It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese
For the second day in a row, the President of the United States has sequestered himself away from the cameras, remaining inside the relative safety of the White House. And after what he said today, we may finally understand why.
Earlier today, in an interview published by the New York Post, Donald Trump made it clear that he fears for his life, even telling the reporter, “I hope you’ll miss me,” with the author adding that Trump sounded “resigned to the reality that Tehran will never stop trying to off him.”
The article became even more unsettling from there. Trump revealed that he has already “left instructions” should he be assassinated by Iran, making it clear there would be hell to pay. “I’ve been on their list for a long time. That’s what we’re dealing with,” he said, before adding that if anything happened to him, the United States should “literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.”
That interview was published this morning. By tonight, he had gone even further. At 11:18 p.m., Trump posted the following on Truth Social:
“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME! Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran - PRAISE BE TO ALLAH! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
He signed it like a decree. He even gave it a one-year term with an extension clause, as though threatening to destroy a country were some kind of government contract. He didn’t threaten military targets or nuclear facilities. He threatened to “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” All areas. And then he signed off with “PRAISE BE TO ALLAH,” mocking the faith of the very people whose supreme leader he helped kill, whose funeral processions are still underway, and whose citizens have been chanting for his death in the streets. All of this from inside the safest building in America, while thousands of American service members remain stationed across the Middle East and will be the first ones paying the price if his words become someone else’s excuse for retaliation.
Donald Trump has threatened people his entire political career, so this response no doubt came earnestly to him. But it also highlights another one of his character flaws. Most people, when they think about the possibility of dying, think about their families. They write wills. They hope the people they love will be taken care of. Donald Trump is leaving military instructions, making sure the retaliation continues even after he’s gone. There was no care for the citizens of his country or the people of the world. His dying wish is that there is more destruction, death, and instability in the world. Most people want the opposite. They hope for peace. And it also shows that he has no plans to relinquish control. He cannot imagine letting go of power, even in a future where he no longer exists. A man who cannot let go of control even in death is certainly not going to let go of it in November.
The threats against him are real. Iran has wanted Trump dead since 2020, when he ordered the airstrike that killed General Qassem Soleimani. And then came the latest round of Trump’s violence in Iran, including the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei. At his funeral procession this past week, mourners carried banners reading “WE WILL K*LL TRUMP.” A eulogist standing before the crowd called his assassination “our duty.” At the NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday, Trump told reporters he is “number one on the kill list for Iran,” and his departure from the summit required switching planes mid-trip after the Secret Service raised security concerns about Qatar Air Force One. The White House later admitted the switch was part of a strategy of “distraction and misdirection” to protect him.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States about a new Iranian assassination plot targeting Trump. He denied it in the Post interview, saying, “No, no. Israel came up with nothing.” But CNN, citing U.S. officials, reported that the Israeli intelligence may have been an attempt to influence Trump’s posture as he weighs whether to escalate military strikes against Iran. And that is where this gets even more dangerous, because Trump is not just reacting to the threat. He is using it. He is wrapping himself in the language of personal danger to justify the concentration of more power, more control, and more unilateral authority in his own hands.
But the instructions he left about Iran are not the only stories that show us where we are headed. Yesterday, Thursday, July 9, the White House fired all three remaining commissioners of the United States Election Assistance Commission. The EAC is the only federal agency in the country whose sole purpose is helping states run elections. It certifies voting equipment. It distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in federal election support. It sets standards for state voting systems and shares best practices with the local officials who actually administer our democracy. As of yesterday, it has zero commissioners and no quorum to act. Four months before the midterm elections.
The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were terminated by email. The Republican commissioner, Christy McCormick, received a phone call and was asked to resign. All three had been unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate. The fourth commissioner, a Republican, had already resigned in April. The agency is now empty.
The White House justified the firings by saying the president has the right to remove individuals who “may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections.” They were not fired for incompetence or corruption. They were fired for insufficient alignment with Donald Trump. They failed his loyalty test.
This was made possible by the Supreme Court. On June 29, days before the firings, the Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 decision that had protected members of independent agencies from being fired by the president at will. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority: “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we (the court) overrules it.” That decision gave Trump the power to fire commissioners across roughly two dozen independent agencies. He used it within eleven days. And the first place he aimed it was at the commission that helps America vote.
The administration has already gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, which was the other federal body responsible for election security. CISA has lost roughly a third of its staff, about one thousand people. The administration’s budget proposal would eliminate CISA’s election security program entirely, cutting funding for information-sharing with state and local officials and removing dedicated election security advisors across the country. The Election Day situation room, which has operated for years as a real-time hub for identifying and responding to threats on voting day, has not been initiated. Michigan’s deputy secretary of state said it plainly: “All of those relationships have been destroyed.”
And there is something else we need to be paying attention to. Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and describes himself as Trump’s childhood best friend, has drafted a 17-page executive order for Trump to declare a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference through electronic voting machines and seize federal control of the upcoming midterms. Ticktin is the same lawyer who represented Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk convicted of conspiring to breach voting systems. He was in the Oval Office with Trump just last month, after Peters was released. When asked about it, the White House did not say the idea was off the table. They only said Ticktin “overstates his current relationship” with the president. That is not a denial; it is a distance measurement.
Hovland, one of the fired commissioners, shared a message: “When you’re asking more and more of people without giving them the necessary resources, you know, mistakes happen. And so there’s this real risk of like self-fulfilling prophecies in that way.” That is exactly right. They are engineering failure. They are stripping states of federal support, defunding election security, and firing the people whose job it is to make voting work. And when things go wrong in November, as they inevitably will without adequate resources, they will point to the chaos they created and use it as justification for more control.
But dismantling the institutions that run elections is only one part of what he is doing. He is still laser-focused on changing who gets to vote in them.
This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that he will not sign the bipartisan housing bill, which passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming support, in what he called a “PROTEST” because the Senate has not passed the SAVE America Act. His own press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the housing bill as “one of the most significant pieces of housing legislation in American history.” And he is refusing to sign it because Congress has not given him the voter suppression law he wants.
The National Association of Realtors reported that home prices last month rose to the highest level on record, with the median price of an existing home at $440,600. Families across this country cannot afford to buy homes. And the President of the United States is holding their relief hostage until he gets a bill designed to keep millions of eligible Americans from voting.
Here is what the SAVE America Act would actually do. It would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a government-issued photo ID at the time of voting. For most people, that means producing a passport or a certified birth certificate. About 24 percent of Americans under 30 do not have ready access to qualifying documents. Nearly half of Black Americans under 30 do not have identification with their current name and address. The Bipartisan Policy Center found that more than 21 million Americans do not have easy access to citizenship documents at all. This would create a wall between millions of eligible voters and the ballot box.
The bill also criminalizes election workers who make honest mistakes, establishing prison time for officials who register voters without proper documentation, even if those voters are United States citizens. And it allows private individuals to sue election officials under the same circumstances. In a country that is already struggling to recruit poll workers, this bill would turn the act of helping Americans vote into a legal liability.
And the SAVE America Act is meant to solve a problem that does not exist. Federal data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shows that noncitizen voting flags at a rate of 0.04 percent. That is not 4 percent. That is four one-hundredths of one percent. Trump is willing to hold housing legislation hostage, to demand the destruction of the Senate filibuster, and to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters to address a problem that is statistically nonexistent.
Trump also demanded Republicans eliminate the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has told him they do not have the votes. Even within his own party, this has gone too far. The bill cannot pass as written. His protest of the housing bill is performative. Under the Constitution, because he received the bill on June 29 and has neither signed nor vetoed it, the housing bill will become law tonight at midnight without his signature. But the message he sent is real: suppressing votes matters more to him than housing and affordability for the American people.
And there is one more connection that cannot be overlooked. The SAVE America Act contains a provision directing the Election Assistance Commission to adopt and transmit implementation guidance within ten days of enactment. The EAC is the body required to make the bill work. Trump fired the entire commission yesterday. If his voter suppression bill somehow passed, there would be no commission to implement it. Implementation would default to whatever apparatus Trump controls directly, which is exactly the kind of chaos that benefits the person who wants to declare an emergency and take control.
He is dismantling the institutions that run elections. He is trying to suppress who can vote in them. And for the communities most likely to vote against him, he is deploying something even more direct.
On Tuesday morning, July 7, at approximately 6:50 a.m., in Houston’s East End, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving his white work van to pick up his construction crew, the same thing he did every single morning for 35 years. He woke up at 5 a.m. He kissed his wife goodbye. He loaded his van. He drove toward the job site where he and his crew would spend the day building houses in the Houston suburbs.
ICE agents in unmarked black SUVs initiated a traffic stop. They claimed Lorenzo ignored verbal commands, rammed their vehicle, and “weaponized” his van in an attempt to run over an agent. They shot him. He died from a penetrating gunshot wound to the torso. The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide.
He was not even their target. Their incompetence resulted in them going after the wrong man. Two days after killing him, DHS admitted that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the person they were looking for. Texas authorities had tipped ICE off about two individuals from Guatemala. ICE agents had conducted surveillance on a target’s address weeks earlier and noted two white vans at the property. On July 7, they spotted a white van with a driver who “resembled the target” and made the stop. Lorenzo was not the man they wanted. He was just a man in a white van on his way to work.
And DHS did not tell the truth about that for two days. On Tuesday, hours after killing him, they released a statement saying Lorenzo was their target and was in the country without legal permission. That was a lie. They did not correct it until Thursday.
Today, the Washington Post published the accounts of the three men who were in the van with Lorenzo. His brother, Victor Salgado, Jose Trinidad Rojas, and Daniel Tirado Pantoja. All four men in that vehicle had been in the United States for at least two decades. Their attorney, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, spoke to each of the three men separately from immigration detention. They all said the same thing.
Jose Trinidad Rojas submitted a handwritten statement: “That is a lie. It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over.... There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.... Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us.”
All three men told their attorney that ICE’s account was false. That at no point did they use the van to ram into agents. That at no point were the agents’ lives in danger.
And then came the detail that will stay with me for a long time. Victor Salgado, Lorenzo’s brother, said the agents fired from the passenger side of their vehicle, striking Lorenzo in the abdomen. And then, while Lorenzo bled out in front of his own brother, an agent looked at him and said, “You wanted to escape, right?” And mocked Lorenzo as he lay dying.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had no criminal record. His three sons are all American citizens. One is a teacher. One is an engineer. One is studying engineering in college. Lorenzo was close to obtaining legal status. His family had been gathering pictures and statements from employers and loved ones for a work permit application. His son Ronaldo said, “We dotted every ‘i’, crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment.”
No one from DHS or ICE has contacted the family. Ronaldo learned of his father’s death on social media, watching a Facebook post of his father lying on the street after being shot.
“He did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo said. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.’ He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream.”
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said his office is pursuing its own investigation, though “access to key evidence remains under federal control.” He added: “We’re going to look at every avenue, and if a state crime was committed, be it a murder, be it a manslaughter, be it tampering with evidence, we are going to investigate it. And if someone committed that crime, you don’t get to hide behind a badge.” Mexico announced that they will file criminal charges in U.S. courts, with President Claudia Sheinbaum saying, “We cannot stand silent in the face of the deaths of Mexicans whose only crime is working honestly in the United States.”
These three stories are not three separate events. They are one strategy with one objective running throughout our government.
Everything Trump and his people are doing is preparation for the midterms and his ability to stay in power any way possible. And when you add what Bloomberg also reported today, the picture becomes even clearer.
The Department of Homeland Security is building its own airline. Not contracting with commercial carriers, as the government has done for decades. Building its own fleet. DHS is searching for a company to operate at least nine jets capable of flying around the clock, on short notice, carrying out deportation flights and transporting senior officials. The government has already spent roughly $140 million purchasing six Boeing deportation jets, and a DHS spokesperson told CNN the planes will be integrated into deportation operations “in the coming weeks.” They built this fleet in part because the commercial airlines they were using pulled out under public pressure. Avelo ended its contract after activists and lawmakers called out the company for profiting from the abuse of migrants. So instead of changing the policy, they are building a system that answers to no one outside the administration. No commercial airline oversight. Their own planes, their own crews, their own rules.
And we need to ask the question that no one in a position of power seems willing to ask out loud: who says they stop at undocumented immigrants?
This is a government that has already sent people to a high-security prison in El Salvador notorious for torture. That has transferred people to countries where they are not citizens. That has disappeared people without due process. When a government builds its own fleet to move human beings in secret, with no independent oversight and no commercial paper trail, history does not let us pretend we do not know what comes next. Political dissidents. Journalists. Protesters. Anyone they decide does not belong often meets the same fate as the regime’s first targets. We have seen this before. We know where it leads.
What Trump is building is not an immigration enforcement system. It is his own personal apparatus of force and fear, and he is building it ahead of the midterms. ICE agents who kill the wrong person and lie about it for two days. A deportation airline with no outside accountability. Demanding the SAVE America Act to make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote. Firing the very commissioners responsible for helping states run free and fair elections. You do not need to cancel an election when you’ve already made it harder, riskier, and more frightening
This is what we are up against today. Tomorrow it will be worse. The hits just keep coming. Trump has the entire apparatus of the government under his control, and he is using every stretch of the imagination to create as much friction as possible to never leave the White House and to retain and build on his power. This is our moment. We have to get loud. Right now. Today. We call our representatives, and we demand answers about the EAC firings. We demand to know who will be running election infrastructure. We push our state officials to prepare for elections without federal support and to fight for emergency resources.
And we keep telling the truth. Everywhere. To everyone. Not just to the people who already agree with us, but to the people who have not been paying attention. To the people who think this does not affect them. It does. And it will affect them even more if Donald Trump continues to dismantle our democracy and drag the rest of the world down with it.
Some nights I sit down to write and the words come easily. The corruption almost writes itself now. There is never a shortage of cruelty or abuse of power to document. The part I struggle with isn’t finding the stories. It’s living with what they mean. The weight I carry isn’t from writing about these things. It’s from knowing these are still the good days. These are the days when we still have time to stop this. I still believe with everything I have that we are going to survive this and build the country we were always meant to be. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid of how much darker these next four months could become before we get there. If this week alone is any indication of how far Donald Trump is willing to go to avoid losing power, then November will test every one of us.
I also worry about the people who have simply reached the end of what they can carry. The people who have decided to tune it out for a while because they’re exhausted. I understand that feeling more than I can put into words. But then I think about my children. I imagine future generations looking back on this chapter in American history and asking what we did when democracy was hanging by a thread. I think about the parents helping their neighbors register to vote. The strangers standing outside courthouses holding signs in the heat. The people making phone calls after work, writing postcards late into the night, donating five dollars when that’s all they can spare, sharing the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and refusing to let lies become history. And I think about us. You and me. Showing up here every single night. Refusing to accept any of this as normal. Determined to do everything we possibly can over these next four months. Because if we leave nothing on the table, if we fight with everything we have, then no matter what comes next, we’ll know we answered history’s call. And deep down, I still believe that will be enough. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
