Trump’s latest desperate attack - he’s completely lost it

Donald Trump spent Saturday trying to project strength, but what he revealed instead was fear. From a golf course outside Washington, D.C., he lashed out at Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, the New York Times, Democrats, and nearly every major news outlet because they dared to raise questions about his health, his behavior, and the truth the public has a right to know. At the same time, his Justice Department is hauling Times reporters before a grand jury over reporting that embarrassed him, while his administration keeps escalating lawsuits, subpoenas, raids, arrests, deportations, censorship threats, and government pressure against the press. This is not random anger. It is a campaign to make truth feel dangerous, and it is aimed at every journalist, writer, creator, and American who still believes the First Amendment belongs to the people.

Based on the events of 7-11-2026

The Breakdown:

* Trump spent Saturday at Trump National Golf Club while posting five increasingly erratic Truth Social attacks in one afternoon.

* Maggie Haberman told Jonathan Capehart that Trump's health remains a "black box" inside the administration, with less information released after repeated Walter Reed visits.

* Trump responded by calling Haberman "Maggot Hagerman," attacking her reporting, and threatening the New York Times with a multibillion dollar lawsuit.

* He claimed he had just finished a "perfect physical" and another cognitive test at Walter Reed, even though the White House said he was referring to his May 26 exam.

* The cognitive test Trump keeps bragging about is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a screening tool for dementia, not an intelligence test.

* By 3:16 PM, Trump posted a 449-word rant attacking Haberman, Jonathan Swan, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

* Three more posts followed between 4:54 and 4:56 PM, including attacks on Democrats as communists and "loud and unattractive people."

* George Conway warned that a severely mentally ill man has control of America's nuclear arsenal, while Haberman and Swan calmly pointed to the success of their book "Regime Change."

* The Justice Department subpoenaed New York Times reporters Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt to testify before a federal grand jury.

* The subpoenas appear tied to Times reporting on Secret Service concerns about Trump's Qatari-gifted Air Force One and its lack of advanced antimissile capabilities.

* Times attorney David McCraw called the subpoenas "brazen," and press freedom advocates said they break with longstanding Justice Department protections for reporters.

* Trump's administration has taken control of the White House press pool and barred the Associated Press over its refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

* FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has investigated major networks while sparing Fox, and pressure around CBS, Paramount, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and ABC shows how media leverage is being weaponized.

* Trump has sued ABC, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the BBC for staggering sums no sitting president has ever used against the press this way.

* Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, NPR, and PBS have all been targeted or gutted under this administration.

* Pentagon rules under Pete Hegseth pushed reporters to surrender credentials rather than accept restrictions on seeking nonpublic information, even when it was unclassified.

* The White House launched a government "media bias" tracker, while journalists including Mario Guevara, Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and Hannah Natanson have faced arrests, deportation, or raids.

* Trump has threatened to jail reporters who protect sources, called for treason charges against news organizations, and reportedly pressed Todd Blanche with printed articles marked "Treason."

* The larger strategy is not just to win cases, but to make speaking, reporting, writing, and telling the truth feel personally and financially dangerous.

* The answer cannot be silence. It has to be louder voices, stronger support for independent and legacy media, and a public that refuses to surrender the First Amendment.

This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

I'm Heather Tlaney 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 9.54 yesterday morning, the president of the United States of America finally emerged from his self-imposed safety-related isolation inside the White House to spend a Saturday at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. But instead of simply playing golf, Donald Trump spent the afternoon unraveling on Truth Social. Over the course of five increasingly erratic posts, he lashed at a journalist, declared that he had just passed another cognitive screening exam he supposedly takes every six months, despite his last one being just over six weeks ago on May 26th. He attacked the Democrats as communists, called one of the nation's most respected journalists, one of the most unattractive people in the news business, and in perhaps the most surreal moment of all, wrote an imaginary speech about himself that ended with this. Trump is the best political athlete of all time. Congratulations, Mr. President. You have beaten us for 10 years, and we are not going to waste our time fighting you any longer. We can't win. Do a great job, sir, running our country. Make America great again. After a week that went from bad to worse for the president personally, Donald Trump managed to look increasingly weak and vulnerable in just a single afternoon. And it started, as it often does, because a journalist told the truth. Because earlier yesterday morning, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and her colleague Jonathan Swann, co-authors of the best-selling book Regime Change, appeared on EmmaS Now, which is what MSNBC used to be. And it was on the show the weekend with host Jonathan Capart. When Capart asked whether the American people should be concerned about the mental acuity of the president, Haberman did not mince words. His health is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue. That's what Haberman said and added, and if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this in trying, not mental per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to Walter Reed several times, and they have released less and less information. She continued, We see what you see, which is he is 80, which is that he is clearly, you know, doesn't speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, as people who turn 80 tend not to. And that was it. That was all it took. A journalist stating what everyone with eyes can see, and the president of the United States could not handle it. By 12 23 p.m., Trump was on true social writing, Maggie Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for 10 years. Her book is a joke. 90% of it is fake news. She has made a living off her bad reporting and will pay the price when our multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the failing New York Times gets to court, which should not be that long. He continued, I don't mind fake reporting, like what's in her boring book, and like she's done for 11 years, with only one aim in mind, to have Trump lose elections. But as I said in the Oval Office and Ponder, that hasn't worked out too well. Maggot is a loser. If she ever wrote the true story about me, it would actually be quite boring, but loaded with lots of success. Then he said, success in all capital letters. Then without any transition, tagged on to the end of this rant about a journalist came this. Also, I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed. I do it every six months, and I requested another cognitive test, the only president to do so three times, and I aced them all. Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C. could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I will be willing to bet they couldn't get 50% of the questions right. Anyway, don't buy the book. It's garbage. President Donald J. Trump. The problem was that he was not at Walter Reed. He was on a golf course. His last physical was on May 26th. The White House confirmed later that he was referring to his May exam. And you know that cognitive test he brags about, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment is a screening tool for detecting dementia. It's also a tool that they use to track it. It is not an intelligence test like he keeps trying to make it out to be. It is the kind of test his own doctors keep giving him because they feel the need to keep checking. And by 316 p.m., the spiral had deepened. He posted a 449-word rant that attacked Haberman, Swan, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, M MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. He attempted to insult both Haberman and Swann by calling him her lightweight assistant. He called Democrats generally stupid people. And then he wrote a bizarre tirade that underscores just how incapacitated he really is. All I do is win, often against all odds, but after the big election success, there's no, gee, he won. He did a great job. There's no saying maybe we were wrong about him. The people were right. Or maybe, congratulations, we wish you great success for our country. No, but after I won the election for the third time, the same people start immediately, all over again. The failing New York Times, the Lost Its Way Wall Street Journal, MSDNC, they changed their name to MS Now because nobody was watching, ignorant CNN, with some of the worst no name anchors in history, and all three fake networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, all of their readership ratings, and viewership, are tanking because the public understands they are, as I have said right from the beginning, and then he has to use capital letters again, fake news. They have no credibility. Or it would have been impossible for me to win with only bad stories, especially in a historic landslide. Think of it. This was my opposition. If the election was held again today, I would win by even more. Actually, much more. It's hard to read that. It's just ramblings of a madman. I don't even know what to say. Then came three more posts in rapid secession between 4:54 and 4.56 p.m. with only bad press and fake news. I won the presidential election in a landslide. Therefore, the media has no credibility. Then I would often say in speeches and otherwise, America will never be a socialist country. And I was 100% correct. The Democrats skipped socialism and went all the way down to communism. And then in capitals, America will never be a communist country. President Donald J. Trump. And finally, I know, this is a lot. The radical left lunatics, often referred to as Democrats, have lost control of their party. They are being led by loud and unattractive people who have totally lost their way. We would be laughing right now if this wasn't the president of the United States. Because that is five deeply concerning posts from the commander-in-chief of the United States military in a single afternoon, while American forces were engaged in an increasingly dangerous conflict in the Middle East. George Conway, the former Republican, responded by writing, A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America's nuclear arsenal, but it doesn't seem that many people care. Haberbin responded simply by noting that her book is sold out and publishers are restocking copies. Extremely grateful for the interest in our book, she wrote. None of them flinched or backed down. And that matters enormously in this moment because what Trump is doing is not just the ranting of a bitter compromised man. It is part of a systematic effort to silence dissent in this country and it is accelerating. On Friday night, the Department of Justice took our country deeper into a dangerous path when we learned that they had subpoenaed four New York Times reporters, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmidt, with federal agents delivering subpoenas to some of the reporters' homes, ordering them to testify before a grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday. The subpoenas state only that the journalists are being asked to testify in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law. What the subpoenas are really about is a story the Times published reporting that the Secret Service had security concerns about the new Qatari gifted Air Force One, which I call Qatari Air Force One, that it lacked advanced anti-missile capabilities, and that Trump had to switch planes mid-trip during the NATO summit because the aircraft was not ready. Before the story was published, a senior FBI official contacted the Times and asked them not to run it, citing national security but refusing to say what the specific concern was. These subpoenas are not about wrongdoing. They are about harassment, embarrassment, and intimidation. The president of the United States was on a plane that was not ready, did not have the capacity or capability to protect him, and reporters told the public about it. He was embarrassed. And now journalists are being hauled before a grand jury because they did their jobs. The Times said it will fight the subpoenas. Their attorney, David McCraw, called them brazen and said they should be understood as an attempt to prevent the public from learning what is happening in their country. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the subpoenas break from long-standing Justice Department practice that requires prosecutors to seek information from reporters only as a last resort. And this is not an isolated act. It is the latest step in the most aggressive assault on press freedom by any American president in the history of our country. Since Trump took office in January of 2025, his administration has waged a campaign against anyone who tells the truth about what is happening in this country. They took control of the White House press pool from the White House Correspondents Association, which had managed it for decades. They barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and all presidential events because the AP refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. A Trump-appointed judge called it pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who wrote the FCC section of Project 2025, launched investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS. The one major network he did not investigate was Fox. CBS was leveraged during the Paramount Sky Dance merger with what appears to suggest that Paramount might have had to pay Trump $16 million to settle his personal lawsuit, hire a conservative ombudsman, and eliminate DEI practices before the FCC would approve the deal. When Stephen Colbert called the settlement a big fat bribe, CBS canceled a show days later. Trump posted that Colbert was finally finished. When Jimmy Kimmel made comments about the Charlie Kirk killing, Carr told a right-wing podcaster, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. ABC suspended Kimmel within hours and Trump praised it, calling it great news for America. Trump sued ABC News and settled for $15 million. He sued CBS and settled for $16 million through the Paramount Deal. He sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion. He sued the New York Times for $15 billion. He sued the BBC for $10 billion. And I'm simplifying all that. There were a lot more details with all of those lawsuits, but the takeaway is that no sitting American president has ever sued news organizations like Donald Trump has. Trump turned lawsuits into just another weapon of his administration. He signed an executive order targeting Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East broadcast networks. VOA employees were put on administrative leave. International broadcasting that reached 427 million people a week was gutted. Congress then rescinded all federal funding for NPR and PBS, roughly $500 million a year. The Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth, the man who championed the renaming to the Department of War because he could not contain his excitement about killing, introduced rules requiring credentialed reporters to accept restrictions that could punish them for seeking or obtaining certain non-public information even when the information was unclassified. Dozens of reporters from the Washington Post, MSNBC at the time, CBS, News, CNN, New York Times, Politico, and Wall Street Journal walked out and surrendered their press badges rather than agree. A federal judge found the policy was designed to weed out disfavored journalists. When ordered to reinstate credentials, the Pentagon closed the media workspace and said journalists would be relocating to an annex outside the building. The day after Thanksgiving, 2025, the White House launched an official government website called The Media Bias Tracker, featuring an offender's hall of shame, ranking news organizations by their supposed offenses against the president. They arrested Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning Atlanta-based Spanish-language journalist while he was live streaming a protest despite an immigration judge ordering his release. ICE refused, arguing that his reporting on law enforcement was dangerous. He spent over 110 days in detention and was deported to El Salvador. He became one of the first widely documented journalists attained by ICE and deported during Trump's second administration after being arrested while covering a protest. And we remember they arrested Don Lemon at midnight in Beverly Hills and independent journalist Georgia Fort at 6 in the morning at her home with her three daughters, ages 7 to 17, watching. The official White House X account celebrated Lemon's arrest with the caption, When Life Gives You Lemons, and then included emojis of handcuffed chains. FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Nattenson, seizing her phones and laptops without giving her or the news organization advanced notice or a chance to challenge the need for the materials. Trump publicly threatened to jail reporters who would not reveal their sources, saying, We're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say, national security, give it up or go to jail. The person that did the story will go to jail if he doesn't say. He said news organizations should face treason charges. CNN reported that Trump personally pushed then deputy, now acting attorney general, Todd Blanche to subpoena reporters, handing him a sack of printed news articles with the word treason written in Sharpie. He has called a New York Times correspondent ugly both inside and out. He told a Bloomberg journalist, quiet piggy, in response to a question about the Epstein files, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has counted over 1,194 anti-media posts from Trump on social media. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented more than 170 assaults on journalists in 2025, nearly double the previous year. 160 of them were at the hands of law enforcement. Reporters Without Borders placed FCC Chairman Carr on its press freedom predators list. Trust in news in the United States has fallen to 28%, according to Gallup as of October of 2025, the lowest since tracking began. This is what it looks like when a government moves to silence dissent. Not all once, but step by step, post by post, subpoena by subpoena, and arrest by arrest. Every time Trump attacks someone for using their voice, it is designed to make the next person think twice. Every subpoena, lawsuit, cancellation, raid, and deportation of a journalist is a message to everyone else. This could be you next. This is the point and their strategy. It is not about winning in court. It is about the upheaval to people's lives and making reporters, writers, content creators, and everyday Americans question whether the next thing they say is worth being subpoenaed for or worth losing everything for, worth their children living on the streets for. It is about suppressing free speech. And it is a direct attack on the First Amendment. And if we lose free speech, the road to better days becomes dramatically more uphill. Because if the information stops flowing, propaganda replaces the truth. And if truth cannot reach people, the people cannot act on it. That is exactly what they want. They do not want the real truth reaching anyone. And if they succeed, it is one of those notches that is much harder to come back from. It's also one of my biggest concerns about the Trump administration. It has been from the beginning. I worry that if we cannot reach people with what is really happening, they won't have that information when they vote. It's the weight of what we are living under constantly. It is exhausting being weighed down by the worst people. Costs are rising. The future is looking more bleak for our children and grandchildren. Measle cases are increasing. Cyclospora, a parasitic infection that causes horrendous diarrhea, is spreading because Trump's CDC cut funding for tracking it. We're having the third largest Ebola outbreak on record after USAID. Funding was pulled and teams on the ground were defunded. New World Screwworm, a parasitic fly eradicated from the United States decades ago, has returned because of irresponsible decisions from this administration. We have our military fighting yet another forever war, born from ego and enabled by a man who wants his department renamed from defense to war because cruelty is the only thing he is good at. We wake up every single day wondering what the president of the United States will do next to destabilize our country and our world. And it's getting worse. The people who speak out now have reason to look over their shoulders, not just because of the cult followers who feel comfortable sending threats and saying unbelievable things to strangers on the internet. People who have put this man above their own interests, their children and grandchildren, who treat any criticism of their dear leader as a personal attack, but also because of the federal government itself, who is increasing their attacks on anyone using their voice, including journalists, comedians, writers, and everyday Americans. And all of this will only intensify from here, especially as the midterms approach. And I know this to be true because I personally have well over 1,500 emails sitting in my inbox right now. It has gotten so bad that I have to open them only when I feel emotionally capable because the things that some people feel comfortable saying to a stranger on the internet are unbelievable. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of these emails come from people on the right side of history. Because the ones that don't are a reminder of what this movement has become. People like me are not just looking over our shoulders because of an increasingly radicalized segment of the public anymore. We are looking over our shoulders because of the federal government too. And after what happened to those New York Times reporters this week, every independent journalist, writer, and creator in this country has another reason to brace for what comes next. Donald Trump and his inner circle just stepped up their attack on the free press. And with it, our access to free and fair elections. We are now in the most dangerous period of Trump's presidency so far. We knew this was coming. We knew it would get worse the closer we got to the midterms. And Friday, they showed us exactly what that looks like. They laid the groundwork to give cause to subpoena and by extension to indict reporters, to discredit journalists when they speak the truth about those in charge, to make sharing the truth a crime, to connect embarrassing the president to a crime. So this is our answer. As I've said, every single time those speaking out have come under attack. Get louder. If you've been on the sidelines, this is the moment to step off them. If you've been scared, I understand that fear completely. I know what it costs to speak. I know what comes into your inbox when you do. I've lived it for well over a year now, and I'm still here because I also know what silence costs, and the price is higher. It always has been. I made a promise when I started writing these posts. Every time this administration attacked the press, attacked the First Amendment, or attacked the right of the American people to speak truth to power, I would call it out by name. And they took it to a new level. And I'm calling it out once again. This was an attack on every one of us who has ever written about what is really happening inside the United States of America, who has shared a post, who has called a representative, or has shut up to protest. They want us to feel it. They want us to hesitate the next time we go to speak out. And our answer has to be that we don't hesitate. We only get louder and we bring more people with us. And we put our money where our voices are. Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people, defending it. That is the most direct form of resistance available to us right now. Protecting the media that is still standing against it all is how the truth stays alive when every other system is being captured. That includes both legacy media and independent media because they both have a place in the battles ahead. I've written every single night for well over a year now with no corporate backing or sponsorship money. No one who could tell me what to say and what not to say. No one who could tell me to change a word. And every post I write is free for everyone because the truth, as I believe it, should never be behind a paywall. But of course, that's only possible because of the people who choose to support this work with a paid membership, who understand what is at stake and who choose to support it. The same is true for countless others doing the same work. Some have newsrooms behind them, but many don't. But all of them need to know that telling the truth won't cost them their freedom or their voice. And I want to thank everyone who has supported me in that way. You really are making a difference. But right now I want to ask you to think beyond just my voice. Thank you for supporting me. And also think about every other writer, every journalist, every podcaster, every independent outlet that you turn to when you need the truth and when you need to trust what you are reading or hearing. The ones who are still standing with the truth, even when doing so, comes at great cost. Because what this administration is trying to build requires our silence. And the most powerful thing we can do right now is to make sure that the people refusing to be silent can keep going. Every paid subscription is a voice against Trump trying to take away our First Amendment rights. If you can afford to support in this way, please do, but please also look out for yourselves. If this would be something that would be unaffordable or would put strain on you or your finances, don't do it. There's other ways to support. There is enough people with expendable income that can support us. So please take care of yourself too and don't feel like you have to support in this way if it's something you can't afford to do. And remember this too. Trump is posting these threats and attacks because he is scared. Regimes on the right side of history do not need this when they feel secure. They do it when the walls are closing in. The midterms are getting closer every single day. They're not coming for our words because they are winning. They're coming for our words because they know what happens when enough of us keep using them. And I, for one, as I've said before, will never stop using my words to fight for our country. And I know that I am not alone. And that is why I still have hope for America and you should too. Last night, right after I hit publish on this post, I got news that Lindsey Graham had died. And I was shocked. I remember the Lindsey Graham from a decade ago who stood beside John McCain, who was one of his maybe best friends. I don't know if that's a stretch, who was a never Trump man. I disagreed with every, nearly I should say, every single thing Lindsey Graham has ever done. But I respected him in that moment. And then I lost all of that respect when he went to the dark side. It was still shocking to me, though, because somebody who has been very vocal in our government suddenly died. And I think it's okay to say that it's shocking. I didn't even know the words to use. I don't like when anyone dies, which is a very odd thing to say in this moment. But it's the truth. I still am adamantly against threats against people because I know that it doesn't go one way. It goes both ways. And I know that part of bringing our country back to where it should be is some resemblance of I don't know, dignity, something like that. Anyway, so I want to acknowledge if that that I do know that that happened. I'm still forming my thoughts. I'm mostly concerned how this affects voting and the election and the midterms and the race in that local area, while also acknowledging I don't like when people die. So I just wanted to throw that out there and say, yes, I do know about that, and I'll have more about that to say later. Um, last night I was just thinking about how how much the media is under attack, how much I depend on journalists and reportive journalists to be able to do my writing and to bring this to you and why it's so important to me to protect them and to make sure that they're funded and supported. Because I know the next four months are going to be very bad for all of us. Uh, this is a regime that is, it feels under attack because they are. And um, and so I just want to, again, thank you, thank you for your support. And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I will be here every single day. And together, we will always find hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.