Trump’s recklessness triggered a global downward spiral
At 8:24 this morning, as he was getting ready to leave his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and head out for another relaxing day of golf, the president of the United States stopped, picked up his phone, declared the death of America’s greatest enemy, and named its new one. In just 30 words posted to Truth Social, Donald Trump told the entire country that their greatest enemy is now their fellow Americans and signaled to his radicalized followers that Democrats are now enemies of the state.
Before escaping the reality he built all around him, an active war, a crashing economy, and a destabilized world, the president of the United States told the country that the roughly 49 million registered Democrats in America, and the tens of millions of independents who lean Democratic, a group that adds up to well over a hundred million American citizens are now the single greatest threat this nation faces, even greater than the foreign power he launched a war against just four weeks ago. And then he went golfing.
There is a reason that every authoritarian leader who has ever dismantled a democracy from the inside has named a domestic enemy, by telling his supporters that the real threat to the nation was not outside its borders, but sitting across the dinner table from them. Because once you convince a third of a country that another third is trying to destroy everything they love, you do not have to give the order for what comes next, because fear and hatred are remarkably efficient tools for encouraging it all on its own.
And as the man who lit the match, he gets to stand back and pretend he never told anyone to burn anything down, just like he did after January 6th, when the mob he summoned to the Capitol left mayhem on the floor of the building where American democracy is supposed to live. That day, he pointed a crowd at a building and told them to fight like hell. They did, and people died. And the peaceful transfer of power almost didn’t happen. What he did this morning at 8:24 a.m. from his private club in Palm Beach is the same act on a different scale. Because this time, he is not pointing at a building. He is pointing at a population of over a hundred million of his own citizens. And this time, he is not a man about to lose power. He is the man who holds the most. He already commands the agencies, the military, and the surveillance infrastructure. And now he is telling the country that those who disagree with him are not opponents to be debated, but enemies to be defeated. That is not politics. That is the precondition for civil conflict, spoken into existence by the one man in America with the power to make it real.
But that wasn’t the only message he sent today. And it wasn’t even the worst one. Sometime between declaring Democrats the greatest enemy of the nation and golfing at his course, Donald Trump reshared a post from one of his supporters on Truth Social that featured a meme reading “3rd Term for Trump as a Reward from Stolen Election.” A sitting president, constitutionally barred from running again by the Twenty-Second Amendment, looked at a post calling for that amendment to be thrown out and decided to amplify it. And the justification printed right there on the meme was the same lie that sent a mob to the Capitol on January 6th, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That lie has never stopped doing its work.
And then, at 5:31 this evening, he picked up his phone once again. This latest post on Truth Social was a direct order to the Republican members of Congress. In it, the president made it clear that any Republican who refuses to comply will be publicly named as someone who voted against the country. He demanded “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” the voter suppression act, be passed along with the anti-transgender additions he made, and the banning of what he calls child mutilation, which is not actually even happening. He demanded that the Senate kill the filibuster, the last structural check on majority rule in the chamber, and that Congress stay in Washington through Easter if that is what it takes to push everything through. He told lawmakers to “Lump everything together as one, and VOTE.” And then he added this: he demanded that Senate leadership “clearly identify those few ‘Republicans’ that are Voting against AMERICA,” with America in all capital letters, so that the country could see exactly who refused to fall in line. That was not a legislative proposal. It was just his latest loyalty test.
And while the president was calling Democrats the greatest enemy of the nation, the actual war he started four weeks ago is still burning, and it is getting worse by the day.
He said Iran is dead. Iran is not dead. What is dead is the diplomatic path that existed before he chose to destroy it, and what is dying, right now, tonight, are the people caught in between his impulses and their consequences. Reasonably priced gas is also dead, with the national average for a gallon of gas hitting three dollars and ninety-four cents, up nearly a dollar in a single month. This may turn out to be the largest energy disruption since the 1970s. That is the war Donald Trump declared over this morning. That is the country he said is dead.
And it is so dead that last night, at 7:44 in the evening, the same man who said Iran was finished posted a forty-eight-hour ultimatum threatening to, in his words, “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if they don’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That deadline expires Monday night. On Friday he floated the idea that the war might be winding down. By Saturday night he was threatening to destroy the electrical grid of a nation of eighty-eight million people. And by Sunday morning he was telling us Iran was dead and that Democrats were the real enemy. This is all coming from the man holding the nuclear codes.
And we need to think about what “obliterate their power plants” actually means, because the phrase is designed to sound strong and clean and decisive, and the reality is none of those things. Iran has roughly a hundred and thirty thermal power plants. It has over forty million electricity subscribers, more than thirty-two million of them residential. Eighty-eight million people depend on that grid for hospitals, water treatment, food storage, and distribution. When you destroy a country’s power plants, you are not striking a military target. You are shutting off the power to the innocent people caught in the middle of a war. A war that Trump once claimed was started to liberate the Iranian people. Now he is dropping missiles on those very same people and threatening to further an already evolving crisis onto them. Under international humanitarian law, civilian infrastructure can only be targeted when the military advantage clearly outweighs the harm to civilians. There is no military advantage that outweighs turning off the lights for an entire country. But Donald Trump doesn’t care. This has become a power contest between egos, not a strategy for either nation.
Iran responded to the ultimatum exactly the way anyone paying attention knew they would. They said the strait will be “completely closed” if the United States follows through. Iran’s parliament speaker threatened all American energy infrastructure in the region. And the IRGC released a map showing power plants across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, with a single message underneath it: “Say goodbye to electricity.” This is what escalation looks like when it has nowhere left to go but up. And the man who started this war, who is at the center of this catastrophic spiral of events, spent his Sunday on the golf course.
And beneath all the posturing and the ultimatums, there is a real horror on the horizon that could result in something the majority of us alive today have never seen. This war is no longer a conflict between two countries. It is a widening catastrophe with active nuclear reactors sitting directly in the crossfire. There are at least five operational nuclear facilities spread across the region, in Iran, the UAE, and Israel, and every one of them is now within range of a conflict that has no boundaries left. The IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, warned that he “cannot rule out a possible radiological release with serious consequences, including the necessity to evacuate areas as large or larger than major cities.” After a projectile struck near one of Iran’s nuclear plants, he called it “the reddest line of all.” And the Arms Control Association warned that if the Iranian government collapses, the risk of nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands increases dramatically.
Analysts are openly asking what happens if Iran’s new leadership, with its supreme leader assassinated and its country under siege, decides this is the moment to build a nuclear weapon, because the religious and political constraints that once held that ambition in check died with the man who enforced them. Iran has roughly four hundred kilograms of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium. There are reports that American and Israeli forces are discussing sending special forces to secure it, and reports that Iran’s defense council may have already met to discuss building a weapon. And Iran has promised that if Trump follows through on his power plant threat, every energy facility and desalination plant in the Gulf becomes a target, and desalination is how millions of people across that region get their drinking water. The League of Arab States has told the United Nations that a full-scale regional war has arrived. The UN Secretary General has warned that this conflict “carries the risk of igniting a chain of events that no one can control.” The Brookings Institution has warned that this could trigger Iran’s complete implosion and a chaos that would make Iraq and Libya “look like a picnic,” and that the greatest beneficiaries would be Russia, emboldened to escalate in Ukraine, and China, empowered to move on Taiwan. This is how a regional war becomes a global one. And the man who started it already told us it was over.
And what makes all of this even harder to absorb is that a diplomatic path already existed. Before the first bombs fell on February 28th, the United States and Iran were in active nuclear negotiations. An Omani mediator reported that significant progress had been made. Iran had signaled a willingness to make concessions. And Trump said he was “not thrilled” with the direction of the talks, and then he bombed them. He chose war over a deal that was within reach, and now more than fourteen hundred civilians are dead, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed, gas prices are surging, a potential nuclear crisis is unfolding, and the president thinks this is the right time to fly to Florida and golf.
The question we need to ask is, how can this possibly end? Even if the goal becomes a negotiated agreement, it may no longer be possible to get there, because desperate people who have watched their hospitals bombed, their children killed, and their supreme leader assassinated do not come to the negotiating table with concessions. They come with rage. And rage does not negotiate. It escalates.
Israel’s army chief, Gen. Eyal Zamir declared that the war is “not close to ending”. Israeli defense officials have said strikes will “increase significantly” in the coming days, directly contradicting Trump’s talk of winding down. Twenty-five hundred additional Marines are being deployed to the region. The Pentagon has requested two hundred billion dollars in additional war funding. And none of it, not a single strike, a single dollar, nor a single deployment, has been authorized by Congress. This is one man’s war. And he does not care what comes next.
But Trump hasn’t just created suffering, mayhem, and danger in the Middle East. He has brought it much closer to home, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, where eleven million people are living through a humanitarian catastrophe that he engineered and that he now sees as an opportunity.
Cuba’s power grid collapsed again on Saturday. It was the third total collapse this month. The entire country went dark. Eleven million people, no electricity, no water pumps, no refrigeration, no hospital power. And this was not an accident and it was not a natural disaster. It was the direct and predictable result of the oil blockade that Donald Trump imposed in January, when he cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba after ousting Maduro and then threatened tariffs against any country that tried to supply the island with fuel. Cuba has not received a foreign oil shipment in three months. The New York Times called it the first effective American blockade of Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The UN warned in February that the country could face “total humanitarian collapse.” And that collapse is now underway.
Trash is piling up in the streets of Havana because there is no fuel for garbage trucks. Hospitals have been forced to limit surgeries and shorten patient stays because they cannot keep the power on. More than 80% of Cuba’s water pumping runs on electricity, which means when the grid goes down, people lose access to drinking water. Food spoils within hours. CNN’s bureau chief in Havana, who has lived on the island for fourteen years, said he has never seen anything like this. “You are seeing people begin to live out a humanitarian crisis in real time,” he said. “The economy is grinding to a complete hold as the U.S. prevents any oil from coming in.”
And while eleven million people suffer through rolling darkness and collapsing services, the president of the United States looked at their pain and saw a real estate opportunity. “Whether I free it, take it,” he said from the White House. “I think I could do anything I want with it.” He called Cuba “a very weakened nation,” as if he were not the one who weakened it. He has talked openly about regime change, about a “friendly takeover,” as though sovereignty is something you can purchase when the price drops low enough. He is starving a country into submission and then presenting himself as its savior. That is not diplomacy, and certainly not liberation. It is economic warfare against a civilian population, followed by the language of colonial acquisition, spoken by a man who does not see other nations as partners or neighbors but as things to be taken.
And today, Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister went on American television and said what no one in the Western Hemisphere should have to say in 2026: that his country’s military is actively preparing for the possibility of American military aggression. “We would be naive if, looking at what’s happening around the world, we would not do that,” he said. Because they watched what happened to Venezuela. And now they are watching a president who has told them, in his own words, that he can do “anything I want” with their country.
And that brings us back to where this day started. Because the foreign enemies are not delivering what he promised they would. The war has not made us safer. And the cruelty has not made anything better. So, at 8:24 this morning, a president who has spent the last year telling this country that immigrants are the enemy, that they are the reason our life is hard and our future is uncertain, quietly switched targets. Because the immigrant scapegoat is losing its power. Even people on his own side are starting to see through it, starting to recognize that the raids and the cruelty and the fear have not made their lives better, have not lowered their grocery bills or made their neighborhoods safer or brought back a single job. So he did what every authoritarian does when the first villain stops working. He found a new one. And this time, the enemy is not someone crossing a border. It is our neighbor, our coworker, our sister, our best friend. Over a hundred million of our fellow Americans, rebranded as the greatest threat this nation is facing, by a man who needed a new target because the last one stopped scaring people enough to keep them in line.
We cannot let him do this. We have seen where it leads. We carry that history for a reason, not so we can say it could never happen here, but so we can recognize it when it starts. We know what happened when a leader in Germany told his people that the enemy was within. We know about the camps and the graves. We know what happens when ordinary people are convinced that their neighbors are the threat, and not enough of them say no.
But here is what he does not understand about this moment. He is trying to run that playbook in a country full of people who were taught what to look for. And we are looking. And we see him. We see the scapegoating and the loyalty tests and the language of enemies and traitors. And we are not taking the bait. We are not turning on each other. We are turning toward each other. Every protest, every act of solidarity, every conversation where someone says, “I see what is happening and I refuse to accept it” is proof that his project is failing, because the one thing he cannot survive is a country that refuses to be divided.
We are less than eight months from the midterm elections. Every House seat is on the ballot. A third of the Senate. Governor’s races that will determine redistricting, election certification, and voting rights for the next decade. We are the ones that determine the future no matter how desperate Trump gets and what he does next. We know what we are up against and we are ready for whatever comes our way.
He wants us afraid of each other. He wants us divided, exhausted, and too beaten down to keep going. But we are none of those things. And there are so many more of us than there are of him. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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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: I’m deeply concerned for the children being kept at the detention center in Dilley, Texas. My husband and I took an early walk this morning to talk about more ways we can help, and I was once again struck by how beautiful the world is among such great suffering. (Solana Beach, CA)
Sources:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/frenzied-trump-79-posts-crazed-160322973.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-invents-word-in-desperate-truth-social-directive
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/18/iran-cost-budget-pentagon/
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/22/nx-s1-5756288/cubas-power-grid-collapses
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/world/americas/cuba-oil-blockade-trump.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/americas/cuba-second-nationwide-blackout-latam-intl
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/trump-save-america-voting-bill-rcna262706
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/nx-s1-5742828/iran-war-us-trump
There is one person in the world who is more dangerous than Trump, and that is his friend Netanyahu and his right Zionist government. Trump is a stupid self aggrandising real estate developer, who basically doesn’t give a hoot about anything, as long as there is money in it for himself. The world can only hope that the general who holds the second set of nuclear keys has sufficient common sense left if Trump tells him to push the button.
And when all this finally ends, Trump and his sons, and Kushner should be arrested for profiteering on a grand scale at the cost of the USA.
It is really unbelievable that there are Americans who voted for this idiot. Doesn’t say much for their intelligence!
Keep up the good work Heather.
Next goal is to start a civil war and then bye bye midterms. Time to pay back for the ones who have been pardoned after 06 january. He just gave the signal. Gonna be bloody because ICE will immediately moves in and support the fascists. What a very dangerous demented convict racist bloke. He does not care about human lives. Fuck trump!