MS NOW host Rachel Maddow has questioned Donald Trump’s changing pace and reliance on “violence porn” during his marathon State of the Union speech.
Trump, 79, spoke for 108 minutes on Tuesday evening, easily smashing the record set by former President Bill Clinton’s 88-minute State of the Union speech in 2000.
Speaking directly after Trump had finally concluded his address, Maddow pointed out the speech was “achingly long.”
The host said the president had “two remarkably different speeds” for the speech, during which he bragged about his economic skills, slammed Democrats, handed out military medals, and introduced the American men’s hockey team after their Winter Olympics win.
Maddow pointed out that Trump’s “freneticism” during one section of his speech demonstrated how “wound up and weird he was.”
In that section, Trump rapidly told the nation, “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” and claimed people are telling him, “Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore.”
The host said, “At least at that point, we thought the speech would go quickly because he was speaking quickly, even if he was ad-libbing a lot.”
Maddow then said that Trump’s pace switched, and he was “particularly slowing down markedly for long stretches of the speech.”
She characterized those slower segments as “essentially sort of violence porn.”
Maddow said Trump “talked about people being covered in blood, gushing blood, blood pouring out of things… He went into graphic detail on a number of different people’s injuries of various kinds.”
She added, “In those moments, he slowed down, ad-libbed a lot and tried to give seemingly as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes.”
During the speech, Trump tried to attack “pro-crime Democrat politicians” by telling the story of Iryna Zarutska, 23, from Ukraine, who moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2022.
Trump said Zarutska was riding home on a train last summer when “a deranged monster” stood up and “viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body.”
As he told the graphic story, Trump said, “No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life. She died instantly.”
Iryna’s mother Anna was in the audience, seated next to Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika. They both cried as Trump referenced the death.
Maddow said Trump’s description was “the sort of violently pornographic riffing that the president did very slowly throughout the back half of his speech.”
The MS NOW host also fact-checked some of Trump’s claims about his success, noting he told several “lies” about the economy.
Trump claimed he inherited the worst inflation in American history and praised his job-creation skills.
“Just for context, in 2023, under Joe Biden, the economy created over 2 million jobs,” Maddow said. “In 2024, under Joe Biden, the economy created over 2 million jobs. In 2025, under Donald Trump, job creation was less than 200,000 jobs, a wild misstatement by the president.”
She added that Trump was “bragging” about grocery prices, but pointed out that “at 2.5 percent, grocery inflation is up this year compared to last year.”
Maddow said, “The president didn’t seem very invested in the lies that he was telling about the economy, but he did list a whole bunch of them, right off the bat.”
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