Who is actually running this country?

Donald Trump looked confused and lost. In any other situation, people would rush over to help someone like that. They’d speak gently, ask if he was okay, maybe call for a doctor. But this isn’t a man fumbling for his keys; it’s the man in charge fumbling with the fate of a nation. This is the President of the United States, the person with access to nuclear codes, commanding the most powerful military on earth. And the truth is, moments like this have become painfully familiar for him. We’ve seen them over and over, and they seem to be getting worse. Each time, as he struggles to follow a question or fumbles through an answer that makes no sense, it’s impossible not to wonder who’s really running the country, because clearly, it isn’t him.

During an interview that aired on CBS last night, Donald Trump was asked about the cryptocurrency billionaire he pardoned barely 2 weeks ago, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, aka “CZ.”

The one who pleaded guilty to federal charges of money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions. When asked why he pardoned him, his response was startling. “I’ve got to be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t know who this is.”

He said it plainly, with an emptiness in his eyes. He wasn’t even searching for an answer. And then, like a switch flipped, he started repeating phrases that sounded rehearsed and disconnected from reality. He called CZ’s case “a Biden witch hunt”. It didn’t sound like a president defending a decision. It sounded like someone repeating a script he didn’t understand. But the most shocking part was that he didn’t even know who he was or what he had done.

The Binance case wasn’t some small legal issue buried in the news. It was one of the biggest corporate penalties in American history, a $4.3 billion fine for breaking U.S. money-laundering laws. It made headlines everywhere because of how serious it was. The Justice Department said his company “allowed criminals to move stolen money and dodge sanctions,” letting drug cartels, hackers, and sanctioned countries push billions through its system, including terrorist organizations tied to Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, and North Korea.

And yet the man who pardoned the founder responsible for all this, the President of the United States of America, admitted he didn’t even know who the guy was. That’s not how a leader in control acts. That’s what happens when someone signs whatever is put in front of them without understanding what it means or what they are even doing.

And it goes deeper than that. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao made a major business deal with the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. This is the company co-founded by Trump’s sons, and Trump himself, who was listed as the firm’s Chief Crypto Advocate before becoming Co-Founder Emeritus in 2025 when he took office again. Trump has personally promoted the company, too.

For someone who claims to be as hands-on as he is, how could he not know who CZ was before or after he pardoned him? If Trump truly didn’t know who CZ was, someone around him did. Which brings us to the real question: if Donald Trump wasn’t the one making the call, then who was?

CZ’s pardon didn’t appear out of thin air either. Reports show he’d been preparing for it for months, quietly building connections and making deals to improve his chances. So, who did he reach inside the administration? Who brokered the deal, whispered in the president’s ear, and walked away with a signature that freed a billionaire criminal? What was promised? What was exchanged?

Because now we know Trump doesn’t even understand who he has pardoned or why. That should concern every American, because he has already pardoned over 1,600 people. Maybe you could forgive a forgotten name or two with that many, but this isn’t sending Christmas cards. These are people convicted of crimes. That he set free.

And yet this is the same man who rants about President Biden using an autopen to sign documents, calling it “fake” and “lazy.” In reality, presidents have a long history of using the autopen to sign routine paperwork after personally approving it. The issue isn’t the pen, it’s whether the person behind the signature knows what they’re signing. Trump’s pardons reveal something else entirely, a president who no longer seems aware of what his own hand is doing.

If this were just one awkward moment, maybe it could be brushed off, a bad interview, a lapse in memory, a mistake. But it’s not. It fits a pattern that’s been visible since the day he returned to office, and, if we’re honest, even before that. From the start of his second term, the government’s actions have moved with an efficiency and coordination that don’t match the chaos coming out of his mouth. His speeches wander. His interviews drift. His public appearances show a man who can barely keep his thoughts in order. And yet behind that confusion, the machinery of power keeps turning, fast, focused, and ruthless.

At this point, it’s hard to look at anything happening in Washington and still believe that Donald Trump is truly the one at the top calling the shots. Whoever is really in charge might let him choose which conspiracy theory to promote each day or which made-up crisis to use as a distraction, but the bigger moves, the ones quietly dismantling democratic systems and institutions, are not coming from him. They’re being carried out by people who understand power in ways he never has.

Their fingerprints are everywhere. Take the disaster that unfolded with DOGE, created by executive order and handed, unofficially, to Elon Musk. Despite the fact that Musk held no official title, no Senate confirmation, and, by the White House’s own admission, no legal authority to make government decisions, he still did.

Then there’s Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with no official position and no security clearance, who has repeatedly walked into the Oval Office, whispered in Trump’s ear the names of people that he later fired, like those from the National Security Council. In this administration, loyalty isn’t owed to the Constitution or the country. It’s owed to the cult of Trumpism.

And hovering over it all is Project 2025, the 900-page playbook drafted by the Heritage Foundation and a network of wealthy donors who have been planning this power grab for years. They had just been waiting for the perfect situation, a leader who is easily bought and easily manipulated. The Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, openly boasts that Project 2025 will “institutionalize Trumpism” for generations. The document reads like a manual for dismantling democracy, purging career civil servants, consolidating law enforcement under executive control, and replacing independent science and education agencies with ideological loyalists.

But Trump insists he’d never read it. He said during the presidential debate, “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it.” And yet, his first hundred days back in office have followed it almost line for line.

That tells you everything you need to know. The people running this government don’t need him to understand what they’re doing. They only need his anger, his signature, and his name on the letterhead. Trump is the brand. They are the operators. And those operators are doing exactly what they set out to do, dismantling democracy from the inside while keeping a confused old man in front of the cameras to take the questions.

Names like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought make that clear. Miller has spent years building the ideological machine behind Trumpism, from immigration bans to the weaponization of culture wars, and he’s never stopped. Now he is doing it from a position of ultimate power as Trump’s right-hand man. Vought, meanwhile, is the systems man, the bureaucratic architect who knows how to make extremism look like policy. As the lead author of Project 2025, he’s been laying the groundwork to purge career officials, rewrite the federal budget to serve donors, and turn public agencies into partisan weapons. Together, they form the spine of the shadow government operating behind Trump’s name, the ones who don’t need him to understand what he’s signing, only to sign it.

The truth is that this was never about one man. It’s about the people who learned how to use him. They saw opportunity in his vanity, his anger, and his unraveling mind. They turned him into a vehicle for their power, and he let them because he needed their praise.

And the proof is in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” the one he pushed through to reward the wealthy. According to a new Oxfam report, billionaires added $698 billion to their fortunes last year alone. In what is the greatest wealth transfer in modern U.S. history, the study found that the richest ten billionaires gained more than the bottom half of Americans combined, while the share of national wealth held by the top 0.1 percent climbed to a record 12.6 percent.

Economists warn that when the richest 0.1 percent control over ten percent of a country’s total wealth, democracy begins to crack, just as it did in Weimar Germany before fascism took hold, and in the United States before the Great Depression. Extreme inequality isn’t just unfair. It’s unstable. It’s the fuel authoritarian systems use to rise and stay in power.

Behind this massive transfer of wealth lies the oldest strategy in the playbook of power: weaken the middle, starve the poor, and crown the powerful. Because a nation struggling to survive doesn’t have the strength to fight back. That’s how fascism grows. That’s how oligarchies form. That’s how democracies die.

They convince you that what you’re seeing isn’t what you’re seeing, that the corruption is just politics. And yet the most dangerous part of all this isn’t that they’ve hijacked the government. It’s that too many of us are pretending not to see it, because seeing it means admitting how far it’s gone.

History has shown us this pattern before, and we know how it ends when good people stay quiet. Each time, it began with one man’s ego and ended when enough people finally pushed back.

Tomorrow marks one year since Trump won back the presidency, one year since many of us woke up in the middle of the night to that horrible news. I went for a walk on the beach with my husband tonight, just like I did one year ago. I tried to summon that same hope I had for the future back then, even for a moment. It felt good to imagine future generations thriving instead of merely surviving the rule of a madman.

I hope tomorrow we start to see light at the end of this dark chapter in our country’s history. I know it’s within reach. We just have to keep moving forward, and most importantly, vote.

My family voted weeks ago, a huge YES on Prop 50 from us Californians. If you’re having a special election tomorrow, please make a plan to get out there and let your voice be heard, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather