Trump's planned Thursday primetime address is deeply concerning

Last night, at 5:44 p.m., weary, struggling, and slurring his words, Donald Trump sat behind his desk in the Oval Office to sign executive actions slashing protective status from nearly three million acres of public land in Utah. There was a moment that caused awkward concern when, minutes after introducing Utah Governor Spencer Cox, Trump finished signing, held up the ceremonial pen, and asked, "Who should I give this to?" before handing it directly to Cox. The governor had been standing in the same place the entire time. Yet the President no longer appeared to recognize the man he had introduced only minutes earlier.

Based on the events of 7-13-2026

The Breakdown:

• Trump signed executive actions stripping protections from nearly three million acres of Utah public land while struggling to stay awake
• The moment he failed to recognize Governor Spencer Cox minutes after introducing him
• The clinical term for what we may be watching: confabulation, when a deteriorating brain fills gaps with fabricated information the person genuinely believes
• A Fox & Friends call to honor Lindsey Graham that veered into the filibuster, the SAVE America Act, and false claims about Spencer Pratt and ballots
• On the Hugh Hewitt show, Trump announced a specific Iranian military target, "Pickaxe," on live radio
• Trump dismissing his own Iran peace deal: "It was a test... memorandums of understanding when you're dealing with sleaze bags don't mean much"
• Describing Graham's fatal aortic dissection as "a certain part of his body literally blowing up"
• The cryptic word about Thursday's address: "guilt," or possibly "gilt," both equally revealing
• 35 Truth Social posts in roughly 90 minutes, including reposting praise for the peace deal he had just killed
• The phrase in his Slaughter case post, "at a time when it is most needed," the language of emergency authority
• In Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, authorized to work in the U.S., reportedly in front of his 3-year-old daughter
• DHS Secretary Mullin admitting they killed the wrong person, and the protests that marched to Susan Collins's office
• Marco Rubio announcing a campaign to "dismantle the ICC, brick by brick"
• The contaminated information environment around Mitch McConnell's hospitalization photo
• The reporting that Thursday's primetime address will claim foreign interference in the 2020 election, and may declare Georgia's senators illegitimate
• Why he is building the case that elections are broken four months before the midterms
• Judge Kathleen Williams voiding Trump's IRS settlement, sanctioning his attorneys, and calling the $1.776 billion figure a "branding effort"
• Williams closing with John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things"

On Thursday, the President will try to convince this country that its own elections are a lie. But today, a judge proved him wrong. There are still people in this system willing to look at the full weight of corruption and say this was wrong, and there will be consequences. Facts are stubborn things. And so are we.

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. Last night at 5 44 p.m., the White House press pool gathered outside the Oval Office before being ushered in to stand just a few feet from the president. Weary, struggling, and slurring his words, Donald Trump sat behind the desk with representatives from the state of Utah standing on either side of him. He struggled to stay awake anytime he wasn't talking and slowly worked his way through the executive action he was there to sign to slash the protective status from nearly 3 million acres of public land in Utah. For more than 20 minutes, Donald Trump spoke about Utah and public lands, but mostly about things that were either not real or simply made no sense. Like when he said, when you see a young former soldier walking around with no legs, no arms, a face that's been horribly, horribly hurt, that was done by Iran. And then he said, the flags are at hask, half mask until Saturday evening, referring to the lowering of the flags for Lindsey Graham. There was even a moment that caused awkward concern when he, just minutes after introducing Utah Governor Spencer Cox, Trump finished signing the executive action, looked around the room, held up the ceremonial pen, and asked, Who should I give this to? Maybe the governor's representative, right? Before handing the pen directly to Governor Spencer Cox. Not a representative, but to the governor. The governor had already spoken. He had been standing in the same place the entire time. No one had moved, yet the president of the United States no longer appeared to recognize the man that he had just introduced only minutes earlier. And this was not the only thing that Donald Trump said yesterday. It was not even the most alarming. Over the course of a single Monday, across two separate media interviews, on phone interviews, I should add, 35 truth social posts, that's how many posted in a short amount of time. And this Oval Office signing, the president of the United States constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed reality so many times that by the end of the day, no one, not his allies, not his enemies, and not the press, and certainly not foreign governments, well, nobody could say with confidence what was real and what was fabricated. And that is no longer just his problem, it's all of ours. There is a clinical term for what we are watching. It's called confabulation. I was recently reminded of it by a retired physician who emailed me after reading one of my posts. He suggested that much of what Donald Trump says might be better explained by confabulation than by intentional lying. And if you're not familiar or you need a refresh on what confabulation means, confabulation is what happens when a deteriorating brain fills in gaps with fabricated information the person genuinely believes to be true. It's not necessarily lying. A liar knows the truth and chooses to say something different. Confabulation is a mind constructing its own reality to paper over what is missing. And it can happen for more reasons than just whatever Donald Trump might be going through. But it is something that happens. And it seems to be what we're watching. Because after last night, after watching Donald Trump cycle through an entire day of public appearances, I think we are watching confabulation. And we're also watching deliberate lies. And then there's the political spin. So we're watching this all merged into something indistinguishable, something that has poisoned the entire government and has trickled down to every one of us. And it's now being aimed directly at the midterm elections. It started yesterday morning with a phone call to Fox and Friends where Trump called in to honor Lindsey Graham. He called Graham a nice man and a great guy who loved playing golf and then promptly insulted his golf game. Within two minutes, he had veered into a rant about terminating the filibuster, the Save America Act, voter ID, and mail-in ballots. The host tried what I counted was four separate times to steer him back to the subject of his dead friend. He talked over every single one of them. At one point, he turned his attention to Spencer Pratt, you know, the reality television star from the Hills, and his failed bid for mayor of Los Angeles. He said, look what happened to the kid in California. Trump said this. They sent a million ballots. Nobody knew where they came from. He claimed Spencer Pratt had come to his office and told him he thought he won. He said they found millions of ballots. There's no evidence of that. None of that was true. While Trump was rambling, Fox aired a memorial montage of Graham photographs and he talked through the entire thing. Then the montage ended and the producers had nothing left to show. So they put up a static image of Trump with the words on the phone, President Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States. He just kept going. He gave Graham a 99 out of 100 friendship score, because you know that's a really normal thing to do, is to give a score to your dead friend. He docked him one point for the moment after January 6, 2021, when Graham stood on the Senate floor and said about Trump, count me out, enough is enough. There was increased concern for Trump's health online after this call. The mayor reported that even his own conservative base thinks he is about to get crazier. And that was just the warm-up because later in the day, Trump called into the Salem Radio Network for an interview with Hugh Hewitt, and that is where the day turned what I would consider dangerous. Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door, Trump said, describing a potential strike on an Iranian nuclear mountain complex. He was announcing a military target on live radio. We're going to hit them very hard tonight, and we're going to hit them hard tomorrow, and there's not a damn thing they can do about it, he continued. They have nothing going other than they have big mouths. I got to know them, and they're stone cold, crazy people. You know, I remember when he called them something like better to negotiate with, more state. Well, he said he just makes the stuff up and he fills in the gaps. This is not how world leaders negotiate peace. He called the Iranians cuckoo. He said these people are crazy. To them, deals are made to be broken. They are extremely unreliable people, and frankly, if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it within one day. His own intelligence agency said there was no evidence to support that claim. When asked about the memorandum of understanding he had signed with Iran to end the war, Trump dismissed it entirely. It was a test, he said. We didn't know. Look, memorandums of understanding when you're dealing with sleaze bags don't mean much. It was sort of a test. And they weren't there. They didn't honor the test. Who could have seen that coming? So either he knew the agreement was never meant to succeed, meaning the signing ceremony was little more than political theater while diplomacy took a back seat, or he is rewriting history in real time to explain why his own peace agreement collapsed. Either way, he's constructing a version of reality that cannot be reconciled with the facts. And he is doing it on the same day. The United States is actively bombing Iran. And then came the moment about Graham. When asked about his friend's death, Trump said, they talked about a certain part of his body literally blowing up. That is how the president of the United States of America described the aortic dissection that killed his friend, or at least that's what's being reported. His friend of nearly a decade, as if he were narrating an action movie. And then Hewitt asked about Thursday, Trump had announced earlier in the day on True Social that he would be delivering a primetime address to the nation at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. When asked what the speech would be about, Trump said something odd, even for him. I'd rather not say, he told Hewitt, because if I say maybe, it's going to take some of the guilt off. Guilt. That was the word he chose. Maybe it was a revealing slip, or maybe it was just another cognitive misfire from a man who increasingly struggles to hold a coherent thought. Either way, it left more questions than answers. And I want to stop for a second here because after I published this, I got some emails that said that maybe he was saying guilt, a gold coating. You know, his speech was slurred and I watched it multiple times. It was difficult to make out. I heard guilt. But if the word was guilt, it's very close, uh, that is just as revealing because guilt means a thin gold coating over something cheaper underneath. So either he is telling us that he feels guilt about what he's planning, like a slip of the word and telling the truth, or he is telling us the whole thing is gold paint over something hollow. Both are equally concerning, but I just wanted to point that out because I do reference it throughout the rest of this. Now, between that Fox call and the Hewitt interview, Trump posted 35 times on Twist Social in approximately 90 minutes. He shared the same three-week-old Newsmax story six times. He reposted a month-old clip of Jack Lassiva calling for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He shared a meme comparing a sitting Democratic senator to Pee-Wee Herman. He posted a photograph of a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn on the same day that American flags were flying at half-staff for Lindsey Graham on his orders. He thanked Dr. Phil for an article in the Epoch Times that about the deep state as though shadowy forces are working against him 18 months into controlling every branch of the government. He posted a photograph of his algae-covered reflecting pool with new allegations of sabotage to cover for his own botched construction project. And he shared a post from Benny Johnson, a far-right influencer, that read, There has been an energy shift. Did you feel it? We are going to win. Libs have been set back a thousand years by this. They have no answer. And yes, Patriots are in control. And then he reposted a tweet from Senator Rand Paul dated June 18th that read, The same voices now attacking Trump's Iran deal are the architects of every failed intervention of my lifetime. This war must end. I stand with President Trump on peace. But he shared this while actively bombing Iran. And the deal is dead. He killed it. And he reposted praise for the peace he never actually delivered because his brain cannot hold the contradiction. Or will not. And we can no longer tell the difference. He also posted to show the importance of the slaughter case, 90 years of precedent has been, and he put this in capitals, completely and unequivocally overruled. Greatly increasing presidential power at a time when it is most needed, President Donald J. Trump. He was referring to the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in Trump versus Slaughter on June 29th, which gave the president the authority to fire the heads of nearly all independent agencies and regulatory bodies at will for virtually any reason. But it was one phrase that stood above all the rest for me at a time when it is most needed. Because that's the language of emergency authority. It is the language leaders use when they are preparing the public to accept extraordinary powers. The obvious question is: needed for what? What is he planning to do next? And all of this happened on the same day that another person died from a bullet shot from an ICE officer's gun. In Bidford, Maine, at approximately 7 a.m., an ICE agent shot and killed a 26-year-old man named Joan Sebastian Guerrero. He was from Columbia and was authorized to work in the United States. He had a social security number. He was reportedly heading to work. An eyewitness said he was killed in front of his three-year-old daughter who was wearing bluey pajamas. DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen initially told Senator Angus King that Guerrero was the target of a warrant. Hours later, Mullen called King back to correct himself. The victim was not the target. They killed the wrong person. I mean, they killed, even if it was the right person, don't kill people. ICE is a rogue agency. The president's own military force, and people are dying. Hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Bidford afterwards. They marched to the office of Senator Susan Collins, just a seven-minute walk from the intersection where the shooting occurred. They chanted Voter Out and ICE Out Now. Collins voted last month for a $70 billion funding package for ICE and Border Patrol. She is running for her sixth term and is one of the Democrats' biggest flip targets in the midterms. And several Democratic Senate candidates showed up at the protest. And I also want to mention that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has also announced a whole of government campaign to systematically disable the International Criminal Court. We will dismantle the ICC brick by brick if necessary. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Sanctions, travel bans, visa revocations, threats to cut foreign aid to any nation that cooperates with the court. He accused the ICC of being backed and run by a powerful network of leftist non-government organizations, smug globalists, and hostile third world governments. And he specifically rejected allegations that the administration's deportations to El Salvador and its deadly boat strikes violated international law. He rebuffed calls for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes in Iran. And it begs the question: why would you want to dismantle an international body with jurisdiction over war crimes unless you know your people are committing them? And still the McConnell situation hangs over all of this. Senator Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since June 14th. His office released a photograph of him on Sunday alongside his wife, Elaine Cho. Apparently in a, I said hospital bed, but it was actually a recliner in his hospital room or what appears to be, holding a copy of the Washington Post. The photo was supposed to silence the speculation, but it had the opposite effect. MAGA influencers and democratic content creators alike called it fake or AI generated. TMZ read it through OpenAI's detection tool and found no signs of AI, but it did not matter because the environment has been so thoroughly contaminated by Donald Trump that no one knows what is real anymore. And everyone is primed to be lied to. Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin even went on Real America's Voice and said, I just heard from some other source that was an older photo, so I really don't know. And he said that about the authenticity of the image. But the most alarming revelation to come out of yesterday arrived from both Emma and Washington Reporter. EmmaS Now reported that Trump's Thursday primetime address is actually about the 2020 elections. According to Emma's Jake Trayer, Trump will use the address to claim the newly declassified intelligence reports reveal foreign interference in the 2020 election. The election he lost six years ago, the election that every court in the country that I could find, including judges Trump appointed himself, said was valid. As Nicole Wallace put it, Donald Trump appears to be taking his assault on the truth and democracy and American elections to prime time. She noted that these claims conveniently obscure that he was the president of the United States. All of his hand-picked people ran every facet of the government in 2020. His hand-picked Attorney General Bill Barr ran the Justice Department, his hand-picked replacement for Jim Comey. Chris Ray ran the FBI. Both of them have repeatedly and publicly debunked these lies that there was any foreign interference. The Washington Reporter, a far-right publication, and I'm only mentioning this because they have shared insider information in the past from the White House posted on X. President Trump is planning to announce that Georgia's two senators, John Osoff and Raphael Warnock, are illegitimate because of fraud. A well-placed source in Georgia tells us. Announcement could come as soon as tonight. And this was posted, of course, last night. On Thursday night at 9 p.m. Eastern, he is going to go on national television and claim that American democracy itself has been compromised by foreign governments using intelligence declassified by his own handpicked people to tell 330 plus million Americans that their elections cannot be trusted. Four months before the midterms. He might also tell us that we have fraudulent senators serving right now. Neither is true. The actual crime is what he is doing, spreading these lies. He knows the midterms are the one thing that can stop him. If he loses either chamber, subpoena power comes back, oversight comes back, investigations come back. The arrangement falls apart. And so he is going to use the full weight of the presidency on primetime television to build the case that elections themselves are broken. And he is going to address it up as intelligence, patriotism, and national security. But he has already told us how he really feels about what he is about to do. He used the word guilt, or maybe he used the word guilt with gold. Who knows? And I think to my point of this whole entire essay is that we're living in a world where we don't know. We don't know what words he's using, and we wouldn't even go towards the one that makes the most sense because that one doesn't make sense. This is the world we're living in. And this is where we all are struggling every single day. Had another president said that, we would have maybe stopped and said there's no way he said that. But the reality is he says such off the wall and dangerous things that we don't know which way is up and which way is down. But what we do know is that last night Donald Trump unleashed his next attack on our country and our constitutional republic. And we also saw our country push back on the same day because U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams voided Trump's IRS settlement. She sanctioned his attorneys. She referred his personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for disciplinary action. She sent her order to the Bar Association where Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward are members. She blocked Attorney Daniel Epstein from practicing in her district for a year. She barred Trump and the government from even calling the deal a settlement. And she found that the lawsuit was never about seeking justice or resolving a dispute. It was, in her words, an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayer to redress grievances not defined in the law. The suit she wrote was improperly employed. The action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute. She wrote that even the fund amount, $1.776 billion, speaks of a branding effort rather than a deliberate and thoughtful calculation of damages. When Trump's lawyers tried to escape consequences by dropping the case, she held firm, ruling that a court retains power over sanctions even after a case ends, because otherwise, she wrote, a party could abuse the judicial system and get off scot-free by pulling the plug. And she closed with the words of John Adams. Facts are stubborn things. Thus, whatever may be the party's wishes, inclinations, or the dictates of their passion, they cannot alter the state of the facts or evade the rule of law. The rule of law still holds. There are still people in this system who are willing to look at the full weight of corruption and say, this was wrong, and there will be consequences. And on Thursday, the president of the United States of America will go on television and try to convince this country that its own elections are a lie, that its democracy is broken, that the truth is whatever he says it is. But yesterday a judge proved him wrong. Facts are stubborn things, and so are we. And that is why 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 find hope for America.