Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)

November 10, 2025

The futility of desperately seeking hope. The signs at the entrances to the Nazi death camps read "Work Shall Set You Free."

It drives me crazy. It leads me to actually shout out loud at home.

People are desperate for hope. They want to hear answers to the question “what can we actually do to stop Trump?”

They want to feel that going out to hold signs along a busy road once week like they do around the country will make a difference.

This is human nature. Feeling helpless when your life as you know it, your lifestyle, is not just jeopardized, but may be forcibly taken from you is a normal reaction. When this is the fact, pretending it isn’t inevitable when it is for certain happening or about to happen is clinical denial or delusional.

Although some people have been herded onto deportation airplanes, we haven’t been herded by armed soldiers into cattle cars to a place that has a sign over the gate that says “work shall make you free.”

Perhaps some of the Jews headed to the gas chambers saw that sign and had a glimmer of hope, a fleeting moment that defied logic. Even if though they didn’t know that some wouldn’t last more than a week before they were killed, while others were going to be worked to death, they had to know that the SS and Gestapo who brought the there weren’t going to provide work that would make them free.

I am under no illusion that my using AI to make images of Nap-oleon Trump like these > 1 does anything more than provide me amusement. I’d hoped it would amuse my readers. It doesn’t solve anything. It is just an escape, a momentary respite.

All the SNL skits, the riffs mocking Trump by late night comics, the editorial cartoons (like those by Ann Telnais), and even the No Kings protests, play into Trump’s hands. He may personally bristle when someone or something scores a hit that bruises his ego, but he also is firm in his belief that those people opposing him are, as the line used in several movies says, bringing knives to a gunfight.

I know that keeping one’s sanity and not succumbing to clinical depression or being debiliated by anxiety is crucial. It is vital for all of us to find ways to take care of our mental health. If it means just avoiding even thinking about the news, this is what you have to do.

I would rather see people seek balance. Escape for a period of time and then refocus your attention so you see what is going on.

You might say to me that is seems like I am saying I should give up hope. I am loath to state that I this is what I am saying. Don’t kid yourself. Trump holds not only the reins of power, but is whipping us with them. He may not be drawing blood yet, at least for those who haven’t been targeted by his ICE thugs, but I see it as only a matter of time before we are all feeling the sting on our metaphorical flesh.

My suggestion as someone who was a therapist for 40 years and still thinks like a shrink is that we should do what help us to feel good but not kid ourselves. If you want to head out to the road with a group of like minded people and hold signs because this makes you feel like at least youre doing something, and it feels good to be with friends and have people who drive by hink and wave, go ahead and do it enthusiastically.

Everyone must practice self-care. I broke my practice of having the news on TV in the morning and going to Music Choice and listening to oldies.

I just want people to understand that things have gone so far beyond being bad that bad can’t even be seen in the rear view mirror.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have posted my Trump as Nap-oleon of yesterday’s Substack which I took down.

November 9, 2025

JOJOFROMJERZ calls it Napocalypse Now, I say the narcoleptic news about Trump delights me, AI images show him napping in a meeting with his clowns, by Hal M. Brown

Go to bottom of page or to see more images click here > 1

JoJofromJerz had the best name for the lastest news about Trump: Napocalypse Now. All of you must read this Substack from JoJofromJerz (click here). I don’t know how even she can top this one for her always funny, acerbic wordsmithing about Trump. She makes me not even want to try to be snarky, let alone to see if I can come up with one or two lines which I think are amusing, let along gut busting laugh out loud hysterical. Check it out:

Her subtitle is damn good, too: “face-planted into dreamland during a press conference on dementia.”

JOJOFROM JERZ is the online persona of Joanne Carducci. She was a suburban mom from New Jersey, but now is a prominent Substacker and podcaster where she writes

Here’s an article about her. She has 237k follower on Instagram here and a million on X here.

I won’t even begin to try to write anything clever about Trump being caught on camera napping and express how, for the first time since he was elected, I actually feel good about anything in Trump world. As JoJo might say, this fucken delights me.

The results of the 2025 election don’t come anywhere close to having made me feel as good as this narcoleptic news about the nattering nabob of narcissism. That alliteration is the best I even want to try to foist off readers as being clever after reading JoJo.

I couldn’t come close to writing sentences like these:

He’s anti-woke like he heard Dr. Oz say “People can sleep again” and immediately took it as a fucking directive from the sleep gods, then attempted to achieve full unconsciousness during a press conference.
But President Napoleon Bone-Apart-From-Reality, seated like a bloated Renaissance bishop awaiting confession, simply slipped into the void with the kind of ease that comes from decades of surviving on rage, ego, and whatever Gargamelian goo is leaking out of his adrenal glands.
And for a split second, Trump twitched upright — like someone hit the defibrillate button on a microwaved pot roast.
A moment so saturated in unintentional symbolism it belongs in a museum next to the Emancipation Proclamation and a can of Barbasol steaming in the glove box of a Dodge Neon outside a Cracker Barrel.
And don’t even get me started on the cankles — those puffy, defiant ankle-calves that look like they’re smuggling two Costco rotisserie chickens under house arrest.

I want to make sure that none of my readers miss this particular JoJo Substack and consider following her.

There are lots of excellent writers on Substack. One is my friend Sabrina Haake. Steve Schmidt is another who wields a sharp rhetorical sword. Here’s his piece on Trump’s reaction to the man collapsing in the Oval Office. Jeff Teidrich is fun to read but he thinks using fuck and shit throughout a piece is humor when it is just venting. For example his Substack about the same topic as this which he titled “what the fuck is wrong with this guy” here.

I have nothing more to write about this. I can’t take credit for the images Perchance AI made. I can take credit for this AI request:

I don’t have to explain why I decided to ask for this particular image. On the very first try I came up with six images. I thought the two in the upper left might serve as a primary illustration but then figured, what the hell, I decided that I’d share them all.

Her are two that came up when I used the same request to be made in a cartoon version.

I know I don’t need to elaborate why I asked for clowns.

I like that HuffPost used the photo of Trump taken when the person collapsed in the Oval Office on the main page to illustrate this story. With some luck this will be used frequently. It won’t have the beneficial impact (to him) that the mugshot photo did and that his fist-raised photo after a bullet clipped his ear really did. That may have gotten him elected. He wants to have it on a new coin.

We should take what we can get when it is offered to us.

This photo is a gift on a golden platter.

The photo shows two things: that he is fighting a losing battle with the demon of drowsy even when he know there are cameras, and they also demonstrate his I don’t give a crap attitude about people who are suffering.

As if this isn’t enough, here some icing on the Trump snooze-quest news cake. This is a another sleepy time story made even more yummy since Fox News broke it:

Here’s the RawStory article about it: ‘He worse than Biden’: ‘Exhausted’ Trump seen ‘slumping into limo’ amid sleep scandal.

Excerpt:

Just as Donald Trump is trying to shake off a scandal after purportedly being spotted falling asleep in the Oval Office, the president was seen in a video reportedly “exhausted” and “slumping” into his limo.
Trump appeared to doze off during a press conference on Thursday, drawing both mockery and shock from political analysts and other online observers. One night later, he was seen “slumping” into his limo, according to video posted by Fox News and shared by the Daily Beast Saturday.
“President Donald Trump slumped into a waiting limousine after landing in Palm Beach for a Mar-a-Lago weekend on Friday—even as he demanded lawmakers keep at it in Washington, D.C., amid the ongoing government shutdown,” the outlet reported. “In footage captured by Fox News on Friday night, Trump can be seen slowly making his way off Air Force One. He descends the stairs at a cautious pace and raises his fist after completing the task without incident, before almost collapsing into the seat of his waiting car.”

That article includes a reference to this X post about McDonald’s burgers and fries:

This led me to using AI to make this:

Also: Nicolle Wallace bursts into laughter as Trump caught nodding off — again.

Click here for possible reason for Trump’s need to nap >2

November 8, 2025

Trump and his warriors' wet wish.

Look closely.

They wish Portland’s costumed protestors were armed to the teeth. It would give them an excuse to say they’re dangerous terrorists. It would give them an excuse to release the kraken.

Read the above article: ‘Sickening’: Dad seized while holding toddler during wife’s ‘harrowing’ ICE arrest. The photo RawStory published was taken outside the ICE facility in my city of Portland. Below is my comment about it:

How many accounts do we have to read which come with videos about official brutality and downright thuggery like this do we have to see before it's just plain fucken stops? It’s a question with a simple answer. This is no limit. There is no red line.

This man hardly looks dangerous.

At least this person dressed like he’s a real police officer of some sort wasn’t hiding his face:

The following is from Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s X page.

Why, I ask myself, am I even writing about one particular incident, one incident that is just the most recent of many. There will be another one tomorrow, the next day,m or the day after.

Eventually we may have another Kent State massacre, but so what? It won’t make a damn difference.

Eventually in a country awash with guns somebody very well could either, on impulse, or thinking what the fuck let them kill me, I’m going to take a few with me. Their pistol will come out and the homeland protectors will load them with lead and make any agent killed will be made into a hero. Indeed, hero they will be because this is precisely what I am certain Trump, Homan, Hegseth, Noem, Bondi, Patel, and the dearest of the dearest, Stephen Miller desire. Obviously there are many more just itching to unleash the overwhelming fire power they have at their disposal.

Wanna bet that the 11, whatever the hell they’re supposed to be, goons at the Portland ICE facility would wet their pants wishing that the protestor in the chicken suit pulled a pistol. He’d be so pumped full of lead he could be used as an anchor.