If you took every true thing President Donald Trump said during Tuesday’s State of the Union address and tattooed it onto the genitalia of a flea, there would still be room for the Gettysburg Address. (Depending on the endowment of the flea and the size of the font you were using.)
For almost two hours on Tuesday night, Trump unleashed a torrent of lies in a desperate attempt to persuade America—and the world—that we all have no idea about the reality we are living in and that he knows better.
Zombified Republican members of Congress clapped like circus seals and brayed like asses on cue as Democrats, with few exceptions, sat more or less inert throughout the president’s bloviatathon. While the contrast may have made Trump and his MAGA legions feel as though their message was getting through, the reality was that the address likely achieved little of consequence.
Trump’s poll numbers will likely remain low and will continue falling. He will achieve little more this year. His standing at home and abroad will not improve.
All in all, it was a craven, meandering, mean-spirited flop. It broke zero new ground. Indeed, it was a version of MAGA for Dummies: the Trump stump speech with a few cheap flourishes that made it seem more like a game show than an address to Congress. “You get a Congressional Medal of Honor! And you get a Congressional Medal of Honor from our lovely spokesmodel Melania! And you get a Purple Heart! And you get reunited with your uncle!”
Amidst the cheeseball hoopla, if there was a theme beyond the astonishing scope of the lies Trump told throughout, it was stolen glory. Trump told stories of heroes—ideally really gory stories; he seemed to get what little energy he had from those—and then have the heroes stand up so the president could soak up the applause for them as though it were for him.
Indeed, confusion over who the heroes actually were was another subtheme of the day. Trump coveted the gold medals around the necks of the U.S. men’s hockey team, who allowed themselves to be used as political props to such a degree that one of the players felt compelled to let the president wear his medal around his neck for a bit.
When a 100-year-old warrior was given one of the two Congressional Medals of Honor that were handed out, Trump actually, Trumpily, produced the mega-cringe moment of the night when he—America’s most famous draft dodger—said he would like to figure out how to give the nation’s highest honor for valor to himself.
Using the Congressional Medal of Honor as a political prop was particularly gross. Had a Democrat done something similarly cheapening to the medal, there would certainly have been calls for his impeachment.
For all the set pieces arranged during the night, the evening was strangely drained of drama. It was more like the kind of speech you’d see in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia or Kim’s North Korea, where everything the leader said was cheered loudly by cortex-numbed followers, oblivious to the lies involved or the malevolence or the damage being done to their country, to our country.
The only drama during the entire affair came early, when Trump had a chilly encounter with members of the Supreme Court as he entered, and then later lectured them and essentially announced he was going to ignore their judgment and continue imposing tariffs without the approval of Congress. Congress, of course, cheered its own complicity in its demise as a coequal branch of government.
Trump, 79, did manage to remain standing for the entire 108 minutes of the address, although as it progressed, he seemed to be clinging for dear life to the podium with his left hand and slowly sinking into the Congressional dais from which he was speaking.
Watching the speech, one could not help but wonder whether Trump was only being kept vertical by his girdle, his support hose, and the thick coating of orange spray tan which encased his body like an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
Trump’s lies took many forms. He began and ended with the lie that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before.” (None of those things is true.) He lied about the state of the economy, he lied that he was creating a lot of jobs (he is not), that he was defeating inflation (he’s not), that he had attracted 18 times more investment to the U.S. in a year than Biden did in four (ridiculous).
He lied that Americans other than the very rich would benefit from his “Big Beautiful Bill,” that he had ended eight wars (that drew jeers), that he had reduced crime in American cities, that he had a healthcare plan that could work, and that America was more respected around the world than ever before.
The opposite is true after his attacks on our allies, on international institutions, on the rule of law, and on democracy in America.
Between the lies were long sections devoted to racism; he made a particularly scurrilous attack on the Somali community, but also was vicious in his attacks on immigrants. He made a strong pitch for measures that would provide even more tax cuts for the very rich and for the SAVE Act, which would be the most sweeping voter suppression bill passed in America in the modern era. (It was ostensibly created to solve a problem that does not exist—illegal aliens voting in elections—but is actually designed to make it harder for communities that support Democrats, especially communities of color, to vote.)
Trump also jammed a sharpened stake through the already faintly beating heart of irony when he announced that he, a convicted fraudster, was launching a fraudulent “war on fraud,” a vastly overstated problem, and that it would be headed by Vice President JD Vance, the leading fraud of his generation.
As a consequence, the speech did not just break records for its duration and its lies, but also for its insufferability, its incoherence, its offensiveness, and the danger its contents present for the future of the country.
Remarkably, broadcast networks (which, for those under 40, are relics of America’s media past that are absolutely irrelevant to modern political discourse) covered the speech from beginning to end, although there is speculation that no one in the entire viewing audience was able to remain awake or attentive for the entire duration of the speech. Because for all its carefully orchestrated Price is Right theatrics, on the whole, the speech was also brain-deadeningly boring.
Truly, had you gone to ChatGPT and said, “Based on past Trump speeches, give me what you think his 2026 State of the Union would have been like,” you surely would’ve been presented with a better-written speech. Further, ChatGPT hallucinations would certainly have been more interesting than those woven through Trump’s remarks as he veered from fantasy to delusion.
Trump arrived at the Capitol for the speech with the lowest public approval ratings of his career. In recent polls, literally every single major policy initiative of the president was unpopular with the public. His ratings among Republicans are growing weaker whereas, for the most part, independents and Democrats have washed their hands of him altogether.
This speech did not help.
We know the price of gas isn’t what he said it was. We know inequality is growing. We know that the rich act with impunity. We know he has thrown our allies like the Europeans and valiant friends like Ukraine under the bus. We know that he is destroying our healthcare system, our education system, our environment, and the rule of law in America, and that his sights are set on doing the same to our democratic institutions.
The dollar is plummeting. International trust in the U.S. has cratered. Our allies are seeking ways to go it alone.
Indeed, from a historic perspective, this speech may well be remembered as the first State of the Union of a failing United States, the first of an authoritarian United States, the first of an internationally isolated United States, the first of a United States that was ceding global leadership to China, the first in which the United States government has been an active enemy of the interests of the American people.
Trump repeatedly sought to suggest his achievements were historic.
One of the few truthful things he said was that he has overseen “a turnaround for the ages.”
Unfortunately for us all, he was right for all the wrong reasons.
This speech marked the low point in the standing of the United States, perhaps since the country became active internationally in the late 19th century. But, worse, listening to Trump, extrapolating from his administration’s recent performance and from what we could conclude would happen to our institutions, economy, people, and standing in the months ahead, this speech may in fact, have marked a turning point of immense consequence.
The state of our union, contrary to Trump’s opening and closing words, is miserable and declining faster than the value of Trump’s cryptocurrency scams. And as long as the racist, misogynist, corrupt, decrepit wannabe dictator who delivered Tuesday’s message remains in charge and enabled by a Republican majority in Congress that is little more than a fascist cheering section, it seems certain the state of our union is likely to deteriorate rapidly.
As a consequence, while Trump’s speech will fade from memory as quickly as any of the game show episodes on which it was based—and while the ratio of the consequence of the speech to its duration may be a number too small for mathematicians to calculate—Tuesday’s address, I’m afraid, was nonetheless important
Because although the president’s speech was, by any metric, bad, it did inadvertently remind objective observers worldwide that the state of our union is even worse.
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