It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese
At 3:43 p.m. local time in Turkey, the President of the United States grabbed the stairs to his plane with his swollen right hand while his bruised left hand hung motionless at his side. This was not the plane he had arrived on; his newly refurbished Qatari Air Force One, but instead the older presidential aircraft he had used before. The change was sudden and unexpected, and multiple reports indicated it was related to security concerns with Iran, even as Trump denied that was the reason while simultaneously contradicting himself, telling reporters traveling with him, that they are “on a dangerous flight,” and, “I’m number one on their list, before you,” before adding, “But if I go, you go. Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”
This was just a few minutes in Donald Trump’s day. By the time the day was over, he had confused world leaders and countries. Sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier in the day, Trump mistakenly referred to him as “President Putin.” And while discussing the conflict with Iran, he declared, “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan.” He had also, once again, signaled his determination to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally, and told more easily verifiable lies than perhaps any sitting president in American history. It was another reminder to the world that the most powerful office on Earth is now occupied by a man whose physical and mental condition appears to be deteriorating at an alarming speed, leaving the entire planet in harm’s way.
The NATO summit was supposed to project strength and unity among the Western alliance. Instead, it became a stage for one man’s unraveling. Trump opened his morning by sitting beside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and declaring, in front of the international press, that he was “very upset with NATO.” He called Spain “a terrible partner” and “a wasted cause,” then turned to his Treasury Secretary and ordered him, on camera, to “cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.” He added, “Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless, bad people.”
He then renewed his demand that the United States take control of Greenland, a territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark. “Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark,” he said, before invoking the Nazi occupation: “When Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day, Hitler beat them out in one day, took over, they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded by saying her country was “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” and that Greenland is “not for sale.”
But the most consequential moment of the day had nothing to do with alliances or defense spending. It had to do with war. Just three weeks after celebrating the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles, a deal he had called a triumph of his personal diplomacy, Trump declared that the agreement was “over.” He called Iranian leaders “scum” and “sick people.” He said continuing to negotiate was “a waste of time.” And he announced that U.S. forces had struck more than eighty targets inside Iran overnight, with more likely coming. “We hit them very hard last night,” he said. “Probably hit them hard again tonight.” Oil surged more than six percent. The Dow dropped six hundred points.
In the same stretch of remarks, while discussing his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he suddenly blurted out, “You know who’s No. 1 on Tic Tac (sic)? I am. I’m number one on TikTok. And all I talk about is how bad communism is.” He claimed to have “like 4 billion views or something like that.” In reality, Trump has roughly sixteen million TikTok followers, which does not place him in the top fifty accounts on the platform. And when some reporters expressed concern about TikTok’s influence, he waved them off: “People have to get their priorities straight.”
That is the sentence that captured the entire day. While ordering strikes on a nation that shares a border with the country he was standing in, while threatening to destroy civilian water and electricity systems, while demanding territory from an ally, the President of the United States bragged about his social media following. He then told the rest of us to get our priorities straight, because we are not sufficiently impressed by his follower count on an app he cannot correctly pronounce.
And all of that happened before he boarded the plane. Aboard Air Force One, after the press had to keep their blinds drawn and the plane shut off their transponder, Trump walked to the press cabin and spoke for fourteen minutes. What came out was a flood of fabrications so constant and so detached from reality that it became difficult to track where one lie ended and the next began.
He told reporters that “probably billions of votes” had disappeared in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. California has roughly twenty-three million registered voters. The entire population of Earth is eight billion. And this is the same man who demands voter ID to protect the integrity of our elections.
He claimed that prescription drug prices had come down “four hundred to five hundred to six hundred percent” under his leadership. A price cannot decline more than one hundred percent. One hundred percent means the price is zero.
Maybe the most telling moment was when he was talking about the conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Trump said, “I settled after fourteen years and about fifteen million people had their heads chopped off.”
Fifteen million people did not have their heads chopped off. Not in Rwanda. Not in the Congo. Not anywhere on Earth, in any era of recorded history. Fifteen million is roughly the entire current population of Rwanda. The broader Congo conflicts, spanning three decades, killed an estimated five to six million people, overwhelmingly from disease, displacement, and starvation. And he called it a settled war, even though his own administration acknowledged in March that the conflict is still ongoing.
I can’t stop thinking about what it means for us as a society when the President of the United States invents fifteen million beheadings, and says billions of votes vanished. These are lies. And they are coming from the man who controls our nuclear arsenal, commands our military, and is actively waging a war without consideration for his allies or permission from Congress.
And what makes all of it worse, what makes it dangerous instead of just absurd, is that it is not only dishonesty; it is showcasing how quickly his decline is accelerating.
Today, at a NATO summit, on the world stage, the President of the United States called Iran “Japan.” He called Zelenskyy “Putin.” He called TikTok “Tic Tac.” He called the JCPOA the “JCPOC.” He called Erdogan the leader of a “great company.” He stumbled over the word ‘denuclearization,’ first calling it ‘d-nuking’ before finding the actual word. His feet were so swollen that his ankles spilled over the sides of his shoes. His left hand, bruised and covered in makeup, hung limp at his side as he climbed the stairs until it jerked backward in an unnatural motion that was caught on video and circulated around the world. He is eighty years old. And when the White House was asked about all of it, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement calling his performance “marathon” and “high-energy,” claiming the president “commanded every room.”
He did not command any room. He alarmed every room he entered. Retired Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said what so many are thinking: “There is something deeply wrong with him. His friends know it, his critics know it. His staff, I’m sure, knows it. The world knows it. World leaders know it. And most importantly, our enemies know it, which is why they don’t take him seriously.” Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh called for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Senator Chuck Schumer called it “an embarrassment to our country on the world stage.”
And still, no one around him acts. No one in his inner circle intervenes. No one invokes the constitutional mechanisms that exist for exactly this moment. Because what we are witnessing is not just a president in decline. It is the most significant cover-up and the deepest corruption our government has ever faced at this level. There is nothing in modern American history that compares. Every person propping him up knows exactly what we are all watching. Every enabler who stands behind him in that room. Every cabinet member who clears the press when he begins to lose coherence. Every Republican in Congress who looks the other way. They know. And they do it anyway, because they want to stay in power. That is the entire reason. They are not acting out of patriotism or principle. They are anti-American in the most fundamental sense of the word. They allow and enable all of this to stay close to power and profit.
And while they cover for him, he is destroying the architecture that has kept this country and its allies safe for generations. In a year and a half, he has shattered alliances that took nearly a century to build. Alliances that matter. Alliances that were forged on the graves of people who died to protect them. He called Spain’s people “hopeless” and ordered his Treasury Secretary to cut off all trade. He demanded Greenland from Denmark by invoking the Nazi occupation. He posted a mocking image of the Italian Prime Minister days before sitting across from her. He told the world he only attended this summit because his friend, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, was hosting it. He said he does not need NATO’s help. And he keeps saying it, over and over, that we are “far away” from the rest of the world, that “we have an ocean separating” us from danger.
We were not so far away when Pearl Harbor happened. We were not so far away when the towers fell. Things do not stay within imaginary borders. They never have. And what he is doing right now in Iran is not making us safer. He is attacking a country instead of helping its citizens free themselves from a regime that oppresses them. He is threatening to bomb infrastructure that provides water and electricity to ordinary people. And in doing so, he is creating the next generation of extremists who will grow up knowing that America destroyed their homes and their families. We will be the ones to pay for that. Not him or his enablers. Us. Our children and grandchildren. Our service members. The people who will be sent to fight the wars that his recklessness and his impairment have set in motion.
Because that is the truth no one around him will say out loud. He cannot govern this country. He simply cannot do the job. And the people who are supposed to protect us from exactly this kind of danger have chosen instead to protect themselves.
We simply must take back both chambers in November. And when we do, here is what becomes possible. Real subpoena power returns. Not just letters or requests. Not strongly worded statements released to the press and forgotten by morning. Subpoenas with the full force of congressional authority behind them, aimed at every decision, every contract, every military order that was issued by or on behalf of a president who was not capable of making them himself.
Impeachment and removal become possible. And the mechanism is specific. We remove Vance first. We leave the vice presidency empty. Then we remove Trump. And when he goes, the cabinet structure that has been propping him up collapses with him.
And then come the investigations. Not just into this president, but into every member of Congress who made this possible. Even the ones who are no longer serving and the ones who get voted out in November. We need to understand why they did what they did. Were they being threatened? Were their families being threatened? Were they promised money, positions, or protection? Or are they simply terrible people who wanted access to power and did not care what it cost their country? We need those answers. Because what they did was not a difference of opinion. It was not politics as usual. It was the deliberate abandonment of their oath of office and the willing destruction of the country they swore to serve. There must be accountability. Without it, the next version of this will be worse. And there will be a next version, unless we build the precedent now that what they did can never be done again.
We are watching a man who is physically breaking down, mentally unraveling, and morally bankrupt try to hold together a presidency that is being operated, behind the scenes, by people who were never elected and who answer to no one. The only thing standing between them and the future of this country is the midterm election. We have to remember that every seat and every vote matters.
And if today felt like nothing but darkness, look at what happened while Trump was stumbling through his NATO performance. A federal judge ordered the release of five point eight million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the woman a jury found Trump sexually abused and defamed. Trump’s lawyers appealed within an hour. And then, hours later, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his request to block the payment. He lost twice on the same case in a single day. Every court that has touched this case, from the trial court to the appeals court to the Supreme Court, has ruled against him. The system held.
And in Florida, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act,” ruling that restrictions on how race and gender can be taught in public universities violate the First Amendment. The court called it “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.” And the judge who wrote that opinion was appointed by Donald Trump himself, during his first term. Even the judges he put on the bench are drawing the line.
On a day when his decline was visible to the entire world, when he embarrassed his country on the global stage, the courts back home still held firm. And that matters, because it sends a message to every loyalist, every enabler, every member of Congress who thinks they can ride this out and escape the consequences. He is not untouchable. And neither are they.
In November, they will be reminded that the power still belongs to the people. And that is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
