Reverb x Civicus
Response to Occupy Democrats’ “WATCH: WH Staffers Are Calling for TRUMP’s REMOVAL!!!”

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When Donald Trump was asked how much Americans’ financial situations influence his negotiations with Iran, he reportedly answered, “Not even a little bit,” and said he thinks about one thing: preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

Dude.

What?

The president of the United States does not have the luxury of not thinking about Americans’ financial situations.

That is the job.

People are trying to afford groceries. Rent. Gas. Insurance. Medical bills. Childcare. Basic survival. Families are making impossible choices while the people at the top play games with power, loyalty, ideology, and money.

So when Trump says something like that, I do not hear strength.

I hear absence.

I hear a man disconnected from the people he is supposed to serve.

And I hear the silence of everyone around him who already knows something is wrong.

That is what makes the Occupy Democrats video so disturbing.

Not because one staffer allegedly said something ugly about Trump. Not because private frustration inside a White House is shocking. Every administration has tension. Every administration has internal conflict.

This is different.

The video points toward something much darker: a presidency where people close to power appear to understand that the decision-making process is chaotic, that staffers may be interpreting Trump’s impulses instead of following clear leadership, and that people below him may be calling shots in his name.

That is not ordinary dysfunction.

That is a warning.

Because if people inside the building know the decision-making process is unstable, if they know people are freelancing power in the name of Trump, if they know he is not functioning as the clear, competent leader his supporters claim him to be, then the issue is no longer only Trump.

The issue is everyone around him who keeps participating.

Everyone who benefits.

Everyone who stays quiet.

Everyone who thinks proximity to power is worth the damage.

The Stable Genius Costume

Trump once called himself a “very stable genius.”

That phrase has always mattered to me because it was never just a boast.

It was a costume.

It was branding.

It was cheap gold paint on the rotten structure underneath.

And now look at what appears to be happening.

The so-called stable genius is surrounded by people wearing his cap, borrowing his authority, interpreting his impulses, and calling it governance.

People with little to no meaningful expertise in the fields they are influencing are making decisions because they were loyal enough, loud enough, extreme enough, or useful enough to be placed near the machinery of power.

That is not a government.

That is a loyalty cult with stationery.

That is how you end up with a presidency where the people below the president begin acting like translators of his imagined will.

“Well, I think this is what he would want.”

“Well, this feels like something he would support.”

“Well, the base will like this.”

That is terrifying.

Not because every president does every single thing personally. Of course they do not. Presidents have cabinets, advisers, staff, attorneys, agencies, and layers of process around them.

But that is exactly the point.

The process matters.

Expertise matters.

Checks matter.

The presidency is not supposed to be a vibes-based dictatorship run by whoever feels most confident pretending they understand the mind of a deteriorating man.

This Is Not Leadership. This Is a Prop System.

I have been saying this for a while now:

I do not believe Trump is truly running all of this.

I believe he is useful.

I believe he is being used.

I believe he is a shield.

I believe he is a prop.

And I believe many of the people closest to him know it.

That does not make Trump innocent. Let me be very clear about that. Trump built this machine. Trump fed this machine. Trump rewarded sycophancy, cruelty, dishonesty, and corruption for years. He created the conditions that now surround him.

But there is something especially disturbing about watching people continue to use a man who appears increasingly unstable because his instability serves their purposes.

It lets them hide behind him.

It lets them say, “That was Trump.”

It lets them pretend that the madness begins and ends with him.

But it does not.

The people around him are not innocent bystanders trapped in a strange building. They are adults. They are professionals. They are political actors. They are making choices.

And some of them seem to understand exactly what is happening.

That is what makes the silence so vile.

The Biden Standard and the Trump Reality

I remember how people talked about President Biden.

The age concerns.

The health concerns.

The constant media fixation.

The endless questions about whether he was too old, too slow, too diminished, too fragile.

I am not saying those concerns were never worth discussing. They were. A president’s health matters. A president’s cognitive capacity matters. The public has a right to care about whether the person holding the office is able to do the job.

But let us be honest about the double standard.

Biden was nowhere near this.

Not even close.

And yet people acted like every verbal stumble was a constitutional crisis.

Meanwhile, Trump can rant, confuse, threaten, spiral, contradict himself, display obvious instability, and somehow we are still expected to treat it as entertainment.

No.

I reject that.

I remember someone close to me once saying, in reference to Biden, that if people were pushing him forward while knowing he was not okay, that should be considered elder abuse.

And I understood the concern.

But if we are going to use that lens, then we need to use it honestly.

Because what we are watching with Trump feels far closer to a political version of Weekend at Bernie’s.

A man is being dragged around as the face of power while other people maneuver behind him.

They smile beside him.

They translate him.

They clean up after him.

They excuse him.

They post for him.

They flatter him.

They keep him moving just enough to preserve the illusion.

And then they hide behind that illusion when the consequences land on the rest of us.

That is not strength.

That is not patriotism.

That is not governance.

That is exploitation wrapped in a flag.

Duty Does Not Disappear Because Power Is Involved

This part hits me personally.

When I was in the nursing field, one of the things we were taught was that if something is wrong, you have a duty to report it.

You do not get to look away because it is uncomfortable.

You do not get to stay quiet because it might cause problems.

You do not get to ignore abuse, neglect, danger, or dysfunction because speaking up might inconvenience someone with authority.

You have a duty.

That lesson stayed with me.

And I cannot stop thinking about it now.

Because this is not a nursing student in some small-town setting trying to understand reporting requirements.

This is the presidency of the United States.

This is the highest office in the country.

This is nuclear power, military power, economic power, immigration power, legal power, global power.

So what is the duty when the people around the president know something is wrong?

What is the duty when insiders privately admit the decision-making is chaotic?

What is the duty when people are making decisions around him, through him, or in his name?

What is the duty when the public is being sold an illusion?

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists for a reason. That does not mean it is easy to use. It does not mean every alarming moment automatically meets the constitutional threshold. But it does mean our system recognizes that there can come a point where a president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.

We are allowed to talk about that.

We are allowed to ask what people inside the government know.

We are allowed to ask who is protecting the country and who is protecting themselves.

Corruption Loves a Prop

The most dangerous part of all this is not only Trump’s condition.

It is the corruption surrounding it.

Because a diminished or unstable leader is useful to people who want access without accountability.

He can sign.

He can rage.

He can distract.

He can absorb blame.

He can be placed in front of a camera while other people make moves behind the curtain.

And when Americans suffer, he can shrug.

That is why his comment about Americans’ financial situation hit me so hard.

Because a president who does not think about the financial pressure on Americans is not detached from one issue.

He is detached from the human reality of the office.

People are trying to afford groceries.

People are trying to afford rent.

People are trying to keep gas in the car.

People are drowning in medical bills, insurance costs, childcare costs, debt, fear, and exhaustion.

And the man in charge says he does not think about that?

Then who is this government serving?

Because it does not look like it is serving the American people.

It looks like it is serving power.

It looks like it is serving donors.

It looks like it is serving ideologues.

It looks like it is serving the people who want to break Americans badly enough that we stop fighting back.

The People Around Him Are the Story Too

I know there are people who will say this is just Trump being Trump.

That excuse is dead.

At some point, the people enabling him become the story.

The advisers.

The staffers.

The loyalists.

The opportunists.

The religious extremists whispering in his ear.

The media figures translating his incoherence into strategy.

The politicians pretending not to see what they see.

The donors funding the wreckage.

The cabinet members who know better.

The people who privately panic and publicly praise.

They do not get to hide behind him forever.

Because if they know something is wrong and they continue to use him anyway, they are not victims of the chaos.

They are part of it.

This is what accountability has to mean.

Not just Trump.

The system around Trump.

The people around Trump.

The people who see the danger and decide the danger is useful.

So I Write

I was taught not to hate.

I was taught not to use that word lightly.

And I do not use it lightly now.

But I am going to be honest: I have never felt hatred like the hatred I feel toward what Donald Trump has done to this country.

I hate the cruelty.

I hate the corruption.

I hate the lies.

I hate the way people excuse everything.

And I hate the way people who claim to love America keep helping someone damage it.

But I also know this:

Hatred cannot be the final destination.

It can be the alarm bell.

It can be the smoke in the room.

It can be the signal that something sacred is being violated.

But it cannot be where I live.

So I write.

I write because silence is surrender.

I write because pretending not to see it would make me part of the problem.

I write because people in power are counting on exhaustion.

They are counting on confusion.

They are counting on us getting so overwhelmed that we stop naming what is happening.

No.

Not today.

They Know

They know.

That is the line I keep coming back to.

They know something is wrong.

They know he is not what they sell to the public.

They know the machinery around him is dangerous.

They know the decision-making is not normal.

They know the corruption is not imaginary.

They know the illusion is cracking.

And still, too many of them keep going.

So let me say the thing plainly:

If Donald Trump is unable to faithfully, competently, and independently discharge the duties of the presidency, then the people around him have a duty to stop pretending.

And if they will not stop pretending, then the rest of us have a duty to keep saying what they already know.

This is not normal.

This is not leadership.

This is not strength.

This is a prop presidency.

And every person helping hold up the illusion should be held accountable when it falls.