Trump is growing more desperate and brazen

May 12, 2026

At 10:01 this morning, Donald Trump sat directly in front of a carefully staged group of women to speak about maternal healthcare. But instead of staying on topic, he went off on odd tangents about how he is the same physically and mentally as he was fifty years ago, that he would “take a bullet” for the country in regards to the stock market going down, and with increasingly slurred words, he once again called himself the “father of fertility”. But none of that was the real story of what happened. Because just 11 minutes into the nearly hour-long event, his eyes slowly started to close as his breathing grew heavier, his head began dipping forward in small, uneven nods, and he appeared to completely fall asleep. And it happened more than once.

And that was still not the worst of it. While cameras rolled, the people surrounding the President of the United States stood there pretending he was awake, alert, and capable of doing the job. And that was just the start of their cover-up of his physical condition. As videos and pictures of Trump nodding off began spreading, the White House social media rapid response team rushed online to insist he was merely “blinking.” In response to a Reuters journalist pointing out the obvious, an official account representing the President of the United States replied: “He was blinking, you absolute moron.”

That is where we are now. The presidency has been reduced to lying to the public over and over again, even while video evidence is there for all to see.

And what makes this so much worse than a lie is what the lie is asking us to do. It is asking us to stop trusting our own eyes. Not to argue about a policy or disagree about a direction for the country, but to look at a photograph of a man with his eyes closed and his head tilted back and accept that he was awake. To look at a video of a president slumping forward and accept that it was a blink. This is not damage control; it is the most dangerous form of propaganda there is: the kind that tells you the thing you just witnessed did not happen.

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a passage that has haunted every generation that has read it, because every generation has wondered whether it could happen to them. Orwell wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” He called it the final command for a reason. An authoritarian regime can survive people who disagree with its policies. It can survive people who protest its laws. What it cannot survive is a population that still trusts what it sees. Because once people trust their own perception, the lie has a shelf life. The Trump regime knows this. And so the perception has to go. The eyes have to be trained to see what the regime says they see, not what they actually see. That is what Trump’s social media account, “Rapid Response 47,” did this morning. That is what “He was blinking, you absolute moron” means.

And that command has a history older than Orwell’s novel. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, the regime did not just rewrite the news. It rewrote photographs. When officials fell out of favor, they were erased from the images where they had once stood. Trotsky was removed from photographs beside Lenin. Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the secret police, was airbrushed out of a famous photo at the Moscow Canal after he was purged. The Soviet citizen was supposed to look at the new image and not remember the old one. To accept the altered photograph as the real one, even when they remembered the man who used to be standing there.

In East Germany, the Berlin Wall stood for nearly thirty years. The regime called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. The barrier that locked East Germans inside their own country was officially described as protecting them from the West. The state media and textbooks said it. Children learned it in school. Their parents knew what it really was. But both versions existed at the same time, and the citizen’s job was to choose the official one.

And in Romania, when Nicolae Ceaușescu gave his final speech in Bucharest in December 1989, state television was broadcasting live. For years, every speech had been met with orchestrated applause. But this time, the crowd began to boo. And the moment the sound changed, the broadcast camera was tilted up to the sky, and the TV transmission went off air. The regime understood something fundamental: it could survive the crowd turning, but it could not survive the crowd seeing itself turn. The camera had to go dark. The audience could not be allowed to witness its own defiance. Four days later, Ceaușescu was executed by his own people.

That is the lineage of “He was blinking, you absolute moron.” Not a clumsy press response or an overzealous staffer. A reflex as old as tyranny itself: the regime telling the public that the photograph is wrong, the camera is lying, the journalist is a fool, and the only truth is the one that comes from them.

And Idrees Ali, the Reuters journalist who posted the photograph, did not accuse Trump of sleeping. He posted a picture taken by Reuters photographer Evelyn Hockstein with a neutral caption identifying the event: “U.S. President Donald Trump attends a maternal health event in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 11, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein.” That was the entire caption. No editorial or accusation. And the official White House rapid response account, an account with 1.3 million followers that regularly gets retweeted by the official @WhiteHouse page, responded by calling him an “absolute moron.” The full weight of the United States government was brought down on a journalist for posting a picture.

And beyond Trump’s sleeping on the job as the President of the United States, and the subsequent cover-up, he also once again called himself the father of fertility. “I shouldn’t admit this, but the first time I really heard about the fertility was through Katie. She said, ‘Sir, we have to do something,’ and I’m a quick study, so I learned everything there is to learn in about three to four minutes, and I became the father of fertility.”

Three to four minutes. That is how long it took the President of the United States to learn “everything there is to learn” about one of the most complex, most painful, most financially devastating medical journeys a family can face. Fertility treatment is not a joke. It is years of hope and grief and exhaustion and bills and waiting rooms and injections and loss. It is tens of thousands of dollars. It is marriages tested, and bodies pushed to their limits, and dreams held so tightly they crack. Yet Trump, in all seriousness, thinks he knows it all after just three to four minutes or talking to a member of Congress.

And the irony that he cannot seem to feel is that the reason Senator Katie Britt had to call him in the first place was because of his own movement. The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that nearly outlawed IVF happened because of the judicial infrastructure his coalition spent decades building. The pro-life legal framework that classified frozen embryos as children was the direct result of the movement Trump rode to power. His people built the legal architecture that almost destroyed IVF access for an entire state. And then he swooped in, took a three-minute briefing, and called himself the father of fertility.

And when it came time to answer a real question, he couldn’t do it. A reporter asked him a basic question: “Outside of these amazing benefits from employers for IVF, there are a lot of women out there who either work part-time or self-pay for health insurance. Is there an option for cheaper IVF for those women?”

And the self-proclaimed father of fertility froze, unable to answer and turned to Olivia Walton, a billionaire philanthropist standing beside him, and asked her to answer it. She didn’t. She passed it to Senator Britt. Britt talked about drug prices coming down and access “ultimately” reaching everyone. No one answered the question. Not one person in that room told the reporter what the policy actually means for a woman working part-time, or paying for her own insurance, or living in a state where the nearest fertility clinic is three hours away.

And then, near the end, Trump told the room that he feels exactly the same as he did when he was 29. “I feel the same as I did 50 years ago,” he said. “Someday there’ll be a day when that won’t happen. I’ll let Bobby and Oz know.”

That was the President of the United States, less than an hour after appearing to fall asleep on camera, slurring his words, and freezing on a basic question about his own policy, telling the country he is physically and mentally as strong as he was in his twenties. And then he told us that the people who would let us know if something was wrong are Bobby Kennedy and Mehmet Oz. The Secretary of Health and Human Services who blames declining fertility on “toxic soup” and the CMS administrator who once made his career on daytime television. Those are the men entrusted with telling the public whether the president is well.

They are also the two men in the room with the deepest political and financial investment in him appearing fine. They are the men whose careers, whose agencies, whose influence, and whose access to power depend entirely on Trump remaining upright and in office. And they are the ones he says will tell us when something has changed.

This is how it works inside every aging authoritarian’s inner circle. The principal is told he is fine because the regime cannot function if he knows he isn’t. The handlers cannot afford the truth. The cameras cannot afford the truth. The rapid response account cannot afford the truth. And so the truth gets reassigned. He fell asleep, they said he blinked. He slurred, they will say it didn’t happen. And he told us he feels 30 years old, and nobody around him can afford to tell him otherwise.

And underneath all of it, underneath the nap and the slurring and the freeze and the crown, there was supposed to be an actual policy announcement, the Department of Labor rule creating a fertility benefit option for employers. It is capped at $120,000 per family member over a lifetime, and it is framed as a supplemental benefit “like vision or dental insurance.” Employers can choose to offer it. They are not required to. They also announced Moms.gov, a website. They announced TrumpRx discounts on fertility medications. They announced changes to Head Start and the Child Care Development Fund that the administration calls “reforms” but that childcare advocacy groups have warned will eliminate Biden-era access and quality requirements. And they reiterated the Most Favored Nation drug pricing framework.

Each announcement came wrapped in the language of mothers and babies and families and life. And none of it answered the reporter’s question.

Because here is what was happening inside the performance. The Secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., stood next to the president and called declining birth rates “an existential crisis for our country.” He said the fertility rate has dropped to 1.57, that the replacement rate is 2.1, and that the United States is “approaching the cataclysmic rates that Japan and China are now experiencing.” He blamed it on pesticides, endocrine disruptors, and what he called the “toxic soup that our young women are walking around” in. He said that previous presidents had tried to “discourage childbirth and motherhood” and that Trump is the first president trying to encourage it.

This is the language of pronatalism. It is the framing that treats women’s bodies as an economic input and a declining birth rate as a national security failure, a framing that says the problem is not that families cannot afford to exist, but that women are not producing enough children for the Social Security trust fund.

And it is coming from the same administration that has spent a year and a half stripping away every support system that makes family life possible. You cannot call falling birth rates an existential crisis while building the economy that caused them. You cannot tell women they have a patriotic obligation to have “more beautiful American babies,” the president’s exact words this morning, while taking away their ability to survive the pregnancy.

And maybe the deeper truth as to why more people are choosing against having children is better explained in a bank report.

The Bank of Montreal released its 2026 Real Financial Progress Index earlier this year, surveying 2,501 American adults. Half of Americans surveyed said they have gone on fewer dates or chosen less expensive activities because of rising costs. Forty-seven percent of singles said dating is no longer financially worth it. Fifty percent of Gen Z and 40 percent of millennials said the cost of dating is getting in the way of reaching their financial goals. The average cost of a single date has climbed to $189, up 12.5 percent in a single year. For millennials, it is $252 per date, up 32 percent from last year. A separate March 2026 study from JG Wentworth found that 86 percent of single Americans have put off dating because of financial concerns.

The Institute for Family Studies, a conservative, pro-marriage think tank, has labeled this a “dating recession” and warned that it will “depress future marriage rates.”

You cannot have babies with people you cannot afford to meet. You cannot start a family in a house you will never own. You cannot plan for a child when groceries cost what they cost, when rent costs what it costs, when healthcare costs what it costs, when childcare costs what it costs. The fertility crisis is not a mystery. It is not pesticides or toxic soup. It is an economy that has made every prerequisite of family life, housing, food, healthcare, time, a partner you can afford to go on a date with, financially impossible for an entire generation.

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And there is another dimension to this that almost nobody in power is willing to name. This administration did not just make dating expensive. It made dating feel dangerous. The Harvard Youth Poll from Spring 2025 found that 53 percent of young women say political agreement is important in a romantic relationship, compared to 42 percent of young men. Seventy percent of young Democrats say political alignment matters when choosing a partner. The Survey Center on American Life has tracked the underlying shift for years: 56 percent of young women now identify as Democrats, compared to just 38 percent of young men. This makes dating nearly impossible for many young people.

And this is not just polling data. This is the lived experience of a generation that has been told, by this administration and this movement, that politics is not just a difference of opinion. It is a question of safety. MAGA did not just divide the country politically. It divided it romantically. It turned the question of who you vote for into a question of who you can trust in a room, who you can trust with your future, who you can trust with your body. And now the same administration that built that divide is standing in the Oval Office expressing alarm that the country is not making enough babies.

If they actually wanted to help, here is what they would be doing. They would take meaningful steps to improve the cost of housing so that young families could afford to live somewhere. They would bring down the cost of groceries and insulin and prescription drugs, not as a press release with shifting percentages but as a real, verifiable price drop that families could feel. They would fund childcare as the economic infrastructure it actually is, not gut Head Start under the banner of flexibility. They would protect the right to family planning options, because you cannot ask women to have babies while taking away their ability to survive having them. They would invest in maternal mortality research, especially the disparities that are killing Black women in this country at three times the rate of white women. None of this was in the announcement. The father of fertility was given a real question this morning about what his policy means for part-time workers and self-pay women, and he could not answer it. Because the answer is: they do not care. This was all a show.

If we are to survive this moment in American history, we must continue to refuse to be told we did not see what we saw. We refuse the gaslighting. We refuse to let an official White House account call a journalist a moron for posting a photograph and have that be the end of the story. Our eyes are not lying to us. And we are going to keep saying that, no matter how many times they tell us otherwise.

We support independent media and the journalists still willing to share pictures even with the threat of being targeted by the White House. Because the same playbook they are using that called a Reuters reporter a moron this morning will come for every journalist and every newsroom that refuses to bend. The reporters still doing their jobs need us. The photographers still pointing their cameras need us. The independent writers and creators who are telling the truth every day without a corporate safety net need us. This is yet another day of me calling on your paid support not just for my own memberships, but for all of the voices who are still delivering what is happening in this country. I promised to do this every time they attacked the First Amendment and journalists, the media and the free press. I won’t stop because this is our moment to build a counter machine to their propaganda, especially ahead of the midterms.

Orwell also wrote, in that same passage, a line that does not get quoted as often but that I have been thinking about all day. After naming the Party’s final command, he wrote: “The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that.”

The truisms are true. He fell asleep. The photograph is real. The policy does not help the women it claims to help. The economy they built is the reason the babies are not coming. And the truth is still worth defending, even when the people in power call you a moron for saying it out loud. And most importantly, there are still people defending what is true, no matter what. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.

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.

Picture of the day: A wise person once told me that whenever you are feeling down, go sit by a body of water. She passed away young. She was a medical provider who fought fiercely for her patients, and she passed away with that same fight in her for her own battle. I think about her every day, and her “no quitting attitude no matter what.” And how she would say that as long as we are still here and breathing, we keep going.

Sources:

President Trump Participates in a Maternal Healthcare Event: Full Video

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/4563165/trump-father-of-fertility/

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/absolute-moron-trump-wh-account-rages-at-reuters-reporter-sharing-image-of-president-with-eyes-closed/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-house-trump-blinking-not-asleep_n_6a022f11e4b08800012686b7

https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/05/11/trump-declares-himself-the-father-of-fertility/

https://usnewsroom.bmo.com/2026-02-11-Date-flation-Hits-Hard-Average-Date-Spend-Nears-200-BMO-Real-Financial-Progress-Index

https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/is-dating-worth-it-anymore-average-cost-of-dating-nears-200-dollars/

https://www.newsweek.com/us-economy-is-putting-young-people-off-dating-11891992

https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/50th-edition-spring-2025

https://www.americansurveycenter.org/short-reads/gender-partisan-divide/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/4522143/us-fertility-rate-hits-record-low/