"Why November Matters So Much" -Heather Delaney Reese

 

After days spent largely hiding away from the public view, the President of the United States finally reemerged this afternoon for a campaign rally at the Nassau County Police Academy in Garden City, New York. With “God Bless the USA” already blaring from the speakers, Donald Trump soaked in the excitement as he gripped the handrail, pushed aside one side of the curtains, and thrust himself into the room full of cheering police officers.  

Once on stage, he clapped his hands, fist-bumped the audience, threw his hands out parallel to where his suit jacket had bunched at his waist, and puckered his mouth to make kissing faces towards the police officers in the stands.

The event was promoted as the unveiling of the FBI’s 2025 Crime Statistics Report, but it was really a highly produced campaign rally ahead of the midterm elections. Because over the 70 minutes that Donald Trump spoke, he praised loyalist politicians, while attacking the press and the Democrats. He lost his train of thought often, even sharing, “I hate reading these boring speeches… to be honest with you.”

He declared he would be taking over territories that do not belong to our country, and he said he is not sorry for the high prices we are paying because of his war in Iran. But the most disgusting moment of the entire event was when he became completely fixated on young women and girls in the White House and went into a bizarre tangent about how ‘beautiful’ they were and how he knows he shouldn’t say what he was saying but that he was going to say it anyway.

“Every day I come to the White House, people are thanking me. ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you! Thank you, sir!’ Now, these young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls in the White House, you know, they come in. Now, I’m not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell? These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls, they want to be safe, and they come. ‘Mr. President, may I speak to you?’ Yes. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you.’”

That was the President of the United States speaking. An 80-year-old man whose name is referenced more than 38,000 times in the Epstein files, while he was standing in a room full of law enforcement officers. He spoke about young girls like that in front of all of them, including many women. He told the audience he knows he should not say it, and then he said it over and over again. He could not stop himself. On X, Aaron Rupar shared a clip of the president saying this and wrote, “Epstein’s best friend says what?”

The irony of his words at an event that was supposed to be about crime was not lost. His purpose for even being at this event was for the release of the FBI’s 2025 Crime Statistics Report, which showed a 9.3 percent drop in violent crime, an 18.1 percent drop in murder, and an 18.5 percent drop in robbery. Trump stood at that podium and took credit for every single one of them. He called it the largest single-year drop in violent crime since 1937 and added that “Every single number is the lowest number in recorded history.”

But what he forgot to mention was that violent crime has been declining since 2022, more than two years before he returned to office. He did not mention that the murders had already begun falling in 2022, and then dropped sharply in 2023 and 2024 while President Biden was still in office. He also said nothing about how during his 2024 campaign, he called these same FBI crime statistics “a lie,” “fake news,” “phony,” and “a fraud.” When a reporter from Time magazine presented him with FBI data showing a drop in homicides in 2023, Trump said, “There is no way that crime went down.” He has no shame and no conscience. He just says whatever benefits him in the moment.

I kept thinking about something today while I was watching the President’s speech. When we live our lives trying to tell the truth, it can actually be shocking to watch someone lie so easily. Lying makes most of us uncomfortable. 

We might worry about the consequences and about hurting someone. We feel that little knot in our stomach even thinking about lying because we physically can’t imagine being untruthful. But when lying becomes second nature, that discomfort disappears. There is no hesitation, and there is no shame. They don’t have a conscience that steps in and says to stop. The lies just come out one after the next.

And that is what I kept seeing today. Donald Trump would say something that was demonstrably untrue and simply keep moving. There was no concern that the police officers standing in front of him might know better. No respect for their training or intelligence. No apparent embarrassment that someone could check what he had just said or how it would make him look. He simply said whatever served him in that particular moment and trusted that the outlandishness of it would cover for the obvious lie.

With Donald Trump, there is no moral center underneath any of this. He is not bothered or concerned about truth or facts. He only cares that people are cheering for him. Everything is transactional and exists only to serve Donald Trump. And I think that is also why he is so comfortable surrounding himself with some of the worst people in the world.

They don’t require decency from him or ask him to become a better person. They don’t care whether he tells the truth because truth isn’t particularly useful to them either. They accept the hollow version of him exactly as he is, because that version is useful to them. They can manipulate and use him. And in return, he doesn’t just accept them, he elevates and legitimizes them.

The entire event was a performance in grandstanding. Trump and his enablers were attempting to position his administration as powerful men who have performed well in their positions. They were hoping this would distract from everything that is actually going wrong.

And the officers in that room played their part. They cheered when Trump called Democrats “Dumocrats.” They laughed on command, and they booed when he mentioned Kamala Harris. They booed the sitting governor of their own state. And when they did this, the harm went far beyond publicly aligning themselves with someone who has no regard for the rule of law. They weren’t just standing behind and cheering for someone convicted on 34 felony counts. They were sending a message that further divides our country.

Police departments across this country are constantly fighting for public trust and to prove that they serve all communities equally. They are supposed to be nonpartisan when they are in uniform and on the clock so that the public can trust that they protect everyone regardless of who they vote for. This is for everyone’s safety. The more the public trusts its law enforcement officers, the safer everyone is. In one afternoon, the officers in that room reinforced some of the deepest fears communities across this country already have about the people who are supposed to keep them safe.

And then he lied directly to them about their own area of expertise. Trump attacked New York’s no-cash-bail law, saying, “You kill somebody, you rob a store, you go right back out on the streets. It is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Every single officer in that room knows that is not how cashless bail works. They know it does not apply to serious violent crimes, and they know that people charged with murder are not simply released to go kill again the next day. He was lying about the very system they operate within every day, and they stood there and let him do it. They just stood there while the President of the United States made a mockery of their training. He disrespected every single person there today.

And when Trump told them he would “always protect our qualified immunity,” he said it as if he were offering them a gift. “Would you like qualified immunity, everybody?” he asked, and they cheered. What he was really offering them was protection. The suggestion that if they stand with him, he will stand between them and accountability.

That is not what qualified immunity is supposed to mean. It is a legal doctrine meant to shield government officials from certain civil liability, not a blanket promise from a president that law enforcement can do whatever it wants without consequences. Donald Trump was not strengthening good policing today. He was encouraging impunity. He was telling law enforcement that he will protect them, and asking for their loyalty in return.

He also tested a new talking point today, repeatedly layering the phrase “common sense” throughout his speech. “I’m a commonsense guy more than a conservative guy,” he said. “It’s all about common sense.” He doesn’t want his audience to examine whether what he is saying is actually true. He wants them to accept his words as the obvious conclusion that any reasonable person should already understand.

Once people accept that, everything else he says becomes the logical response, even the unpopular culture-war distractions become “common sense.” Even policies that might otherwise sound extreme can begin to feel reasonable because he has already told the audience that respectable people agree with him.

That is what makes this kind of rhetoric so effective. It flatters the listener into believing they are part of the rational group, the people who simply “get it,” while anyone who disagrees must therefore lack common sense. Facts and scrutiny no longer matter because disagreement itself becomes evidence that the other side is irrational. He is making everyone who challenges him on anything at all seem unreasonable simply for asking questions.

Dividing people is one of Donald Trump’s favorite weapons, and he will use anything available to do it. He called Chuck Schumer ‘a Palestinian,’ adding that “The radical extremists has not been disavowed by Chuck Schumer, who’s a Palestinian. He’s a full-fledged Palestinian. In fact, I’m looking for Palestinian garb. I’m going to send it to him for his birthday.” Chuck Schumer is Jewish. He is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history. Donald Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur to describe a political opponent who is Jewish.

This moment had nothing to do with Israel or Gaza. This was about Trump seizing the opportunity to take an entire group of human beings, strip away their individuality and humanity, and turn their identity into something his followers are supposed to fear, hate, or laugh at.

He does it to immigrants when he calls them animals and invaders. He does it to women when he reduces them to their appearance. And today he did it to Palestinians and to the Jewish people. Every one of these attacks pushes us a little further apart from each other. It teaches one group of Americans to look at another group of human beings as something beneath them, something to fear and to ridicule.

And he didn’t stop there. He called New York Attorney General Letitia James “a real slob” and “essentially a dirty cop.” He called communism and by extension Democrats “the greatest threat to our country in history, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.” Then he pointed toward the press gathered at the back of the room and said, “Well, look at all that fake news,” encouraging a room full of law enforcement officers to turn around and boo the journalists covering the event. And they did.

He is trying to strip what we have in common. He wants us to remember that there is always someone we are supposed to hate and blame. He wants us to walk around always feeling like there is not enough for everyone here, that our resources are stretched too thin, and that some of us are less American than others and less deserving of dignity. And that the people he is telling us to hate are somehow responsible for everything that is wrong in our lives.

The targets keep growing, but the purpose never changes. He needs us to stay angry and suspicious of one another. If he can do that and keep us fighting among ourselves, we might never stop long enough to look at the power and taxpayer money he is taking from all of us.

When it came to the gas prices his war has created, he told the room, “For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a nuclear weapon... you’re at $4. It’s OK. I mean, it’s... I’ll never apologize.” According to AAA, we are paying the highest August gas price in recorded history.

Trump continues to present a version of the world that simply does not exist. He said once again today that we are the “hottest country” in the world. But that is not even close to being true. Not even inside his own company.

This week, The New York Times reported that traffic to Trump’s Truth Social platform plummeted 36 percent last month compared with the same period last year. Shares of Trump Media have fallen from a high of around $60 to roughly $9. The company reported a net loss of $238.1 million in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

And its grand strategy to monetize the platform by selling Wall Street traders early access to Trump’s posts for as much as $100,000 a month attracted just over ten customers. His loyal fans, the Americans who hang on every word he says, are even growing tired of him. And the big donors and businesses he expected would pay for this new membership simply because he offered it are jumping off his sinking ship and starting to distance themselves from him.

He rounded out his event today by telling those in the room with him that what is happening in their state is going to fail. He said,  “They’re destroying the city. They’re destroying the state. We want to be there for the state, but we don’t like... what’s happening is a guaranteed failure. It’s a guaranteed failure. It’s not like, oh, maybe it’ll work. It’s a guaranteed failure.” He might have been talking about New York, but he was describing himself and his presidency. He ended his time on stage with that awkward dance and then left the stage.

Looking around that room today, I just kept thinking about how different most Americans are from the man standing on that stage. Because for the average American, the people who are not getting richer from Trump or benefiting from access to his inner circle, life is actually pretty simple.

We want to do right by our neighbors. We want our families to be safe. We want to be able to afford our homes and groceries, send our kids to good schools, go to work, come home, and believe that if something terrible happens, the people around us will still care. Nearly everyone agrees that we don’t want to keep living like this. There are fringe people who enjoy the cruelty and like being entertained by watching other people suffer.

But I don’t believe that is most of the people. I think about the people we used to have relationships with, our friends and those we called family. Somewhere underneath everything they have been told to fear and hate, there is still a human being in there. And I have to believe that matters.

I don’t write every night because I think I am going to convert Donald Trump’s most devoted followers. I write these for you and for me. For those of us who see what is happening and sometimes feel completely alone, exhausted, angry, and frustrated, but know we cannot stay quiet in the face of what is happening to our country.

And maybe part of why I keep doing this is because I need the reminder too. I need to remind myself every single day that humanity still exists inside most of us, even when it doesn’t feel that way. Because beneath all of the propaganda and anger, the truth is still the truth. It remains true no matter how many times someone twists it, or how much money or power someone gains by convincing other people to believe a lie.

In two and a half months, we all get to decide what we want the future to look like. Because lies will not keep us safe. Turning against our neighbors will not make our families richer or our lives easier. Surrendering our judgment to an authoritarian will never give us the freedom he promises in return. It only makes us participants in whatever comes next. History has a way of catching up with people who convince themselves that they were only going along with it, and that they didn’t really mean it, or that they thought they would somehow be spared. In the end, we are remembered not only for what we believed we were building, but for what we were willing to help tear down.

And that is why November matters so much. We cannot control what Donald Trump says tomorrow or who he chooses to target next. But we can slow down his destruction of our country, and we can send a message to his enablers that we will never forget what they did.

Donald Trump wants us divided. He wants us looking across the street at our neighbors and seeing enemies instead of looking up at the people accumulating power while the rest of us fight over what remains. We do not have to participate in that. We can choose each other instead. He is trying to drag all of us down with him. But we are not going to let that happen. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather Delaney Reese