The State of the Union doesn’t matter and has never mattered.
The State of the Union doesn’t matter and has never mattered. This is a truism, and with good reason: One way or another everything said at these speeches is forgotten 24 hours later. (One exception: People of my generation and older still remember South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” — rudely but accurately — at Barack Obama’s various outright prevarications about his plans for Obamacare.) I remember the last time people insisted a State of the Union address was a “make or break” moment for a president: March of 2024, when Democrats managed to convince themselves that Joe Biden was as fit and strong as ever, and ready to run for reelection after reading a speech hectoringly from a teleprompter. To quote a line of Trump’s from last night about the Maduro regime: “How’d that work out for them? Not too good.”
In fact, I debated even writing this Corner post, seeing as how most of the major points have already been hit on by our editorial. For those who didn’t watch — I assume this is most of you, as Trump once again gave a speech the length of a Fidel Castro dinner oration — Trump’s performance was fine; it was cromulent. The first hour was positively soporific, and Trump’s lack of energy was notable until he successfully goaded the Democrats (specifically reliably intemperate morons Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib) into offering him an opening with their heckling and mulish disrespect for the honorees on the night.
Trump is always better on the spontaneous attack than when reading from a prompter, and the single most memorable moment of the night was probably when he barked, “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” at the Democrats in the chamber, scolding them for their opposition to basic imperatives like border security.
It was a turn that says so much about where the Democrats have placed themselves on the political spectrum; Trump roared to life when turning to domestic issues like the border and youth transgender medicine. It was by far the most powerful part of his speech, and he knew it — just look at how excited he was delivering those lines and turning the spotlight harshly upon the Democrats by leveraging their own public immaturity.
The public tributes to various heroes — a wounded Chinook pilot who led the raid to capture Maduro, a National Guardsman who clawed his way back from the brink of death after last December’s shootings in D.C., our U.S. Men’s Hockey team — all went over spectacularly well, as they were destined to. There was in fact a surprisingly gauzy “soft focus” approach to most of the speech — Trump neither savaged the Supreme Court as expected (for which I am immensely grateful) nor showed his hand in any way with respect to Iran, but mostly rambled on circularly about how great his tariffs and deals have been.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the night was how tired Trump sounded for most of it. His voice was thin and papery, and got hoarser and hoarser as the speech went along. Trump clearly seems to be flagging a bit with age — Biden Alert! — but he still controls a room and can improvise on the fly like always. The State of the Union is always a matter of theatrics, so it makes little sense to analyze it in terms of policy.
As theater, this did the job.