime became more about the illusion of strength than truth. Trump is performing that same illusion.

What we’re watching is a presidency in freefall, masked only by the silence of those around him and the machinery of a government that no longer answers to its people. We’ve been here before. Toward the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, there were growing questions about his cognitive health, questions the White House denied, even as staff quietly worked around him, limiting his exposure and reducing his workload. Just five years after leaving office, Reagan announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Retrospective linguistic studies have since found patterns in his second-term press conferences consistent with early cognitive decline, patterns dismissed at the time as political attacks. And now here we are again, but with someone who lacks the safeguards Reagan had and, speaking generously, his grace, caution, and respect for the office.

And this isn’t just about one man anymore. It’s about the system propping him up. The reason his decline is being allowed to continue is because powerful people are benefiting from it. Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Peter Thiel. The architects of Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation. Turning Point USA. Elon Musk. And so many others. Names we didn’t elect. Names with no accountability to the public. They feed Trump what he wants to hear, keep him calm enough to sign what they need signed, and then run the country through him like a puppet. And the more Trump checks out, the easier it becomes for the regime to centralize power in the shadows. The man who once prided himself on firing people face-to-face is now asleep in meetings while others decide the fate of millions.

The danger is not just the chaos. It’s the vulnerability it creates. When a president is this detached, it leaves us exposed. Exposed to manipulation, bad actors, foreign interference, and the unchecked domestic cruelty we are seeing every single day. There is no one home at the top, and everyone knows it. The only people still pretending he’s in control are the ones making sure he stays just coherent enough to be useful. Because the only thing more dangerous than a dictator is a dictator with possible dementia surrounded by extremists who are fully aware of it, and fully willing to exploit it. And I think that’s what’s hardest to sit with. We’re watching our country be overtaken by a fascist regime, and everyone who could stop it is in on the arrangement or is pretending it will all go back to normal when he leaves.

What too many people still don’t understand is that Donald Trump didn’t run for president again because he loves the job or believes in public service. He ran because it was an opportunity to carry out his retribution hit list, to amass greater wealth, and because winning was his clearest path to escaping prosecution. Jack Smith was appointed special counsel the same month Trump announced his candidacy. By August 2023, Trump faced federal indictments on 44 counts across two cases, charges that, if he’d lost the election, could have sent him to prison. Instead, he won the election, and both cases were dropped because the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute sitting presidents. The timing wasn’t coincidental. Trump understood the stakes better than anyone.

That was the calculation. And it’s not hard to imagine how that arrangement came together. The Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 architects likely came to him with an offer: we’ll bankroll your run, flood the courts with lawsuits, financially rig the system state by state, and keep you from going to prison. But in return, we get a say in any decisions you make while in office. We will make this presidency easy for you. You get to perform for the cameras, rage post, and throw tantrums if you want, but we write the executive orders, we decide the laws, we name the officials. You just sign off and stay out of the way.

Trump didn’t care what was on their list of demands. It didn’t matter to him. Abortion bans? Not his issue. Stripping women’s rights? He’s never respected them anyway. Immigration crackdowns? As long as they were only targeting brown, black, and Asian folks and communities, that’s all he cared about because he viewed them as expendable. He didn’t even care if any of it hurt his own voters. As long as it kept him out of prison, he was happy to sign. If controlling women made the far-right Christian nationalists happy, he’d let them do it. If LGBTQ+ kids had to be sacrificed for a little political protection, he was fine with that. These weren’t ideological decisions. They were transactions. His only principle has ever been self-preservation, power, and money.

That’s why the same man who fast-tracked mRNA vaccines under Operation Warp Speed now entertains anti-vax conspiracy theories. He knows they aren’t true. He’s vaccinated himself. But when the scientific community rejected him, he turned to those who welcomed him back with open arms, not because he believed in them, but because they fed his need to feel adored. That’s what made the RFK Jr. alliance so easy. He doesn’t care about science or public health. He just knows it’s fun to rile people up. To him, spreading disinformation is a sport. And it works. It sells. It reaches more people than truth ever could, because outrage moves faster than facts, and because the people who believe those lies are desperate for someone to blame.

And that’s the deal. Trump didn’t just sell out the country. He sold it to people who never wanted democracy to begin with. He looked at the list of Project 2025 priorities and said, Fine. Do whatever you want. Just make sure I win. And they did. They had the orders drafted. The policies written. The media outlets bought. And now we’re living in the aftermath of that bargain. He doesn’t even know the details of what he approved. He denied knowing about Project 2025, even as its full agenda was being carried out under his name the moment he was sworn into office.

And now they’re looking past him. Authoritarians don’t care about legacy. They care about control. Trump’s not going to run again. That doesn’t mean his words aren’t dangerous or that his actions shouldn’t be taken seriously. But everyone knows his time is nearly up. That’s why they’re testing new figureheads. That’s why they sent J.D. Vance into the spotlight this week. He’s their dream puppet. A man who used to compare Trump to Hitler, who once warned about the rise of fascism, now falling in line completely. Not because he’s changed, but because he never stood for anything. He craves power more than truth, and he knows it’s easier to gain approval from extremists than earn respect from the informed. So he surrendered his spine for a seat at the table. And now he’s vying with Marco Rubio to be the next in line to the throne.

If Trump is no longer able to stay in power, the same forces that elevated him will push their next useful idiot to the front. That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. Because while everyone keeps watching Trump, the machine behind him is still moving. And it’s already preparing for what comes next. This isn’t to say Trump is any less dangerous or any less evil. He is. And at this point, he could very well be thrilled with all of Project 2025—especially during his more lucid moments. But we need to remember there are others still building, still scheming, still laying the foundation for a permanent, post-democratic America. And they don’t need Trump to finish the job. They just need enough silence from the rest of us to get away with it.

In that interview, a senior White House official said Trump has been “thinking more about what he will be remembered for.” That stuck with me. It was one of the more unexpected details in the whole thing, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. Even men like him, who hurt people without ever feeling sorry, eventually start to wonder how they’ll be remembered when it’s all over. And I’ve thought about it too. What will he be remembered for?

I’ll remember him for trying to destroy our country. For nearly breaking it in two. For handing power to people who dream of a permanent ruling class and think democracy is just a marketing slogan. For turning government into a tool of cruelty and making millions of Americans believe it was righteous.

But what I’ll also remember from this time is that we didn’t let him win. I’ll remember all the brave souls who put their bodies in front of injustice, and the heroes we lost in the fight for our country. I’ll remember how we still got up every single day, even when we knew the news would bring more cruelty, more chaos, more betrayal. And I’ll remember how we didn’t let them break us. That together, we pushed back, we voted them out, and we held them accountable for their crimes.

Trump’s legacy is already written. He’ll be remembered as a modern fascist, a coward who admired dictators and tried to become one. He may not care. But we do. And we won’t let the world forget what he did, or what we did to stop him.

Everywhere I looked today, I saw more reemergence of resistance. Endless brands, companies, and individuals with platforms large and small declaring what side of history they are on. This is what happens when a country is pushed too far, too fast. We stumble, but then we rise. And we’re finding our footing again, even as they try to pull the ground out from beneath us.

I remind myself that progress is never a straight climb. There are valleys that feel like failure. But they’re part of the rise. Even the worst moments carry us forward. And one day we’ll look back and know that this dark period brought us closer to the country we were always meant to be: free, fair, and full of justice for all. That’s why I still have hope. I hope you do 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.