It is time for President Trump’s diehard supporters to honestly listen to the way he talks, and then tell me if you think he is all right.

After being nearly an hour late arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, last Saturday to speak at the 250^th birthday celebration of the United States Navy, President Trump rambled through a political and largely incoherent speech. I cringe to think how embarrassing the nation’s 250^th birthday will be next year with Trump at the helm.

As far as I know, he is the first U.S. President to treat a gathering of military personnel like a political rally. Of course, this was not the first time he has done that. He does it on a regular basis, including his speech to 800 Generals and Admirals at Quantico, Virginia, on September 29, 2025.

While making a flicking motion with his hand last Saturday, Trump said, “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats.” He said Democrats “want to give all our money to illegal aliens.” I imagine there were some Democrats in his audience that day. His name calling needs to stop. He is 79 years old, not seven years old.

Trump referred to sorties as “sortays.”

He said we would have won the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan “but we got politically correct. We are not political correct any more. Now we win.”

He said the Navy blowing up drug cartel boats in the ocean “is an act of kindness.” He bragged that we’ve been so good at blowing up boats that there aren’t even any fishing boats out there anymore.

Trump told the sailors that he could have prevented the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. I’m quoting part of his speech verbatim, in case there is still any doubt in your mind that our President cannot make a coherent statement. On Saturday, he said,

“I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago, one year before he blew up the World Trade Center. I said, ‘You gotta watch Osama bin Laden. And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was truth but, I said one year before to Pete Hegseth, I said one year before, in the book, I wrote — whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you, but I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and ‘You’ve gotta take care of him. They didn’t do it and a year later he blew up the World Trade Center. So we’ve got to take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me.'”

I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump discussed Osama bin Laden with the then 20-year-old Pete Hegseth in the year 2000, but that’s what he said last Saturday in Norfolk. Either that, or he thinks the World Trade Center was blow up this year and he talked to Pete Hegseth about Osama bin Laden last year.

Most of his speech last Saturday was inappropriate for a captive audience of U.S. Navy personnel.

To the sailors’ credit, they were silent while the president waited in vain for booing from them when he asked if they had heard of President “Barack Hussein Obama.” He never misses a chance to include President Obama’s middle name as a blatant jab at the name which has roots in the Middle East. The insinuation is always that President Obama is a Muslim, which he is not.

It was jarring, though, to see the young sailors seated behind Trump react with laughter when he called Democrats “gnats.” It is troubling that they have not been trained in the military tradition demonstrated by their Admirals on September 29. Is their training lacking? Were they not reminded in preparation for Trump’s speech to not show approval or disapproval for political remarks he might make.

We have a U.S. President who regularly treats speeches to our military personnel as a political rally.

The United States military being non-political is a bedrock foundation of our country. If we lose that, the citizens of the United States will no longer trust our military to protect us.

He is abusing the National Guard by sending them from one state to perform law enforcement duties in another state. Surely, the Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago will win their lawsuit against Trump for sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago this week. If the courts let us down on this case, our democracy is surely doomed.

Janet