JUST SAYIN'

 

Paul Mrocka, Retired Honeywell Senior International Captain at Honeywell/AlliedSignal / Paradox Brewery

This Isn’t Normal. And We Need to Stop Pretending It Is.

Did anyone actually watch President Trump’s speech last night in North Carolina? Not the clips. Not the spin. The whole speech. It was supposed to be about affordability and the economy. Instead, it turned into rambling stories about folding underwear. He talked about “beautiful panties,” about Melania steaming them, tying them up, putting them neatly into a drawer, and how beautiful it all was. Then he said he doesn’t even notice beautiful women anymore. He said he only sees the arm of a chair. An armchair. That’s what he talked about.

That is not policy. That is not leadership. That is babbling.

People keep saying, “Don’t question his health.” I’m not diagnosing anything. I’m describing what we all saw and heard. He couldn’t stay on topic. He wandered from thought to thought. He repeated himself. He drifted. He’s been falling asleep in public. He keeps bragging about taking the same cognitive test three times and says that proves he’s perfect. If you passed it once, why take it two more times? That doesn’t calm concerns. It raises them.

This matters because this man holds real power. He holds the nuclear codes. This is not late-night comedy. This is not harmless talk.

And then he went even further. In that same speech, he talked about suing the United States government for one billion dollars. A sitting president talking about suing the government he runs, while also being in a position to influence the outcome. He joked about giving the money to charity, then immediately walked it back, saying maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he’d keep it. Like it was his decision. Like the money already belonged to him.

Ask yourself a simple question. What court does he think decides that? What law allows a president to sue his own government and then hint he’ll pocket the money? That is not how America works. That is not how the law works. That is not how leadership works.

At the same time, he keeps trying to put his name on everything. Buildings. Institutions. Even memorial spaces meant to honor the dead. Memorials exist to remember sacrifice and history, not to feed the ego of a living man. When a president can’t tell the difference, something is wrong.

And still, people defend it. That’s the part I can’t understand. He can’t walk straight. He can’t hold a clear conversation. He falls asleep in front of cameras. He talks about underwear, chairs, and “beautiful” things while holding the most powerful office on earth. And people still fight for him like none of this matters.

History has seen this before. Leaders surrounded by yes-men. Institutions too scared or too compromised to step in. People telling themselves, “It’s fine,” because facing the truth feels uncomfortable. Those stories never end well.

The closest comparison I can make isn’t political. It’s a story. The Grinch. Loud. Self-obsessed. Taking what doesn’t belong to him and calling it greatness. The difference is the Grinch was fiction. This is real life.

I’m not saying the sky is falling. I’m saying open your eyes. This isn’t left or right. This is about judgment, stability, and basic fitness for office. History will judge this moment, and it won’t just judge the man. It will judge the people who saw it, excused it, and stayed silent.

This is serious. And pretending it isn’t may be the most dangerous thing we can do.

Paul Mrocka

Veteran, Business Owner, Defender of the Constitution 

HAPPY WINTER SOLSTICE!

 

Winter solstice › Date (2025) 

Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 10:03 AM 

Northern Hemisphere · Eastern Time

 

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

--=Robert Hayden

"Not surprising, but it is disgusting."

 

 

Matt Davenport:

The Kennedy Center is our nation’s capitol’s only official living memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy. It was named by our Congress and President Johnson to honor Kennedy in the months following his assassination to honor his memory and legacy in promoting the arts and his tireless efforts to make the arts center first approved by President Eisenhower a reality.

President Kennedy promoted the arts as a source of national pride. He invited the renowned contralto, Marian Anderson, to sing and the famous poet, Robert Frost, to give a reading at his inauguration. He invited musicians to perform at the White House, brought the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery for temporary display with French government cooperation, and he and Mrs. Kennedy hosted operas, ballets, and theatrical performances of Shakespeare at new White House cultural events. And the center bearing his name has continued his legacy since its 1971 opening, hosting plays and operas and soloists while co-producing musicals and ballets and free public arts performances and educational programs for all visitors.

It was not a surprise that our current president fired the nonpartisan board overseeing the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chairman. It has not been a surprise to see him slash arts budgets and cancel previously awarded arts grants and educational arts and music programs, and cancel federal funding for the NEA, an endowment first envisioned and championed by Kennedy. Or to see him bulldoze the East Wing once graced by Mrs. Kennedy, or cement over the lawn of Mrs. Kennedy’s Rose Garden. Or install a wall of bronze plaques in the West Wing portico filled with kindergarten-level insults hurled at former presidents So it is not surprising today to wake up to the news that he wants to (unlawfully) add his OWN name to the Kennedy Center, something insecure, third-world dictators do.

Not surprising, but it is disgusting. He represents the ugliness of our time, rising to the top in a hunger-games marketplace of egotism and noise and branding and material greed and white nationalism where our White House is treated as his own piece of real estate to be defaced with ballrooms and gold he has grifted from his rich friends and working-class supporters. We have turned our back on the days when we cared about art and literature and music and the simple beauty of being moved. Because there is no art in this White House, no curiosity, no poetry, no literature, no theater, no selfless embrace of a national history bigger than any one person, just a dark cloud of hate now controlling national institutions he sees as nothing more than a stage he can use to promote himself and call our fellow Americans “garbage” and “vermin” and “deranged” and “low-IQ” and “piggy” and “stupid.”

He will one day be gone from our White House. And it will be the Kennedy Center once again. Until then, it’s good to remember the words of Kennedy himself, who in a speech to Amherst College of the Arts in the last month of his life said, “When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

In addition to being a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter, we can add "vandal" to what Trump is. He has vandalized a national monument by attaching his name to a memorial dedicated to our late 35th POTUS, John F. Kennedy. 

In a few years, Trump will be gone, and we will have the pleasure of redressing the Congressionally designated memorial that Trump has debased and sullied with his name. 

THE LAWLESS TRUMP BREAKING THE LAW AGAIN

 

Can Trump Actually Name the Kennedy Center After Himself? 

"There's no question that this is not legal." 

President Donald Trump’s hand-picked John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board voted unanimously yesterday to rebrand the cultural institution as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” Unfortunately for the president, this change won’t come as easily as slapping his name on a smartphone or a Bible. 

The statute that established the center as a memorial to President Kennedy in 1964 “explicitly names it the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” says Georgetown law professor David Super, meaning the moniker is legally baked into the facility’s very existence. Because the center’s name is codified in US law, a board of trustees vote won’t cut it; an act of Congress is needed to tack on the “Trump.”

House Republicans have been toying with this project since the summertime. One proposal introduced in July, the Make Entertainment Great Again Act, would rechristen the institution the “Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts.” Such a measure would be a “completely adequate” means of legally changing the center’s name, Super says, should it advance through Congress.

Until then, however, any changes to the center’s name are unofficial. “The other way of accomplishing a renaming is to hire somebody with a hammer and a chisel,” Super adds. “But it wouldn’t be legal.” We’ve seen this film before, in fact: Consider, for example, the Department of War or the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace—which have never been established through an official legal channel and essentially function as colloquialisms, used mostly by the administration itself. 

 [skip] 

So the name change is pretty much imaginary, from a legal perspective. But it is real in the sense that it presents the potential for further damage to the center’s integrity and the resulting condition of its employees. As usual, though, don’t hold your breath expecting the Trump administration to face any legal consequences for this. 

“There’s no question that this is not legal, but it is not at all clear that anyone has standing to sue him over it,” Super says. Not even members of the dynastic Kennedy family, who have already expressed their unequivocal disgust with the move? No, not even those guys. “The fact that somebody might be offended by this change—even the fact that someone is a descendant of President Kennedy and feels that he’s being slighted—is not necessarily going to be enough to get someone into court.”

********************************

Trump has broken the law again. What did people think a convicted felon would do when he became president and was given immunity by the SCOTUS for acts committed in his official capacity as POTUS? 

They gave a man who's been a cheat, a liar, a fraudster, and all-around sleaze-bag for his entire life permission to be all that on steroids as the most powerful person on the planet.

The Kennedy family has spoken out about this insult to the memory of John F. Kennedy, our 35th president who was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and whose name was given to the Memorial Center for the Performing Arts by an act of Congress. Trump could care less about the insult to the Kennedy family, the American people, and the law. 

Since Trump has deteriorated into a squalid orange-faced Id enabled by his feckless lackeys, we'll see more and more of this corroding narcissistic behavior from him, and it will only get worse.

I will NEVER forget what the Republican Party let this wreck of a human being do to our country.

"Trump turned the White House into a middle school bathroom wall..."

 

From The Other 98%: 

"Trump turned the White House into a middle school bathroom wall, and the plaques he stuck under Obama and Biden’s portraits are the proof. Under Barack Obama’s picture, Trump’s brass tantrum calls him 'one of the most divisive political figures in American History' and sneers at the Affordable Care Act as the 'highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act,' bragging that Trump later tore up his Iran deal and backed out of the Paris climate accords. It reads less like history and more like a Truth Social post someone mistakenly let near a chisel.

 The Biden plaque is somehow even more deranged, labeling him 'Sleepy Joe Biden' and 'by far, the worst President in American History,' then claiming he only won 'as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.' It rants about 'unprecedented disasters' and Biden’s 'severe mental decline' and even fixates on his 'unprecedented use of the Autopen,' like a middle school burn book pretending to be official White House prose. This is not statesmanship, it is fan fiction for the deeply aggrieved.

Everything about this era of American politics feels stuck at the emotional maturity of a cafeteria food fight. MAGA has turned what should be a sober record of the presidency into a walk of fame for grievance cosplay, where cruelty, lies, and projection get framed as history. At this point, the movement can go right back to the locker room where this mentality started, because the country deserves leaders whose brains have actually graduated past eighth grade."

************************

I can't add anything more to this except wonder about the people surrounding Trump and how they've abased themselves by being his enablers. They know better, I hope, and yet they do nothing to curb Trump's worst impulses and behaviors. I will never forgive them for their failure to rein in Trump's beastly actions.

Trump is to be pitied because we are watching a slow-motion dissolution of a human mind no longer able to control its primitive urges.