He wasn't supposed to say this out loud

In a chaotic 97-minute cabinet meeting, Trump declared he might run for president of Venezuela, fell asleep during his own Defense Secretary's briefing, spent five minutes telling the story of a Sharpie pen, and then voluntarily brought up the 25th Amendment, admitting that revealing his plans for Iran could get him removed from office. Nobody asked him about it. He put it on the table himself.

The Breakdown:
Trump holds first full cabinet meeting since launching war on Iran 27 days ago
Admits the 25th Amendment could be invoked on him, unprompted by any reporter
Falls asleep during Defense Secretary Hegseth's war briefing
Declares running Venezuela is "a wonderful option" for his post-presidency
Describes Venezuela as "sort of a joint venture" while confirming U.S. took 100 million barrels of oil
Spends five minutes telling the story of replacing White House pens with personalized Sharpies
Asks when Venezuela will build a statue of him, comparing himself to Simon Bolivar
Hegseth attacks the press and says the Department of "War" will "continue negotiating with bombs"
Trump launches unprompted defense of his cognitive health, claims test "gets really hard in the middle"
Reveals he took a cognitive screening test three times in front of doctors he did not know
Treasury announces Trump's signature will appear on all U.S. paper currency starting this summer
First sitting president in American history to put his name on U.S. money
Removes the U.S. Treasurer's signature from bills for the first time since 1861
Federal law has prohibited living people on currency since 1866, but Trump is bypassing it
Historical pattern: Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Franco, Marcos, Assad, and Mao all put themselves on currency
Trump mocks NATO allies, calls UK aircraft carriers "toys," and says America may not stand with allies anymore
Warns European allies to "remember my statements" and "never forget"
New Reuters/Ipsos polling shows Trump approval at 36%, with 62% disapproving, a new second-term low
Record-breaking turnout at the latest No Kings Rally

More on my daily Substack at: https://heatherdelaneyreese.substack.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Heather Claney Reese, and you're listening to Hope for America, where every day I bring you the truth about our politics, our country, and the forces trying to destroy them. Together, we cut through the noise, expose the lies, and stay focused on what really matters, fighting for the survival of our country. At 10.35 in the morning, Donald J. Trump took a break from praising authoritarians on social media and sat down behind the long mahogany desk inside the White House cabinet room, first meeting with his full cabinet since his war with Iran began. In what was supposed to be a wartime briefing, Trump instead declared he might become president of a South American country and accidentally shared that he should probably have the 25th Amendment invoked on him. And that was just the beginning. What unfolded over the next 97 minutes was an alarming spiral of disinformation and recklessness. And as he sat there in his navy suit, his crisp white shirt and his red tie that perfectly matched the red stripes on the strategically placed and multiple American flags placed behind him, he appeared surprisingly alert, like he'd been practicing for the camera. He cracked jokes, clearly enjoying himself. And if you couldn't hear what he was saying, you'd think you were watching a man without a care in the world. And as he gestured and grinned and interrupted and rambled, it was easy to imagine that he feels like he's back on the apprentice. But instead of saying catchphrases for a camera, he's holding the fate of millions of people in his hands. And he does not seem to understand the weight of all of that. And for their part, his cabinet played along. One by one, they took their turn participating in the theatrical production. Rubio called him the president who finally had the courage to act. J.D. Vance claimed Iran's military is effectively destroyed, and then came Pete Heggseth, the former Fox News host, turned defense secretary, who used his time to attack the press. He said, Behind every headline you write, there's a helicopter crew in the air. That's what he told the reporters in the room. And behind every fake news story, there's an F-35 pilot executing a dangerous mission. He called Trump's war stuff for the history books and stuff for legacy. And then he said the Department of War would continue negotiating with bombs. And the rest of the cabinet nodded along. But none of that is true. The press he was attacking were doing their jobs, reporting the facts with compassion and respect for the men and the women in uniform. It was Hegeseth who was spinning reality into his preferred storyline to make an unjust and struggling war look justified and heroic. And while Hegseth delivered that performance, the man sitting right next to him, the man who started the war, once again couldn't keep his eyes open. Trump sat hunched forward in his chair, his head tilting and his eyes heavy and closed. The commander in chief of the United States military could not stay awake while his own defense secretary briefed him on the war he had launched 27 days before. That is how this administration is really being run by a deteriorating president who sleeps through life and death meetings. And when it was Trump's turn to talk again, he snapped back, not to discuss strategy or a number of important matters involving the country he was elected to lead. Instead, he wanted to talk about pens. To make his point, he pulled a sharpie from his pocket, held it up for the cameras, and then spent the next five minutes telling the story of how it got there. The Biden administration, he said, had left behind ballpoint pens that cost$1,000 each. Gold and silver. Beautiful, he said, but they didn't write. And he said, I take it out and I sign and there's no ink. And I got all you people looking, and you're saying there must be something wrong with Trump. So he personally called the CEO of Sharpie, negotiated the price down to five dollars, asked them to paint it black so it wouldn't look and I quote too informal when he was signing a trillion dollar airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets. They added the White House logo in gold. Almost real gold, he said. Then they added his signature. His signature on a pen. That is what the president is focused on these days. And when his story was finally over, he held the pen out to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson. And he said, Could I give it to a man who's done a great job at treasuring? And the cabinet laughed, because that's what you do when the most powerful man in the room hands you a$5 pen and expects you to act grateful for the gift and amazed by the story. And then moments later, he went on his next detour. I'm the highest pulling person, he said. In other words, after the presidency, I think I may go to Venezuela and run for president against Delsey. I may run against DLC. It's an option for me. It's a wonderful option. The room laughed at the absurdity of it all, because they had been trained to always respond to his outpursts in this way. But it becomes more troublesome when you think about what he had just said. The president of the United States declared that running a foreign country he just invaded is a wonderful option for his post-presidency. And as much as I'd love to just say this was a joke, with Trump, all of his so-called jokes must be taken seriously, because this is not a man limited by rules or common sense. This is a man who responds with impulse. And now earlier in the same meeting, he had described the Venezuela arrangement as sort of like a joint venture. He said, We get a lot out of it, referring to their oil. He confirmed that the U.S. took in a hundred million barrels in the first two weeks. Rubio confirmed the money flows into a U.S. Treasury-backed account. Trump said the U.S. has made a lot of money and that they've paid for the cost of that military hit many, many times over. One of his cabinet members then told him the Venezuelan people were going to build a statue of him, comparing him to Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America. Trump's response, that would be a great honor. And then while that same cabinet member was still talking about oil production and American companies returning to Venezuela, Trump interrupted him to ask, forget that. When are they going to do the statue? Because all jokes aside, that is what Trump cares about most. Seeing his likeliness plastered all over our country and the world, like most authoritarians do. That's what he cares about. And then in the moment that was the most concerning and possibly the most truthful thing Donald Trump has ever said, he admitted the reality of his presidency. A reporter asked about his plans for Iran. Trump said he couldn't reveal them and then unprompted offered this. This is exactly what he said. I can't say what we're going to do because if I did, I wouldn't be sitting here for long. They probably what is it called? The Twenty Fifth Amendment? He couldn't remember what it was called. The Twenty Fifth Amendment. The constitutional mechanism designed specifically to remove a president who is no longer fit to serve, or in Trump's case, was never fit to serve. And he had to search for it mid-sentence. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, which they didn't do with Biden, which is shocking. Now nobody asked him about the 25th Amendment. No reporter brought it up. No cabinet member raised it. He volunteered that information. He put it on the table himself in front of the cameras in the world. And in doing so, he told the country two things at once. That somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows the 25th Amendment is a real possibility for him. And that even he knows it should be invoked based on his actions. That is what sat behind the mahogany table that day. That is who is running this war. And as if to prove the point he didn't realize he was making, Trump spent the final stretch of the meeting on an unprompted defense of his own mind. No reporter asked about his cognitive health or even brought it up. The question that started it was about European deportation policy. But Trump's mind took him somewhere else completely. He went from European policy to attacking Democrats to calling Kamala Harris and Biden two sleepy people, too stupid people, to again mocking Gavin Newsom for having a mental disability, to then ironically declaring, I don't want a stupid person being president. And that's where his own brain betrayed him once again. Because from there, with no one pushing him, he drove himself straight into a defense of his own cognitive decline. He told the room he's, and I quote, the only president that has ever took a cognitive test. That he took it three times, that he aced it all three times, that the questions start easy, but by the time you get in the middle, it gets tougher. And by the time you get to the end, very few people can answer those questions. And that's the part where he let the truth out. A cognitive screening test is not an IQ test. The questions don't get tough for healthy brain. They're designed to detect impairment. If the middle of the test is where it starts getting hard, that's not a sign of difficulty. That's a sign of potential decline. These tests exist for one reason, as a screening tool designed to measure cognitive strengths and weaknesses. So when the president tells us it gets really hard in the middle, he's telling us more than he thinks. And then there are the questions no one in the room had the courage to ask. Why has he taken it three times? Most of us have never taken one. It's not part of a routine physical. It's ordered when there is a concern. Who ordered them? He said he took them, and I quote, in front of numerous doctors that I have no idea who they are. He doesn't know who was evaluating him. And he said his own doctors warned him beforehand that, and I quote, it's Walter Reed. It's essentially a public hospital. And if you do badly, it's probably going to get out. They warned him for the test. That's not how you prep someone you're confident about. That's how you prep someone you're worried about. And he ended this all by calling Obama not a smart man and saying Biden wasn't a smart man 30 years ago, but the room wasn't thinking about Obama or Biden. The room was watching a 79-year-old president in the middle of a war, unable to stay awake during his own defense secretary's briefings, defending his cognitive fitness in a room full of people who hadn't asked, and insisted he passed a test that most healthy adults never need to take. Every day brings more chaos and damage, but this day it went beyond just what Trump said and into what he is doing. Because hours after that cabinet meeting ended, the Treasury Department made an announcement that shows how unrecognizable this country truly has become. Starting in June, Donald J. Trump's signature will appear on all U.S. paper currency. The first$100 bills will roll off the press this summer with his name on them. He will be the first sitting president in American history to put his signature on our money. And to make room for it, they are removing the signature of the U.S. Treasurer, a position that has appeared on every single bill printed since 1861. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant released a statement that read like something out of a state propaganda handbook. He said, There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than US dollar bills bearing his name. In that one sentence, the Trump regime made its intentions clear. Donald J. Trump and the United States of America are one and the same. Our great country and President Donald J. Trump side by side, as if there is no difference between the two, because in his mind, there isn't. And this wasn't even his first attempt at conquering all of the visual reminders of what this country really is and replacing them with his likeness. His first attempt was to put his face on a coin. He wanted a one dollar coin with his portrait to go into circulation, and then he also wanted a twenty four karat gold commemorative coin with his image hunched over a desk, fists clenched, to also be available. But federal law has prohibited living presidents from appearing on U.S. currency since 1866. The nonpartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, a body established by Congress specifically to review coin design, refused to even look at it. The chair's words carry the weight of what Trump has been attempting. Only those nations ruled by kings or dictators display the image of their sitting ruler on the coins of the realm. He called the proposal abhorrent to the Declaration of Independence. And here's what makes this so much bigger than vanity. George Washington, the first president of the United States, the man who led the revolution, specifically refused to put his face on the country's currency. He called it monarchical. Hope I said that right. The Mint Act of 1792, one of the earliest laws of this nation, stamped coins with an image of liberty instead of Washington's face. The founders did this on purpose. They had just fought a war to free themselves from a king. They were not going to put another one on their money. That principle held for years until Donald Trump became president. And now to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence from that king, this president is stamping his name on every dollar bill in America. The irony is so heavy it's painful because it will be just one more way to normalize his authoritarian tactics. It is just a signature, but it means so much more. And we know that because we've seen it before. Mussolini put himself on Italian coins. Saddam Hussein's face was on every Iraqi dinar. Franco did it in Spain. Marcos in the Philippines, Assad put himself on the Syrian currency in 2017 while his country burned. Mao is on every bill in China. The pattern is consistent across a century of authoritarian regimes. And it never varies. When a leader puts himself on the money, he is not honoring the nation. He is claiming ownership of it. And now connect it to everything we watched. The pen with his signature on it, the statue he wants in Venezuela, the joint venture where he is extracting oil from a country he just invaded. And then the things he's already done. The Kennedy Center with his name added to the building, the triumphal arch he's building, his name going on warships on a drug discount website, on savings accounts for newborns, his face on a banner hanging down from the Department of Justice. And now he's adding his name to our money. And while he stamps his name on our currency, he's simultaneously tearing apart every alliance that once made this country a force for stability in the world. Because in that same cabinet meeting, he told our NATO allies to remember my statements and he warned them to never forget that they didn't help. He called the UK aircraft carriers toys compared to what we have and mocked their offer of support by saying, We'll send our aircraft carriers when the war is over. I said, Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you very much. Don't bother. We don't need it. And then most devastatingly, he said this about standing with our allies in the future. We're always going to be there. At least we were. I don't know about it anymore, to be honest with you. And we need to remember, these were not random comments. This was the intentional destabilization of allied governments. He is weakening Europe because strong allies hold him accountable. He went after Venezuela first because Maduro was a dictator, no one would defend. And then Iran because the nuclear threat made it justifiable on the surface. He's already said Cuba will just fall. He said Operation Colombia sounds good to me. He said you have to do something with Mexico. And he hasn't forgotten about Greenland or Canada. He's just temporarily distracted by easier targets, racking up winds, building the precedent that America can take what it wants without consequences. But here's what he doesn't understand. And what every authoritarian eventually learns the hard way. He can put his name on every bill in circulation, and we still get to decide where these bills go. Because I personally spent the better part of an afternoon doing something that has become a regular part of my life under his administration, making sure my money is going to people on the right side of history. And that day's search was for a new specialist doctor for preventative care. But now I don't just read reviews and check credentials. I also scroll through their social media looking for any sign of where they stand. I'm not expecting a public statement from every provider. I understand the cost of speaking out. I felt it. The threats against myself and my family, I get it. But I also know what silence costs. And I personally wanted to find someone who understood that too. And I did, I found one, a doctor who had posted against ICE, who had made it very clear that they weren't okay with what's happening to our country. And during my appointment, when I went in, I told them exactly why I chose them. It wasn't just amazing reviews. It was because they too were not okay with what is happening to our country. They said it was hard. They acknowledged that they get pushback, but they own their own practice and they can't be fired and they felt it was important to speak out. And now I'm going to be bringing my entire family to this doctor because we have to support each other. We have to make sure that our money goes to the people are standing up when it would be easier to stay quiet. I always think back to that old saying that if there's a fascist at the table and 10 people sitting with them, then you've got 11 fascists. I'm not calling anyone a fascist for being afraid. But I am saying that this isn't business as usual. Nothing about this is. We are watching a dangerous regime take shape in real time. And every one of us is making a choice about where we stand, whether we realize it or not. And I personally am choosing to reward the people who are brave enough to say something. And I'm asking all of us to do the same in any way we can. I know it is hard to find a doctor these days, and this isn't practical for everyone to do, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing venture. Look for the opportunities you can easily align with others that are on the right side of history and start there. We are not looking for perfection in our resistance efforts. We are looking at endurance because our pushback is working. New polling from Reuters from March 24th now shows approval rating has dropped to 36% with 60% disapproving, which is a new second term low. We just had a record-breaking turnout for the last No Kings rally. And as we get closer to the midterms, the resistance keeps moving. The resistance movement will just keep getting louder and louder. If we can keep the pressure building, we will be in a very different place next year. We will have a Congress that actually checks the power. And that is why I still have vote for America, and you should too. And I want you to remember no matter how dark it gets, I'm going to be here every single day, and together we will always have hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.