If you don't know this, you should.

5-31-2026

At 8:15 this morning, the President of the United States began panicking in front of the entire world. For more than seven hours, he posted nearly 50 times. And when he finally slowed down, it would stand as one of the most revealing fits of rage of his presidency to date. Because what he shared was beyond any reasonable person’s comprehension.

He complained that because China has a ballroom, he should have one too. He posted an image of a “Trump Peace Prize” bearing his own face. He repeatedly compared himself to George Washington. He shared an image of himself kissing a flag. He shared a heroic fantasy image of himself depicted as the God of War that said, “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.” And most concerning of all, he repeatedly called for a federal judge to be investigated, impeached, and removed from the bench, placing both the judge and his wife in danger by putting a target on their backs before an already radicalized base of loyalists.

The judge who he was putting in harm’s way is Christopher Cooper. He has sat on the federal bench in Washington since 2014, when the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous vote, every Republican and every Democrat agreeing he belonged there. He graduated with high honors at Yale and Stanford, where he led the law review. He spent decades in law before he ever put on a robe. And he spent today being told, in writing, by the President of the United States, that he should be ashamed of himself. His offense was reading a law and applying it. The statute that created the Kennedy Center says it is to be named for President Kennedy and can carry no other name. Cooper ruled accordingly. For doing that, the President wrote that he “should be brought up on charges,” and then, hours later, returned to the same target to write that he, “like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED.”

But going after the judge was not enough. He went after the judge’s wife. He named her, too, Amy Jeffress, a lawyer who served the Justice Department for nearly two decades and once advised the Attorney General of the United States. He wrote that she “doesn’t use the ‘Cooper’ name because they, as a couple, don’t want people to know that she has a Conflict of Interest,” and added, “obfuscation anyone?” The truth is that she has used her own name her entire professional life, the way millions of women do, and the man who officiated at her wedding was even a future Attorney General. But none of that mattered this morning. What mattered was that the President of the United States once again instigated potential political violence against a judge and his private citizen spouse. All because a judge told him no and upheld the law.

We have watched this movie before, in other countries and in other decades, and it always opens the same way. The strongman does not begin by jailing his enemies. He begins by naming them. He points, and he lets the people who follow him understand what the pointing means. The judges go first, because an independent court is the one thing that can tell a president no and make it stick. And so the courts are not argued with. They are made afraid. A ruling becomes a personal risk, and then a physical one, and a judge who once only had to weigh the law now has to weigh whether his family is safe. That is what happened this morning. That is what “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” at the end of his post about a sitting judge was for.

And we cannot say this part quietly, because the title in front of his name is the whole point. This is not a troll on the internet. This is not a man yelling into a void from his basement. This is the President of the United States. This is the one human being on the planet who commands the most powerful military, who holds the nuclear codes, who can move markets and topple governments and start wars on a whim. When a man like that names a judge and a judge’s wife and tells millions of followers they should be ashamed, investigated, and jailed, the distance between a post and a real human being in real danger collapses to nothing. There is no one above him to send it up the chain to. He is the chain. And the entire world is watching him spend a Saturday this way, our allies and our adversaries alike, all of them now asking the same question every American should be asking, which is whether the person with that much power over their lives is well enough to hold it. These are dark days for this country. They are dark days for the world. And it is a strange and frightening thing to live through a time when the most dangerous instability on earth is not a foreign army or a failing economy, but the mind of one man posting cartoons of himself for nearly 7 hours on a Saturday.

Because in between the threats against the judge, he spent the same seven hours building a shrine to himself. He posted images of his own face carved into Mount Rushmore beside Washington and Lincoln, not once but twice. He posted himself standing shoulder to shoulder with George Washington in front of the White House. He posted an image of the roof of the White House turned into a military installation, armed soldiers and combat drones lined up across the people’s house, and he labeled it a “DronePort,” as if turning the nation’s home into a fortress were something to brag about. He posted a graphic titled “Excellent Health” with green checkmarks beside every line. He posted another image titled “Trump Energy 2026,” showing colonial soldiers on horseback beneath formations of stealth bombers and fighter jets, as if the entire arc of American history, from the Revolution to the most powerful military on Earth, existed solely to glorify him.

Think about what it takes to feel confident enough to post such nonsense. Think about what has to be missing inside a person for them to spend a Saturday generating pictures of themselves as a founding father. None of us does this. None of us, on the worst day of our lives, sit down and manufacture images of ourselves on a mountain beside the men who built the country, or press a flag to our own face and kiss it, or put our face onto a fake peace prize we invented. We don’t need to. People who are secure in who they are do not spend hours showing how powerful and beloved they are. And a president who actually believed he was powerful, steady, capable, and of sound mind would not do this either.

Which brings us to the timing, which is very telling. On Friday night, the White House released the results of his physical. They told us his cardiac age was 14 years younger than his real age. They told us he scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on a cognitive test. They told us he was in “excellent health” and “fully fit” to serve. They released it late on a Friday, the slot reserved for news you are required to put out but would rather no one examine. What you want the weekend news staff to cover when the full week staff are gone. What you want to fade into the chaos by the time Monday rolls around again. And yet the very next day, the man that report describes spent seven hours proving the opposite of everything it claimed. A man with nothing to prove does not post a homemade scorecard of his own health to the internet. A man who feels well does not need the world to be told, again and again, that he is. And the medical statement does not match the man we have all been watching with our own eyes. Because the report says one thing, and the footage says another. We have watched him fall asleep, over and over again, in meetings that were supposed to be the most important of his day. We have watched him go breathless, stopping mid-sentence to catch air that does not seem to come easily. We have watched him do the slow, pursed-lip breathing of a person whose body is working harder than it should just to keep him upright. We have watched a man who, by the account released Friday night, has the heart of someone 14 years younger, and what we have seen does not look like that man.

And then there is the scan. He went back for another look at his arteries, a coronary scan, the kind of test you do not repeat on a healthy person every six months. He had extensive imaging in the fall. And here he is again. Multiple medical professionals have noted that healthy people do not get their hearts imaged on that schedule. People who are worried about something do.

We cannot see his chart. We are not his doctors, and we will not pretend to be. But we can watch what a man does the day after he gets his results, and we can ask an honest question. Maybe the report we were handed on Friday night is not the report he was handed. Maybe a man who keeps falling asleep, who keeps losing his breath, who keeps going back for scans that healthy people his age do not need, heard something this week that frightened him to his core. We do not know. But we know what fear looks like when it has access to a social media account, and it looked a great deal like this morning.

And even his cruelty today carried the same desperate edge. In between the founders and the medals, he stopped to post a series of memes splitting the screen between “Biden’s Solution” and “Trump’s Solution,” on fentanyl, retail theft, and stealing groceries. His side of every one was a cage. Handcuffs, prison jumpsuits, people behind bars. That was the punchline. Not a policy, or a plan, just human beings in chains offered up as entertainment to a base he wanted to thrill on a day he felt small. A man who feels powerful does not need to post pictures of other people in cages to feel it. A man who feels himself slipping does.

And underneath all of it, driving the whole desperate display, is an embarrassment he cannot make go away. He cannot get people to perform at his own party. The country is about to turn 250 years old, and the artists he wanted for the celebration have been walking out the door one after another, saying they were misled about how involved he would be. So this morning, he tried to turn his rejection into their failure. He wrote that the artists are getting “the yips.” He called them “Third Rate ‘Artists.’” He said he only wants to be “surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN.” And then he nominated himself to replace them, “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar,” “the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!).” By the afternoon, when even that did not fix the picture, he gave up and called for the whole thing to be scrapped, an event celebrating the founding of the United States, because the alternative was admitting that the performers who represent this country would not stand on a stage with him.

And there it is, the whole man in a single day. The artists who represent the living country said no, so he generated fake images of our dead founders who cannot decline to be in his proximity. Washington cannot decline the invitation. Lincoln cannot walk off the stage. The living people turned him down, and a federal judge told him he could not put his name on a building, so he spent the day surrounding himself with a country that exists only because he typed it into a machine, and threatening the one real person who told him the truth.

And I keep coming back to one thing tonight. Never before have we seen an American president behave like this. Not in a country founded on democratic norms, not in our lifetimes, not in any lifetime we can point to. There is no modern equivalent for this, no American equivalent, for this level of instability, corruption, and sheer insanity playing out in public day after day. To know that there are people beside him taking his wildest fantasies and turning them into digital hallucinations for him to share is its own kind of betrayal. And then there are the people who still claim to follow him, who cannot keep pretending that any of this is normal, because it is not, and somewhere underneath this unimaginable spectacle, they know it too. He cannot keep going like this. A man does not spend his day the way he spent today unless something is wrong. What we are watching is a man in cognitive and physical decline doing it in front of the entire world. And one day soon, we are going to have to come to grips with something even harder than the posts themselves, which is that there were likely medical professionals who knew, who put their names to words like “excellent” and “fully fit,” and who covered for him anyway. We are going to have to reckon with how many people looked straight at this and chose to call it normal. How many looked straight at it and called it healthy. How many looked straight at it and chose loyalty over truth.

Because here is what today actually showed us, underneath the noise. This was not strength. A man in command of himself and his country does not spend seven hours of a Saturday begging the world to see him as George Washington. The judge did his work calmly, in writing, on the law, and it held. The President spent the day melting down at him in public, in front of everyone, in front of the whole world. One of those is what lasting, real power looks like. The other is what it looks like when power can feel itself slipping and cannot stop grabbing at the air. We have not seen him this exposed before. The mask he used to keep up, the one that hid the worst of it, is gone, and a man who has to insist this loudly that he is well and powerful and beloved is telling us, without meaning to, exactly how unwell and how unsteady he has become. These are dark and dangerous days, for this country and for the world. But we are closer tonight than we were yesterday to the end of them, and we know that because of what he showed us with his own hands today. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

Heather Delaney Reese (political commentator)

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