Is It Too Late Yet?
One of Trump’s jollier gaffs during the recent NATO summit1 was creating “the Islamic Republic of Japan.” He also created “JCPOC,” “Tic Tac,” and let slip he had been president three times. He referred to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as that man’s mortal enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, but that mistake was forgivable. From Trump’s towering perspective, those midget leaders — each about five feet seven inches tall — are interchangeable.
NATO chuckling stopped when Trump’s cognitive failings impeded any progress the leaders had hoped to make. Trump ranted at them for not sending warships to help the United States secure the Strait of Hormuz, then claimed sourly that he didn’t need their help. He asserted the United States had and had not obliterated Iranian nuclear sites, had and had not wiped out Iranian military capacity, had wiped out all of Iran and would engage in a campaign pretty soon to do exactly that. A compulsive extortionist, he circled back to threaten European leaders with tariffs if they failed to support U.S.’s annexation of Greenland.
What’s rotten about Trump’s vituperative bluff is he drops it in private. After maligning his allies savagely in front of the cameras to sell the public Tough Trump, he adopts a different tone behind closed doors, or so rumor has it.2 NATO allies tolerated this charade to salvage something from a critical summit. But their courtesy smacks of cowardice and reinforces Trump’s estimation of himself as the only wheel that turns, which exacerbates the Trump problem.
Lifting the curtain on Trump’s waning cognitive powers and wretched performance at the NATO summit, Illinois governor JB Pritzker posted July 8: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”3
As Robert Reich would say, “Hello?” “Someone” has to step in before it’s “too late”? Where have you been this past year and a half, JB?
We go forward in time, not backward. We can’t know it’s the moment before it’s too late until it’s too late.
Pritzker tasks us with the Pritzker conundrum: do something the moment before it’s too late. That is tricky. We go forward in time, not backward. We can’t know it’s the moment before it’s too late until it’s too late, at which point per definition stepping in would be futile. Clearly, we think we still have a chance. We believe “too late” hasn’t happened yet. But if we consider what Trump has done just in the days since Pritzker’s July 8th warning, we must realize little time is left.
July 9: Trump guts the Election Assistance Commission by getting rid of its last remaining members. In shutting down the agency that was instrumental in helping election officials nationwide run secure elections, Trump’s action threatens chaos for the midterms, precisely what he wants.4
July 10: The U.S. Department of the Interior and Department of Commerce redefine “harm” in the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitats. The use of “harm” had been “misguided,” they explain, which led to government overreach.5 The amended ESA continues to prohibit injuring or killing members of listed wildlife directly — an intentional fatal bop on the head is still verboten — permitted now, however, is the modification, adulteration, contamination, reduction, and fragmentation of the lands, grasses, trees, wetlands, and rivers where those species live. Water associations and irrigation districts, for example, can now divert all the water they need for irrigation, to the point of lowering river volumes, drying up tributaries, and destroying the habitat of protected fish species downstream if they deem necessary, with no legal repercussions.6
July 13: Trump signs executive orders reducing Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument by over 90%. That 2.9 million acres will be made available for extraction of critical minerals and uranium from Bears Ears territory, for coal mining and drilling in the Grand Staircase-Escalante. With his orders, Trump informs us, he is giving the land back to the citizens and caretakers of Utah.
July 13: Trump announces he will be guardian of the Strait of Hormuz and charge 20% of cargo value for his trouble, a windfall he will likely pool with his Venezuelan revenues and Board of Peace permanent membership fees in a tidy no-oversight all-for-me Trump account.
July 16: For those not already alerted, the New York Times presents the granite helipad with the presidential seal Trump is having built on the South Lawn of the White House. A man of opportunity, he saw the time was right. After the removal of the UFC cage that transfixed a select crowd for reasons we’ll never fathom with its foul spectacle, Trump decided no $1 million restoration of the lawn was required after all. He’d put his helipad right in the middle of the mess pronto. No approvals. No reviews. No fuss.7 8
July 16: U.S. Secret Service and National Park Service present plans to erect a permanent 8-to-10-foot-high steel perimeter fence around Lafayette Square to streamline security closures. Lafayette Square had been the traditional spot for peaceful, legal, highly visible public protests against federal government actions and policies. No more.
July 16: Trump informs us on national television that our elections are in jeopardy, but that he is putting controls in place to preserve their integrity. We are to thank the president.
July 17—18: U.S. bombs a seawater desalination plant, cutting off fresh water supplies to villages in southern Iran where afternoon temperatures exceed 106°F. International law forbids destruction of civilian infrastructure. The U.S. protests that soldiers use water, too, quick to borrow a Netanyahu-style justification for questionable strikes.
Ten days have passed, JB, since your warning and look at what’s happened. Is it still not too late? Or, as Thom Hartmann framed more ominously on a recent edition9 of The Hartmann Report: “Are we in a police state yet?”
Renée Good’s “too late” date came January 7, 2026; for Alex Pretti, it was January 24, 2026.
The reason we are still waiting and watching and wondering darkly what Trump will do next is because we obviously think we still have time to save the day, that it’s not too late. For many, however, the waiting is over.
The waiting was over for Ruben Ray Martinez March 2025; for Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez September 2025; for Keith Porter Jr. December 31, 2025.
Renée Good’s “too late” date came January 7, 2026; for Alex Pretti, it was January 24, 2026. For Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, July 7, 2026; for Joan Sebastian Guerrero, July 13, 2026.
It is too late for the 42 people who died in ICE custody; for the hundreds of women and infants dead as a result of Trump’s shutdown of reproductive healthcare; for the 221 people killed in international waters by U.S. “kinetic” strikes on their boats; for the hundreds of thousands worldwide whose lives ended with the federal withdrawal of USAID funding.10
We’ve been watching this stream of “too late” moments for 18 months now. No one stepped in, and the bottom never dropped out. From that we assumed we still had time to do something about Trump, that the decisive moment hovered out there somewhere in the future, that we could continue to watch, wait, and worry in relative security, which, ironically, increased our tolerance of Trump’s abuse.
We know that someone won’t be Congress, a body that has shown extreme reluctance to so much as inconvenience the president.
Once we realize we are in that magic Pritzker moment — the moment before it’s too late — we’ll have to work out who this “someone” is who will step in and do something. We know that someone won’t be Congress, a body that has shown extreme reluctance to so much as inconvenience the president. We know our someone won’t be the courts. They’ve been trying to do the right thing, but are too slow. We know not to look to the Supreme Court. That Trump abettor overturns hard-fought lower-court decisions against Trump back in his favor. And, sadly, it’s not going to be the weighty Illinois governor JB Pritzker.
But, hang on! We Americans have been proud for a very long time of being a nation of someones; citizens who face adversity squarely; pioneers who are practical, logical, clear-sighted, far-sighted, determined, courageous, and fair. We can take an example from the Albanians who recently showed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner the door and demanded the resignation of prime minister Edi Rama, who aggressively promoted the corrupt Trump/Kushner real estate scheme with the backing of Albania’s entire underworld;11 a people who lived under Communism until their massive protests in 1990 established democracy in 1992. What can 3.7 million registered Albanian voters do that 204.6 million registered American voters cannot?
So, as T.S. Eliot said, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”12 Let us rise, depart the pub, get out into the streets again — no nonsense this time about “No Kings” that deposed no one — and show President Trump how very fair we are by informing him that he can go the easy way or the hard way: resign today or prepare his fanny for a long slide out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue right into a penitentiary, which he seems to know awaits him if — God forbid — the people have their way.
- Held in Ankara, Türkiye, July 7 and 8. ↩︎
- https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/07/trump-yelled-at-nato-leaders-in-public-in-private-it-was-a-different-story-00989982 ↩︎
- govpritzker.illinois.gov/post/3mq5u4h7n6s25 ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/trump-accused-election-rig-federal-commissioners-fired ↩︎
- https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/department-interior-restores-clear-esa-enforcement-rescinding-misguided-harm ↩︎
- https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ ↩︎
- The helipad is absolutely necessary to protect the south lawn from the scorching downward air currents generated by the new helicopters now serving to convey the U.S. president, the U.S. vice president, and designated high-level government officials on their shorter jaunts. It was for those jaunts that the fleet of 23 VH-92A helicopters was purchased August 2024 for $5 billion. Once his handy-dandy helipad is finished, President Trump need only walk 100 feet from the Executive Residence to submit his limbs to the euphoric up, up, and away sensation of serious flight. No longer having to walk the 250 feet to the grassy turf of the South Lawn will save him 30 seconds. Over the course of the next two years — if he lasts that long — the more he rides in Marine One the more time he saves, a win-win if there ever was one. However, due to obstacles thrown in his way as a result of the helipad construction site, Trump is currently obliged to take a quarter-mile ride in his presidential motorcade to reach Marine One. ↩︎
- Surely Trump would feel that saving his good buddy UFC CEO Dana White the nuisance of restoring the lawn would be worth the $1 million it would have cost him to perform the work. Of course, Trump would suggest White transfer that sum to Trump. Of course, White would comply. ↩︎
- https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/police-state-are-we-already-there-3ae?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web ↩︎
- USAID was dismantled July 1, 2025. The death toll due to the sudden cessation of malaria treatments, nutritional programs, and PEPFAR clinics worldwide is between 750,000 and 800,000, including 500,000 children. PEPFAR, the United States President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, is tasked to address the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. As of 2023, it had reportedly saved over 25 million lives, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Dismantling USAID has not totally closed down PEPFAR clinics worldwide, but severely fractured its global network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamingo_Revolution ↩︎
- The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot. ↩︎