At 4:52 this afternoon, the President of the United States stopped in front of the waiting press pool for less than four minutes — and almost immediately, you could hear the frustration bleeding through.

He snapped at a female NBC reporter, telling her, “You don’t know anything” Raw Story after she pointed out that the Strait of Hormuz was still blocked. When she identified herself as being from NBC, he dismissed the entire network: “That’s fake news.” IJR

And then, before boarding Marine One to fly to Miami for UFC 327, he made the statement that should have stopped everyone cold: “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me.” CNN He said versions of it over and over. “Regardless, we win.” “Regardless what happens, we win.” When a man has to say “we win” five times in three minutes, he knows he isn’t winning. And so does everyone watching.

In the middle of war negotiations, an energy crisis, and a world in turmoil, the President of the United States spoke to the press for less than four minutes — during which he undermined his own negotiating team, insulted a journalist for doing her job, dismissed the outcome of critical diplomatic talks, and threatened a nuclear superpower. Then he got on a helicopter to go watch a cage fight.

And while Trump was settling into his cageside seat at Kaseya Center in Miami, Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner were in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the first face-to-face engagement between the United States and Iran since 2015 NPR — more than fifteen hours into what was being described as the highest-stakes direct meeting between the two nations in nearly half a century. The whole world was watching those talks. And the man who started the war had just told reporters it makes no difference to him whether they succeed or fail.

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His war on the press had already been running at full speed that morning. Before noon, he posted essentially the same tirade twice on Truth Social, blaming the media for reporting that Iran is “winning,” insisting “everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG!” He credited the United States with clearing the Strait of Hormuz “as a favor to Countries all over the World,” mocking those same allies for not having “the Courage or Will to do this work themselves” — a remarkable statement given that the strait was fully open and freely navigable before he started this war.

Two hours later, he posted it again. Almost word for word. The media is “CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT.” The same claims. The same attempt to discredit any version of reality that doesn’t match what he wants people to believe.

Calling the press “deranged” and corrupt isn’t just an insult. It’s a strategy. And it’s the most dangerous one he has. Because when the President of the United States tells the public every morning that every major news outlet is lying to them, then spends his afternoon snapping at a reporter and dismissing her network as fake, he’s not just being rude. He is systematically dismantling the only mechanism the public has for holding him accountable. He is telling the American people not to believe what they see, not to trust what they read, not to listen to anyone who contradicts him. And in a country where free elections depend entirely on an informed electorate, that is not a personality flaw. That is an act of sabotage.

What makes it even more dangerous is the silence around it. Because only a corrupt or complicit Congress could watch this pattern play out, day after day, post after post, and still refuse to act.

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The numbers tell a completely different story than the one he’s selling.

His economic approval just hit a career low of 31% in the latest CNN/SSRS poll. Only 27% of Americans approve of his handling of inflation, down from 44% a year ago. CNN The share of Republicans who strongly approve of his job performance has dropped from 52% to 43% since January. CNN

A UMass Lowell/YouGov poll released just days ago found that 65% of Americans say the cost of the Iran war is too great, and 67% say the country is on the wrong track. UMass Lowell The director of survey research at UMass Lowell, John Cluverius, put it plainly: “The Iran war is an unmitigated public-opinion disaster for the Trump administration. Most wars start out popular, get more popular with strategic victories, but then lose popularity over time. Not only does the war appear to be dragging down Trump’s approval rating, but he seems to have skipped the typical surge of popularity for military action and gone straight to the decline.” UMass Lowell

Because what he’s trying to hide is becoming impossible for more and more people to pretend not to see. Every decision has led to more instability, more damage, more consequences he cannot contain. And at a certain point, that stops looking like failure and starts looking like something deeper — the complete absence of leadership being covered by spectacle. When there’s no ability to lead, the only thing left is to perform as if you are. To project false strength. To dominate attention instead of solving the problem.

There’s an expression that has survived two thousand years because it captures something universal about what happens when leaders stop leading. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The real Emperor Nero probably didn’t play a fiddle — the instrument didn’t exist in 64 AD. What historians recorded was that while the city burned, the emperor retreated to a private stage and sang about the fall of Troy, comparing Rome’s destruction to ancient legend rather than doing anything to stop the destruction happening around him. Most historians believe the story was exaggerated by his enemies. But it endured for two millennia because it captured something people recognized then and still recognize now: what it looks like when a leader chooses performance over responsibility. When the show matters more than the suffering.

Trump isn’t singing about Troy. He was sitting cageside at UFC 327 in Miami — his first major public appearance at a sporting event since this war began on February 28 — while the world he set on fire tried to negotiate its own ceasefire without him. The instinct is exactly the same. A man who has lost interest in governing retreating into the spaces where he thinks he can still feel powerful. Where he expects the crowd to cheer. Where nobody asks hard questions.

Except on Saturday night in Miami, Trump was booed while entering the arena. Raw Story

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And while he sat cageside, the news broke that proved he already knew what was coming when he told those reporters it makes no difference. After twenty-one hours of direct negotiations in Islamabad, Vice President JD Vance stepped in front of cameras and announced that no deal had been reached. Iran refused to commit to abandoning its nuclear weapons program. Vance said, “The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” ABC News He left a “final and best offer” on the table and immediately departed for Washington. The Iranian side said the United States came with “excessive demands” and was “looking for an excuse to leave.” The Daily Beast

For the military families who had been holding their breath — hoping these talks would be the beginning of the end, hoping their loved ones might finally be coming home — tonight was devastating.

And we have to remember why we were told this war was necessary in the first place. The only justification this administration ever gave the American people was the threat of a nuclear Iran. That was the whole case. And after six weeks of combat, after American service members have been killed, after thousands of civilian deaths across the region, and after all of this “winning” — we are worse off than we were before it started. Iran still has nuclear enrichment capability. The strait is controlled by Iran, not us. And the new Iranian leadership is even more hardline than the one we went to war against.

That is exactly why his attacks on the free press matter so much. Because the only reason the American people know any of this — that the talks failed, that he was at a cage fight when it happened, that he told reporters the outcome doesn’t matter to him — is because journalists reported it. The same journalists he called deranged this morning. The same ones he dismissed as fake news this afternoon. The same ones he has been trying to destroy since the day he took office.

Trump’s war on the press is not a sideshow. It is the centerpiece of everything. Every attack on a journalist, every “fake news” dismissal, every Truth Social rant about media credibility — it’s all aimed at the same target: our ability to know what’s true. Because if people trust the media enough to hear the truth, the truth will end him. Without a free press, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there are no free elections. Without free elections, there is no democracy. It is that simple, and that serious.

Support independent journalism. Share the work of reporters who are still telling the truth. Push back every single time he calls a reporter “fake news,” every time his press secretary dismisses a legitimate question, every time someone in his administration mocks, threatens, or belittles a journalist for doing their job. The moment we stop pointing it out is the moment it becomes normal. And the moment it becomes normal, we lose the free press. And the chain from there to losing free elections is very short.

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We also have to keep our eyes on November. Democrats lead on the generic congressional ballot by nearly six points. The economy is painful. Gas prices are crushing families. But none of it matters if people don’t show up. Our focus has to be on the voters who are against what’s happening but stayed home in 2024. We need to reach them now. Not in October. Now. We have to make it too big to rig.

And tonight, I want to tell you where I’m finding more hope than I expected.

Today, Hungary voted. Viktor Orbán has held power for sixteen consecutive years. He is one of Trump’s closest allies — a man Trump has publicly endorsed. Wikipedia Orbán reshaped Hungary’s courts, captured the country’s media, rewrote election rules to protect his own party, Wikipedia and built exactly the kind of system the architects of Project 2025 are trying to build here. Just days ago, JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign alongside him — stood on a stage and told the crowd that Trump and Orbán had done great things together.

The night before the vote, more than 100,000 Hungarians filled Heroes’ Square in Budapest for a seven-hour concert-rally featuring fifty musical acts. The crowd chanted “Ruszkik haza!” — “Russians, go home!” — a cry that hadn’t echoed like that since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Kyiv Post

Turnout reached 77.8% by 6:30 PM — above the previous record of 70.5% set in 2002. Al Jazeera The people of Hungary have had everything stacked against them for sixteen years. Captured courts. State-run broadcasts. Gerrymandered districts. And they showed up anyway, in numbers too big to ignore.

If they can do that after sixteen years — we can do it after four.

Because if they succeed tonight, it won’t just change Hungary. It will tell the whole world that the pendulum is swinging. That people everywhere are tired of strongmen, lies, and cruelty. That democracy isn’t dying. It’s fighting back.

And that is why I still have hope for America. You should too.