He said it was going to be long. He wasn’t lying.
Donald Trump told reporters earlier this week that his State of the Union address would be “a long speech,” and unlike with many of his key campaign promises, the president delivered. He spoke to lawmakers for 108 minutes on Tuesday, breaking the record he set last year for the longest speech ever delivered to Congress.
The speech was filled with the requisite presidential shoutouts to special guests in the audience. The U.S. men’s hockey team was there, fresh off their first Olympic gold medal in almost half a century. So was Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. The president also nodded to attending working moms, military veterans, and first responders to the floods that ravaged Texas last year. Trump toward the end of his speech recognized a 100-year-old Navy pilot before Melania Trump fastened the Medal of Honor around his neck. “I’ve always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I’m not allowed to give it to myself,” said Trump, who also doled out a Presidential Medal of Freedom, Purple Heart, and another Medal of Honor during the address.
The foundation of the nearly two hours Trump stood before Congress, however, was the president’s just-as-requisite torrent of ravings and falsehoods.
The president claimed to have ended “DEI,” ushered in the “hottest” economy in American history, and saved the country from the “scourge” of undocumented immigration. He extolled the signature policies that have tanked his popularity across the country, defending his implementation of widespread tariffs that have driven up costs for consumers. In the presence of some of the Supreme Court justices, the president dismissed a decision released last week in which the court ruled that he had unlawfully exceeded the bounds of his emergency economic powers and usurp tariff authority granted to Congress by the Constitution.
Despite plummeting approval over his administration’s immigration enforcement agenda, much of the president’s speech focused on the same kind of immigration fear mongering that defined his 2024 campaign. Americans have been horrified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal tactics, and Trump seemed to be trying to convince the nation that immigrants, the real enemy, are here to kill you and your families. He described a series of violent crimes committed by undocumented migrants in gory detail, linking them all — regardless of the actual immigration status of the perpetrator — to open borders and Democratic policy.
At one point, Trump demanded that lawmakers “stand up” if they agreed that the primary role of the American government was to “protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Of course, the Democratic side of the aisle did not stand up in response to the loaded question,” prompting Trump to shout, “You should be ashamed of yourselves, not standing up.”
Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) shouted back in response that Trump himself had broken that principle under the guise of immigration enforcement. “You have killed Americans!” Omar shouted from the audience, referencing the killing of two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — by ICE agents in her home state of Minnesota. “You should be ashamed,” she added.
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who is known to be a disruptive presence at Trump’s State of the Union addresses, wasn’t heard from … because he was kicked out of the chamber shortly after the speech started for holding up a sign that read “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES,” a reference to a video Trump posted recently that included a depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
Trump translated his obsession with citizenship status into his demand for federal electoral reform that would disenfranchise millions of eligible American voters, but help Republicans win future elections. The president repeated false claims that widespread election fraud cost him the 2020 election — suggesting that this should really be his “third term” — and called for Democrats to aid Senate Republicans in passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The bill is a sprawling election reform law that would require Americans to appear in-person to present proof of citizenship when they register to vote, implement national voter ID requirements, heavily restrict mail-in voting and registration, and give the federal government unprecedented access and influence on state voter rolls.
“Why would anybody not want voter ID?” Trump said. “One reason: because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason. They make up all excuses, they say it’s racist, they come up with things you almost say what imagination they had.”
The SAVE Act has passed the House, but needs a 60-vote majority to pass the Senate, and is unlikely to succeed without the support of a significant portion of the Democratic minority, which does not seem inclined to provide the president any boon ahead of the midterms.
Just hours before Trump arrived at the Capitol to address the joint session of Congress, NPR and MS NOW released back-to-back reports indicating that the Trump administration had withheld documents related to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor — including dozens of pages from a series of FBI interviews with the accuser — from the Epstein files the Justice Department has released over the last several months. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) says Democrats are investigating the allegations that the documents were wrongfully withheld.
The revelation cast an even brighter spotlight on the Epstein-related protests already taking place at the State of the Union. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers boycotted the event, a rare occurrence in the speech’s history. Some of the Democrats attending the speech invited survivors of Epstein’s abuse as their guests, while others wore pins or held signs calling attention to the scandal. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), both leading figures in the congressional push for transparency related to the Epstein case, have bridged the sacrosanct partisan seating divide of past State of the Unions and sat together for the event.
Many of those who ditched the address instead attended the “People’s State of the Union,” a collection of public speeches and speakers held on the National Mall. Lawmakers who attended the event included Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Tina Smith (D- Minn.), as well as Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).
The official rebuttal to the State of the Union was delivered by recently elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, who won an upset election that snatched the state’s governorship away from Republicans last year. “Let me ask you, the American people watching at home, three questions,” she said. “Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe, both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you?”
“We all know the answer is no,” Spanberger said.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”