At 4:52 yesterday afternoon, the President of the United States stopped in front of the waiting press pool for less than four minutes to take questions from reporters already lined up to talk to him, and almost immediately, you could hear the frustration in his voice. He snapped at a female reporter, telling her, “You don’t know anything,” shortly after saying, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me” about ongoing negotiations in the Iran war. And then, with his temper visibly escalating, he threatened China as he walked toward Marine One, on his way to Miami to attend UFC 327.
In the midst of war negotiations, an energy crisis, and a world in turmoil, he spoke to the press for just three tumultuous minutes. During which the President of the United States managed to undermine his own negotiating team, insult a journalist for doing her job, dismiss the outcome of important diplomatic talks, and threaten a nuclear superpower before getting on a helicopter to go watch a cage fight.
And while Trump was heading to Kaseya Center in Miami to sit cageside and soak in the crowd, Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner were in Islamabad, Pakistan, more than fifteen hours into what is being described as the highest-level face-to-face meeting between the United States and Iran in forty-seven years. These are the talks that the whole world is watching. And the man who started the war just told reporters that whether those talks succeed or fail makes no difference to him, trying to frame it in the false light that we “already won”. And he said it multiple times. “Regardless, we win.” “Regardless [of] what happens, we win.” Over and over. When someone has to say “we win” five times in three minutes, they know they’re not winning. And we see it for what it is. The American people are not being misled. The world isn’t either. And neither are our adversaries.
When he snapped at the reporter and she identified that she was from NBC, he dismissed the entire network as “fake news.” Sending the same signal he has sent to so many journalists who have ever asked him a question he didn’t want to answer: challenge me, and I will ridicule you and paint you and your network as the enemy. And it connects directly back to what he’d been doing for hours before he ever stepped in front of a camera.
His attacks on the press had already ramped up earlier that morning when he posted essentially the same tirade twice on Truth Social before noon. Both posts targeted the media for reporting that Iran is “winning,” when, in his words, “everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG!” He blamed it on TDS, “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” claiming the press is incapable of telling the truth because of it. In the first post, he declared their leaders “no longer with us, praise be to Allah.” He bragged that the United States is now clearing the Strait of Hormuz “as a favor to Countries all over the World,” while mocking those same countries for not having “the Courage or Will to do this work themselves.” He even pointed to empty oil tankers bound for the United States to “LOAD UP,” treating the wreckage he created as a gift to the world.
And then, two hours later, he posted it again. Almost word for word. The media is “CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT.” The same claims and the same attempt to discredit any version of reality that doesn’t match what he wants people to believe.
And with each word he said today to the reporters and on social media, our standing in civilized society continues to slip. Because this is so far beneath what used to be considered how the leader of the free world should behave. And somehow, we keep adjusting to it. We keep watching the bar drop lower and lower, each time thinking it can’t go any further, and then he takes us there.
Calling the press “deranged,” corrupt, and incapable of truth 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 spends his morning telling the public that every major news outlet is lying to them, and 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, and 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. It is an act of sabotage. And 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.
And the repetition tells you everything you need to know about where we are. This is not a man communicating a message. This is a man trying to will a version of reality into existence that the facts won’t support. He’s not informing the public. He’s performing for an audience of one, himself, and hoping enough people buy it that the truth stops mattering.
But it does matter. Because his numbers tell a completely different story than the one he’s selling. His overall approval has dropped to around 39 percent across polling averages, down from 47 percent when his second term began. His economic approval just hit a career low of 31 percent in the latest CNN/SSRS poll. Only 27 percent of Americans approve of his handling of inflation, down from 44 percent a year ago. Only 24 percent approve of how he’s handling gas prices. A UMass Lowell/YouGov poll released just two days ago found that 65 percent of Americans say the cost of the Iran war is too great. Sixty-seven percent say the country is on the wrong track. The share of Republicans who strongly approve of his job performance has dropped from 52 percent to 43 percent since January. His net approval hit an all-time second-term low of negative 17.5 on Nate Silver’s tracker just days ago. And a political scientist at UMass Lowell called the war “an unmitigated public-opinion disaster,” noting that Trump “seems to have skipped the typical surge of popularity for military action and gone straight to the decline.”
Because what he’s trying to hide is becoming impossible for more and more people to pretend not to see. Every leadership decision he has made has led to more instability, more damage, and more consequences he cannot contain. And at a certain point, that stops looking like failure and starts looking like something deeper. It shows a lack of leadership altogether. There is no steady hand guiding this. There is no control. There is no real leadership at the top. And that’s why everything else has become performance. Because when there’s no ability to lead, the only thing left is to act like you are. To project false strength. To dominate attention instead of solving the problem. That’s what we’re watching now. Not leadership under pressure, but the absence of leadership being covered by spectacle.
There’s an expression that has survived for 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 yet in 64 AD. What historians recorded was that while the city was consumed by fire, 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 about the destruction happening around him. Most historians believe the story was exaggerated by Nero’s enemies. But it endured for two millennia anyway 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’s sitting cageside at UFC 327 in Miami tonight, his first major public appearance at a sporting event since the Iran war began on February 28, while the world he set on fire tries to negotiate its own ceasefire without him. The instinct is exactly the same. A man who has lost interest in governing, if he ever had any, retreating into the spaces where he thinks he can still feel powerful. Where he expects the crowd to cheer. Where nobody asks hard questions.
