Trump's behavior is getting harder to understand

Donald Trump emerged from hiding Sunday night aboard Air Force One, gave a rambling press gaggle, and confirmed almost everything his administration has spent weeks denying. He told reporters negotiations with Iran are going "extremely well" then said "we always have to blow them up." He used the word "wars," the very word his administration refused to use because the Constitution requires Congressional approval he never sought. He called the Democratic Party "terrorists." He confirmed Cuba is next.

Trump spent the weekend locked inside Mar-a-Lago, skipping CPAC to avoid facing the eight million Americans who protested the day before. He described killing three rounds of Iranian leadership with complete detachment, said the supreme leader "may" be alive, and could not identify anyone on the other side of negotiations. Representative Jim Himes told Face the Nation that Trump "flat-out" lied about negotiations because he saw a stock market crash coming.

The DHS shutdown became the longest in American history at 44 days. Children are held in detention centers in conditions no human should endure. The president said Democrats "don't care about our country" while standing on a plane costing $273,063 per hour to fly him to his club, trips totaling $101 million since he returned to office.

The Breakdown:

Trump gave a rambling press gaggle aboard Air Force One after hiding at Mar-a-Lago all weekend

He said Iran negotiations are going "extremely well" then said "we always have to blow them up"

He used the word "wars" after his administration refused to call it a war to avoid Congressional authorization

Representative Jim Himes said Trump "flat-out" lied about Iran negotiations to prevent a stock market crash

Trump does not know whether the supreme leader of Iran is alive or dead

He compared war progress and White House ballroom construction as equivalent projects

He held up ballroom renderings and said "I thought I'd do this now because it's easier"

He called the Democratic Party "terrorists"

He confirmed Cuba is his next military target

The DHS shutdown became the longest government shutdown in American history at 44 days

Trump's weekend trips have cost taxpayers $101 million since he returned to office

Oil prices are up roughly 40 percent and gas has climbed past $3.98 per gallon

13 American service members killed and more than 300 wounded in the Iran conflict

Children including medically fragile children are held at the Dilley detention center in Texas

Eight million Americans protested in all 50 states the day before

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 817 in the evening, the President of the United States finally emerged from hiding. He had spent the entire weekend at Mar-a-Lago so that he wouldn't have to face the humiliation of large protests, fractures within his own party, and the longest government shutdown in the history of our country. Now aboard Air Force One, Donald Trump stood in the doorway to the press cabin and gaggled with the traveling journalists, telling them the next country he would be targeting with our military and calling the Democrats terrorists. After a quick update about his war with Iran, the president abruptly changed the subject and held up drawings of the ballroom he is building at the White House, one he said was needed for when authoritarians, or as Donald Trump calls them, dignitaries, like President Qi of China come to visit. After straightening his jacket, Trump spent the next 20 minutes and forty-six seconds acting out the kind of performance that has become the hallmark of this presidency, one where confidence and desperation occupy his body at the same time, where every sentence contradicts the one before it, and where the man delivering it genuinely believes he is selling it, while also not fully understanding much of what he is even saying. He told the press that negotiations with Iran are going extremely well, that the relationship is strong, that progress is being made, and then in the very same breath he said, You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up, effectively telling every diplomat working to bring Iran to the table and every foreign leader that the United States views diplomacy as a prelude to bombing. He said he would probably make a deal with Iran that he was pretty sure and then immediately added, but it's possible we won't. Which is not a strategy and not a plan and not leadership, but the verbal equivalent of a coin flip from the man who holds the lives of thousands of people in his hands and cannot commit to a single position for the length of a single sentence. He told us that Iran has been giving him presents and a tribute out of a sign of respect, describing oil tinkers being allowed through the Strait of Hermoose as personal gifts to Donald Trump. He was so pleased with himself when he said it, so certain that we would be impressed that a country we are actively bombing was sending him tokens of admiration, that he did not seem to realize or did not care what was actually happening. That countries like Pakistan have been negotiating directly with Iran for passage because the president of the United States has proven to the world that he cannot be trusted to negotiate anything. A fact that was even stated that morning by Representative Jim Hines, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who told Face the Nation that Trump flat out lied about negotiations last week because he saw a stock market crash coming with oil at$112 a barrel and simply made it up. Trump also claimed that Iran has agreed to most of his 15-point peace plan, that Iran publicly denies that any negotiations are happening at all, leaving us all to wonder who is running this war and just how much danger we are all in, if this is the level of cognitive function the president is working with. He told us that regime change has already happened, and that the way he described it was against everything America stands for, because he talked about the systematic killing of three rounds of a country's leadership the way a man talks about clearing out an old storage unit. He said the one regime was decimated, destroyed. And he said, they're all dead. He moved on without pausing. The next regime is mostly dead, he said, and then added that one of them may have a little life in him. A phrase so detached from the gravity of the situation and the reality of what he has done to an entire region of the world. And the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anybody's dealt with before, he said, and then called them very reasonable. The word reasonable applied to the people running a country that wounded more American service members just days ago, that has closed the Strait of Hormuz for a month, that has launched missiles at U.S. bases until they are, in Heim's words, supposedly uninhabitable, and that has killed at least 13 American service members and wounded more than 300 as of the filming of this video. When asked if the Supreme Leader is alive, Trump said he may be and that he is seriously wounded, which means the president of the United States does not know whether the leader of the country he is at war with is alive or dead. He does not know who he is negotiating with, and he cannot identify a single person on the other side of the table, but he is pretty sure a deal will happen, or maybe it won't. And either way, they've been very reasonable. This is the same president whose defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said after the June 2025 strikes that this mission was not and has not been about regime change. The same candidate who ran in 2024 as the peace president and warned against this exact kind of war by saying they're all warhawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh gee, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy. And the same man who said in 2011 when Barack Obama was president, and I quote, our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. Barack Obama never attacked Iran. Barack Obama negotiated a deal. Donald Trump started the war. And then he was done with it. You could see it as it happened. The moment the war stopped being interesting for him to talk about, he pivoted to his beloved ballroom. The one he tore down the east wing of the White House to build. He held up architectural renderings and told the press corps about the Corinthian columns that will be hand carved. The bulletproof glass on every window, the drone proof ceilings, how it will be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world, and he said it with such specificity, enthusiasm, and genuine engagement more than he had shown during any moments of the conversation about the war that is killing people right now. He compared being ahead of schedule on the ballroom to being ahead of schedule on the war, as if the two are equivalent projects with equivalent stakes, as if Corinthian columns and a ground invasion of Iran belong in the same progress report. And then he explained why he was showing the renderings now by saying, I thought I'd do this now because it's easier. I'm so busy fighting wars and other things. Wars. He said the word wars, the word that his own administration spent 30 days refusing to use because the Constitution of the United States of America requires Congress to authorize war, and Congress has not authorized this one. He himself has stated multiple times just this past week that he doesn't call it a war because then he needs permission. He said, I don't call the conflict in Iran a war for legal reasons. He went on to say, to start a war you need congressional approval or something like that. And Congress, the body that is supposed to hold that authority, has let him do it. Democrats have introduced resolutions to invoke the War Powers Act. Republican leadership has blocked every single one of them from reaching the floor. The longest undeclared war in a generation is being fought because one man decided to skip the part of the Constitution he found inconvenient. And the people whose job it is to stop him have chosen not to. But that wasn't even all of it. He was not finished. When the conversation turned to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which that day became the longest government shutdown in American history at 44 days, a record that belonged to Donald Trump twice over, the President of the United States called the Democratic Party terrorists. He used that word. The most loaded word in the American political vocabulary since September 11th. The word that has justified two decades of war, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless surveillance, and the entire reshaping of American life around the idea that certain people are so dangerous they forfeit their rights. And he pointed it at the elected representatives of roughly half of the country. The Republicans are wonderful people. But we're dealing with very sick individuals. The Democrats are sick. There's something wrong. They're like terrorists. That's what he said. And he later said about the Democrats, they don't care about our country. They don't care about people. He said that while standing on a plane that cost$273,000 an hour to fly him back and forth to his club on the weekends. That information came from a Huffington Post report. These weekend getaways have now cost the American taxpayers$101 million since he has been back in office. And yet he said Democrats don't care about Americans. Trump is the one hiding from them and costing us huge amounts of money. He also casually confirmed yet again that Cuba is his next target, telling the reporters that Cuba's going to be next, and describing it as a country that will fail, and that the United States will be there to help it out. The same language of liberation that has preceded every American military intervention for a generation. I can't imagine how our military and their families are doing during these constant threats, where they are treated as pawns. There is something that happens in my head every night when I sit down to write these posts, where my brain tries to reconcile two things that cannot live in the same space. On one side is the sheer absurdity of what we are living through, the kind of absurdity that if you let it, could almost make you laugh because none of it seems like it could possibly be real. And on the other side is the weight of what that absurdity is actually doing to real people, to children, to families, and to service members, and to this country. And that weight is not funny at all. And it's the saddest thing I've ever watched happen to something I love so much. Because if you were going to cast the actors for some absolutely atrocious D-level movie on purpose, the kind that goes straight to the bottom shelf because the plot is too unbelievable to be taken seriously, the people that you would hire are the people Donald Trump has hired. A reality TV star running transportation, a Fox News host leading the military, a president who has been convicted of felonies and has faced numerous allegations of sexual impropriety, a vice president who is a chameleon who shifts to whoever is the highest bidder, and whose political career was built and funded by Peter Thiel, operating as the heir apparent to whatever this experiment becomes. An agent just secretary who is an attorney, who is a known disinformation peddler, a man who built his career taking advantage of people and their fears about medicine and profiting from the propaganda he spreads, now running the entire health apparatus of the United States government, while Measles cases climb to levels we have not seen in decades. And making sure that we have a Congress that has somehow been brought to its knees, whether through ideology, blackmail, cowardice, or some combination of all three. And at the center of it, a president whose original motivation for seeking the office was just to stay out of jail. If someone handed you this as a screenplay, you would put it down and say the writers lost the plot. Because no country would let this happen. Because it's too absurd to be real. And yet here we are. And beyond what Donald Trump says and does on the plane, or behind the resolute desk, or any of his other favorite places to hear himself talk, there are children being killed and harmed. In Iran and here in the States. Children are always innocent, no matter what country they are born in, no matter what government rules over them, no matter what language they speak or what God their parents pray to. And the United States military, under orders from the man who spent his Sunday night showing off a ballroom, dropped a missile on a school full of children in Iran. And we can never forget that. I think about my own three girls every time I close my eyes and I think of the horrors that those children went through in those moments and what their families continue to suffer through. And it's not just in Iran. Right now at the Dilly Detention Center in Texas, children, including autistic children and medically fragile children and their parents, are being held in conditions that no human being should endure, and especially not without adequate medical care and psychological support. They are being held in an environment that functions as prisons in everything but name. There is no version of this that is acceptable. There's no framing of immigration policy that justifies holding a child in a cage. This is not and will never be a political issue. This is a moral one. And the people who are telling us this is necessary. The people who have built their brands on being advocates for children are following a leader who has faced allegations of crimes against children of a sexual nature. Allegations that were documented in detail in the Epstein files. Those files which contain testimony and flight logs and depositions that implicate some of the most powerful people in the country are files that this administration has actively fought to keep from public view. If the people running this country truly believed in protecting children, they would want those files released. They would demand transparency instead, they have done the opposite, and that silence tells you everything you need to know about whose children they are willing to protect and whose they are not. At the heart of everything that is happening right now, underneath the ballroom renderings and the contradictions and the incoherent babbling of a president who cannot hold a single thought for the length of a sentence are those of us who want better for our children and for future generations. We might be planting seeds for trees we never get to sit under, and most of us are okay with that, because this was never about us. It was always about what comes next. And as much as what Donald Trump said on that plane that was riddled with contradictions and nonsense and the kind of confident incompetence that would be disqualifying in any other job on earth, I want to say something that might surprise you. That incompetence is one of the biggest advantages we have. He has surrounded himself with people just like him, people who are easily distracted, who are doing this for ego and self-interest, who cannot stay focused long enough to finish dismantling the thing they are trying to dismantle before they get bored and pull out a picture of a ballroom. History has shown us again and again that authoritarian regimes built on loyalty instead of competence carry the seeds of their own collapse. The Soviet Union did not fall because of some great external force. It rotted from the inside because the system rewarded obedience over ability until there was no one left who knew how to keep the lights on. The Argentine military junta of the 1970s and 1980s was brutal and terrifying, but it was also disorganized and riddled with internal rivalries. And when the Folkland wars exposed the gaps between the regime's propaganda and its actual capability, the whole thing crumbled in months. Regimes that prioritize loyalty over competence do not last because eventually the incompetence catches up to the cruelty, and the people see through both at the same time. We are watching that happen right now. They can try to hide their incompetence between words and images by calling themselves patriots and wrapping themselves in a flag they have perverted into a symbol of their own power all they want. But when an estimated 8 million people, nearly one in every 40 Americans, took to the streets and every single state in the country, that was real patriotism. That was not what Trump is trying to sell us. That was America, the actual one, showing up and saying no. I keep thinking about standing at the No Kings protest, surrounded by 2,000 people in a suburban neighborhood that has never seen anything like that, and seeing so many signs that talked about the obligation we have to the generations that come after us. And I keep thinking about the pendulum and how it swings and how our job right now is not just to push it back, but to catch it and hold it so it does not swing this way again. The Doe Kings protest showed us what we are capable of when we stop waiting for someone else to fix it. And I keep thinking about the next seven months. Because that is our challenge now. To find the people who care but not quite enough yet. The ones who are uneasy but haven't acted. The ones who are angry but haven't fully committed. The ones who would vote if someone just made it a little easier for them to get there. If we can have the kind of turnout we had in 2020, we are going to be okay. The math is on our side. The energy is on our side. And most importantly, the constitution is on our side. The only thing standing between us and accountability is showing up. And last Saturday, eight million people proved that showing up is something Americans still know how to do. And that's why I still have hope for America. And you should too. And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I will be here every single day, and together, we will always have hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.