Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was the longest ever given. But to understand its core purpose — arguably, the core purpose of his presidency — you need only to hear one line.
It came during a discussion of the SAVE Act, a Republican bill designed to combat the fictitious scourge of noncitizen voting. Democrats, Trump claimed, only opposed the bill because “they want to cheat.” And then he took it much further.
“Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” Trump said on Tuesday night. “We’re going to stop it. We have to stop it.”
Think about that for a second. This is the president of the United States, speaking to the country in a ritualized national address, claiming that the opposition party is not only wrong on policy but fundamentally illegitimate, so much so that if they win an election it must be because they cheated.
Taken literally, that is the president announcing that the stated policy of his administration is preventing the opposition from winning any future election.
We’re all so used to wading through Trump’s sea of hyperbole that it’s easy to push past a bald-faced declaration of authoritarian intent. And to be clear, I don’t think the SAVE Act — or anything else Trump has proposed so far — could actually lock Democrats out of power. There is a real gap between what he is saying and what he is capable of doing.
Still, we have very good reason to think that Trump really does believe that Democrats cannot win without “cheating.”
When he last lost an election, in 2020, he claimed — and has continued to falsely insist — that the contest was stolen. His supporters took this so seriously that, after a fiery Trump speech at the White House on January 6, they marched on the Capitol building and ransacked the very chamber in which he spoke tonight.
He even referenced these grievances in the State of the Union, saying “this should be my third term, but strange things happen.”
Not rivals, but enemies
Trump’s vitriol is different from the “normal” partisanship of pre-Trump State of the Unions. Prior presidents might attack, or even mock, the other party’s policy ideas. But they would treat their opponents as political rivals: as people they disagreed with who were nevertheless partners in the shared project of democracy.
In many ways, that’s the conceit of the entire State of the Union tradition: that the president, in speaking before Congress, is giving an accounting of his actions to the nation as a whole, divided in opinion but united in purpose.
But Trump doesn’t see Democrats as opponents. He sees them as enemies.
I mean “enemies” here in the specific sense used by interwar German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In his view, the liberal idea of politics — a community of political equals engaged in a shared project of collective governance — was a fantasy. For Schmitt, politics always comes down to a division between friends (those in your group) and enemies (those outside it, who may be legitimately excluded from political life or even killed).
Schmitt’s thinking has enjoyed a revival among MAGA intellectuals, a reflection in part of the movement’s increasingly Manichean view of American politics. Democrats, in this telling, are not just wrong; they are evil, an internal scourge bent on the destruction of America as we know it.
And indeed, this was how Trump talked about Democrats in the State of the Union.
“These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Boy, we’re lucky we have a country with people like this,” he said. “Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it, just in the nick of time.”
At many times during the rambling speech, Trump sounded optimistic, even sunny. But make no mistake: It is this dark Schmittian vision that dwells at the heart of his politics.
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