HE SPEAKS

I beg your indulgence today for this exceptionally lengthy essay as I give you the words of a guest speaker, with only a brief comment after his remarks.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States:

We’re very proud of our military. I rebuilt the military during my first term. It’s one of the greatest achievements. We had the greatest economy in history and I built the military. Those are the two things I say more than anything else. And I also kept us safe at the borders. We had very good borders. We didn’t have people coming in from jails and prisons and everything like took place over the last four years.

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We were sitting there, I said, didn’t it used to be called the Department of War? And he [SecWar Pete Hegseth] goes, yes, sir, they changed it like in the early 50s. So we won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything in between and everything before that. We only won. And then we went, in a way, woke. That was probably the first sign of woke-ness and we changed it to defense instead of war. And I said, what do you think -- how do you think if we change it back? Would that be a nice idea? And Pete loved it immediately. Some people thought about it. You know, they gave it a little thought. But in the end, we did it. And I have to be honest, it’s so popular. It’s -- I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up, I must be honest with you. They’ve had it. They’ve had it with Trump. They’ve been after me for so many years now. Here we are. Here we are. Come to the White House anytime you’d like. No, they’ve given up, bad -- a lot of bad people. But all over that’s been so popular. It’s been a very popular. I really thought that we were going to have to sort of fight it through. There’s been no fight. There’s been no fight. Like when I called the Gulf of America, the Gulf of America, because to me, it was always the Gulf of America. I could never understand. We have 92 percent of the frontage. And for years, actually 350 years, they were there before us, it was called the Gulf of Mexico. I just had this idea. I’m looking at a map. I’m saying, we have most of the frontage, why is it Gulf of Mexico? Why isn’t it the Gulf of America? And I made the change and it went smoothly. I mean, we had a couple of fake news outlets that refused to make the change and then one of them, AP took us to court and we won. And the judge, who was a somewhat liberal judge said, the name is the Gulf of America, because AP refused to call it the Gulf of America. They wrote -- they’re not a good outfit by the way. They call it the Gulf of Mexico. I said, no, the Gulf of America is the name. And the judge actually said that, in fact, you can’t even go into the room because what you’re doing is not appropriate. The name is the Gulf of America. Google Maps changed the name. Everybody did, but AP wouldn’t. And then we won in court. How about that? Isn’t that so cool. As Secretary Hegseth beautifully described, the name change reflects far more than the shift in branding. It’s really a historic reassertion of our purpose and our identity and our pride. That’s when we go with the word war.

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I rebuilt our nuclear, as you probably know, but we’ll upgrade that also and just hope we never have to use it. We have to hope we never have to use it because the power of that is so incredible. I see things -- I don’t think they’d show it to you. I really wouldn’t want them to show it to you. But when you see the result of what’s left, you never want to use that. Never, never ever. I moved a submarine or two, I won’t say about the two, over to the coast of Russia, just to be careful because we can’t let people throw around that word. I call it the “n” word, there are two n words and you can’t use either of them. You can’t use either of them. And frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else. We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about. But when somebody mentions it, that submarine started immediately thereafter and it’s just lurking. But I’m sure we’re not going to have to use it. But it’s an amazing -- it’s undetectable totally. Ours is -- theirs isn’t. Theirs are totally detectable. We can detect them easily. We go right to the spot. But we have a genius apparatus that doesn’t allow detection. It doesn’t allow detection at all by anybody above water or below water. It’s incredible, we’re way ahead of everybody in that and other things.

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I always put the fire department in because they’re great. They’re great, and I got 95 percent of their vote too, that helps. When you get 95 percent of the vote, you always have to mention them, but they’re great. And they’re brave in our inner cities, which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now, it’s a big part of war. But the firemen go up on ladders and you have people shooting at them while they’re up on ladders. I don’t even know if anybody heard that. And actually don’t talk about it much, but I think you have to. Our firemen are incredible. They’re up on one of these ladders that goes way up to the sky rescuing people, and you have animals shooting at them -- shooting bullets at firemen that are way up in death territory. You fall off that ladder, it’s over, it’s over. They don’t even have to inspect you when you hit the ground. And you have people shooting bullets at them in some of these inner cities. We’re not going to let that happen.

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Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it -- they’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing. They’ll give it to a guy that wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump and what it took to solve the wars. And he’ll get -- the Nobel Prize will go to a writer. No, but we’ll see what happens. But it’ll be a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it. It should get it because there’s never been anything like it. Think of it. So if this happens, I think it will.

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I love tariffs, most beautiful word, but I’m not allowed to say that anymore. I said, tariff is my favorite word. I love the word tariff. You know, we’re becoming rich as hell. We have a big case in front of the Supreme Court, but I can’t imagine -- because this is what other nations have done to us and we have, you know, great legal grounds, but you still have a case of being very bad if something happened. But I said, my favorite word in the English dictionary is the word tariff and people thought that was strange. And the fake news came over and they really hit me hard on it. They said, what about love? What about religion? What about God? What about wife, family? I got killed when I said tariff is my favorite word, so I changed. It’s now my fifth favorite word and I’m OK with that. I’m OK with that, but they hit me hard.

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We’re investing tens of billions of dollars in modernizing our nuclear deterrence capabilities like never before. And we’ve begun construction on what we call the Golden Dome missile defense shield. It will be the most sophisticated in the world. You watched it do well until they had some problems at the end with a little bit of a lack of ammunition, defensive ammunition, but they’ve got that taken care of. But I tell you it’s -- what we’re doing is so good and we deserve it. You know, we help other countries with it, we don’t have it ourselves. And Canada called me a couple of weeks ago, they want to be part of it, to which I said, well, why don’t you just join our country, you’d become 51, become the 51st state and you’d get it for free.

So, I don’t know if that made a big impact, but it does make a lot of sense. It actually makes -- because they’re having a hard time up there in Canada now because, as you know, with tariffs, everyone’s coming into our country. We have more investment than we’ve ever had before, $17 trillion coming in. As an example, in four years Biden didn’t have $1 trillion.

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Do you know in the Second World War, they were freighters and different types, but we were doing a ship a day and now we don’t do ships. And I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very esthetic person. I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing esthetically. They say, oh, it’s stealth. I say that’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.

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And they were -- they’re vicious people, you know, that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are different, a different kind of vicious. But they spread all these horrible -- you know, they made up statements, and said what I said about everything, but even about the military. But fortunately, the military didn’t believe it. It’s hard. You know, they make up a statement and they say you say it. We had 25 people that said he never said that. 25. We had 25 affidavits. And they said, well, we’re going with it anyway. You know, these sleazebags. And that’s why the press is really losing all power, because people aren’t believing it. We need an honest press.

We need borders. We need borders, we need an honest press, we need fair elections. I mean those three things. And we don’t have an honest press. We have a really corrupt press, but we fight through the corrupt press, and the people understand. You have to do this stuff a lot. You have to go on television a lot because you can’t get a fair shake if you’re going to rely on somebody else.

Biden let people come in from prisons, mental institutions, drug dealers, murderers. You know, we had 11,488 murderers allowed into our country by this guy who had no clue. He had no clue. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but he had no clue. The people that ran the office, the White House, were, people that surrounded him, radical left lunatics that are brilliant people, but dumb as hell when it came to policy and common sense.

And they allowed people from all over the world, from the Congo. They opened up prisons in the Congo. They came into our country totally unmatched, unvetted, unchecked. And from all over South America, not just South America. You know, you think South America, no, but from all over. A lot came in from Venezuela. Venezuela emptied its prison population into our country. That’s why they have Tren de Aragua, one of the worst gangs ever, but we took care of them. We took good, strong care of them and I just want to thank the National Guard in Washington D.C. It was -- it’s embarrassing to say this. Now I can say it because we solved it, but Washington D.C. was the most unsafe, most dangerous city in the United States of America.

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Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live.

Oh, when we send in the troops, if you have a real leader that says you’re going to do what you have to do. I put that out the other day, you got to do what you got to do, because we don’t want our people hurt as they stand by. I was watching -- during Biden, they had troops standing up like this, brave, standing up at attention, the way I should stand all the time, and -- like this. And people are standing there. Their mouth is this far away from their mouth and they’re spitting at them and they’re screaming at them. And that soldier standing there, he wants to knock the hell out of the person, but he’s not allowed to do anything. So they just stand there and they get abused. And a woman was this far away from his face and she starts spitting in his face and he’s not allowed to do anything. If it’s OK with you generals and admirals, I’ve taken that off. I say, they spit, we hit. Is that OK? I think so. They spit -- it’s a new thing. They spit, we hit. How about the cars, where the cars are coming at -- they get brand new cars, border patrol, ICE, beautiful, nice, new cars. And they’re driving along and they have to go through a gauntlet of rocks being thrown at the car. So here’s this beautiful, brand-new car. By the time it goes 100 yards, it’s destroyed. These guys have pretty good arms, some of them, and they’re throwing bricks at full force into the window and into the car. It looks like it’s a war zone. And I said, never let that happen again. From now on if that ever happens, and I say it here, you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do, because those people are -- you know, you can die from that. Those bricks go through the windows, you can die. They’d like it to. They’d like it to go through the window. But this was a couple of months ago, they just kept driving and bricks are hitting the car. And I said, why aren’t they stopping? Because they were under orders from the past administration, never stop. But that’s different with this. We stop. And since I gave that order, we haven’t had that problem. It’s very interesting. It’s amazing.

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And you know what the people say, the people in those cities where they’re being raped and shot and beat up, you know, they say we love the military. You ever see where they’re interviewing the people on the street? I’ve never seen somebody say they don’t unless they’re radical and paid off because a lot of these insurrectionists are paid by -- whether it’s Soros or other people, but they’re paid by the radical left.

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We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs. I said it’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for -- like I’m on stairs like these stairs, I’m very -- I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that, need to walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any record, be cool. Be cool when you walk down but don’t -- don’t bop down the stairs. So, one think with Obama, I had zero respect for him as the president, but he would bop down those stairs -- I’ve never seen, da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once.

But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead; this country was going to hell. We were dead in every way, from immigration to miliary. You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there, because we had the United States military the best, the boldest, the bravest that the world has ever seen, that the world has ever known.

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With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come, because we will fight, fight, fight and we will win, win, win. I want to just thank you once again and God bless the United States military and God bless America; God bless you all. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Those words were verbatim, less than one-quarter of the rambling speech Trump made to the unexplained assemblage of hundreds of top rank U.S. military officers summoned to Arlington, Virginia, on September 30, 2025. I assure you I have taken nothing out of context; if anything, I have omitted more incoherent rambling. You can read the entire speech at your own leisure --- it’s available at several on-line sources such as Roll Call (https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/) – but you will see that the balance was no more coherent.

Senile? Deranged? Stupid? A manifestly rude evil man, plainly the most corrupt president in over a hundred years, if not since the founding of the Republic (anyone want to buy his crypto or a place at his dinner table?), while in office he has doubled his inherited fortune. He has brought unprecedented rage and hatred into the Oval Office. I know I am far from alone calling out Donald Trump’s mental and intellectual incapacity.

Arne Werchick, after fifty years as a California litigation attorney, pro tem judge, law lecturer, former Presiding Arbitrator of the State Bar of California, and past president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, moved to Hawaii and lives with his wife Ruth and their rescue dog Topaz. His prior community service included two years as Special Counsel to California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law at Hastings College of the Law, Administrative Law Judge pro tem, Chair of the Palm Desert Rent Review Commission, and numerous professional and civic organizations, and he was frequently an invited lecturer at continuing education programs. He now writes and publishes OUT OF MY LIBERAL MIND to provide a progressive perspective on current politics and provide a forum for liberal conversation, WIDGETS by WERCHICK, an occasional comment on techie gadgets which might prove useful for seniors, and NJABCTCC -- Phileas Fogg Reports, the voice of the Not-Just-Another-Book-Club Travel Conversation Circle