On the menu today: Over on the home page, you can find the assessment of President Trump’s State of the Union address from the Editors — “As a matter of performance, it often had the feel of a Trump rally inside the congressional chamber, with its over-the-top boastfulness, informal asides, dubious claims, pointed partisan jabs, and sheer length” — along with reporting from Audrey Fahlberg, Kamden Mulder, Brittany Bernstein, as well as our live blog from last night.
What’s left to say? Trump-lovers and Trump-haters got what they wanted last night. Everybody went home happy, unless you were Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and you wanted to give your response while the East Coast of the U.S. was still awake.
Our Divided Nation
Historically, the State of the Union address doesn’t have much of a lingering effect on a president’s approval rating, particularly in recent years. The charts of Trump’s and Biden’s approval ratings before and after the speech look like the EKG of a flatlining patient.
People who like the president watch and like it, people who dislike the president either don’t watch or “hate watch” to yell at their screens, and people who don’t have a strong opinion about the president are most likely watching something else on streaming. (That’s why it’s not exactly surprising when the instant polls show “64 percent of speech watchers say President Trump’s policies will move the country in the right direction.” It’s good that people who watched liked what they saw, but the people who tuned in are more likely to at least be open to hearing what the president has to say.)
So, what makes the State of the Union address unique, when the content and the tone of the speech are not all that different from all the other campaign-style speeches the president gives? Well, this is the one night a year when a Republican president speaks before a chamber that is nearly half Democrats, and vice versa.
For the opposition party, particularly in the Trump era, this is the chance for elected officials who really want camera time to come up with some stunt to express how much they can’t stand the president, like Nancy Pelosi theatrically tearing up Trump’s speech behind him. In 2017, many congressional Democrats wore white to represent women’s rights; in 2020, they wore white to protest “misogyny.” This year, many Democrats wore white to oppose the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. In 2018, many Democrats wore all black, and others wore African kente cloths.
With an annual theme, the State of the Union has become something like the Met Gala for the MSNOW green room.
Last night Texas Democratic Representative Al Green was escorted from the chamber — again — for refusing to sit down and holding up a sign that read in all capital letters, “Black people aren’t apes!” Whatever his public reaction, Green is not the least bit upset about being removed from the chamber, otherwise he wouldn’t have tried something that got him removed for the second straight year. By getting thrown out, he gets to stand out. And he represents a D+24 district in Houston; he’s held that seat since 2004 and ran unopposed in 2024. The last time Green had a Republican opponent in 2022, he was reelected with more than 76 percent of the vote.
Our Kamden Mulder describes the reaction from two members of “The Squad,” Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar and Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib:
“You have killed Americans!” Omar shouted at the president. “You are a murderer! You have killed Americans!”
Tlaib followed, ostensively yelling, “Alex was not a murderer! Alex was not a criminal!” presumably in reference to Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent at an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota at the end of January.
Tlaib wore two buttons to the State of the Union, one that said “Release the Files,” the other “F*** ICE.”
Just as with Green, people in Omar and Tlaib’s districts who object to this behavior are few and far between. Omar’s district covering Minneapolis scores a D+32 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and she was reelected with more than 74 percent of the vote in 2024. (Every time some optimistic Republican contends the latest scandal is going to lead to Omar getting voted out of office, I roll my eyes and sigh, “Oh, brother.”) Tlaib’s district in Dearborn scores a D+21, and she was reelected with more than 69 percent of the vote.
From what we can see, most voters in Omar and Tlaib’s districts are just fine with everything they do to oppose the president. The congressional Democrats who make the biggest and most disruptive scene with their objections have no incentive to change their behavior or respect decorum.
Of course, the Democrats’ blistering contempt for Trump is equaled only by his contempt for them. For Trump, Tuesday night was the night he got to tell Democrats he hated their guts, to their faces, repeatedly. And he appeared to love every minute of it.
Trump used the word “Democrats” ten times last night, and almost every reference was an accusation that the opposition party lawmakers in the chamber before him wanted to hurt the American people:
All Democrats, every single one of them, voted against these really important and very necessary massive tax cuts. They wanted large-scale tax increases to hurt the people instead. . . .
Everything was working well. Countries that were ripping us off for decades are now paying us hundreds of billions of dollars. They were ripping us so badly. You all know that. Everybody knows it. Even Democrats know it. They just don’t want to say it. . . .
In addition, my plan requires maximum price transparency. That’s a big deal. Sounds so simple, so big. And I did that in my first term, and the Democrats immediately terminated it with full knowledge that they were doing a very bad thing for the people. . . .
As we speak, Democrats in this chamber have cut off all funding for the Department of Homeland Security. It’s all cut off — it’s all cut off. They have instituted another Democrat shutdown, the first one costing us two points on GDP — two points we lost on GDP, which probably made them quite happy, actually. . . .
We have no money because of the Democrats, and it would be nice — we’d love to give you a hand at cleaning it up, but you gave no money. Nobody’s getting paid. It’s a shame. So you have to think about it. We have, in case you didn’t know, a pretty large snowstorm out there. . . .
But surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’re even talking about that? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.
Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy.
Amazing. Terrible. Boy, oh boy. We’re lucky we have a country. With people like this — Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we, huh?
What is the state of our union? Divided. Deeply divided and bristling with disdain for the other side. But what’s more, from everything we can see, our political leaders are quite happy feeling disdain and have no discernible desire to change the state of things.
ADDENDA: Yesterday in the Corner, I marked the four-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the Cliffs Notes version is that Ukraine has paid a terrible price in blood, Russia has paid an astonishingly much higher price in blood, the Ukrainians have revolutionized drone warfare, Vladimir Putin is one of the worst bastards of this century, the U.S. government is not helping the Ukrainians as much as we could or should, our European allies have picked up some of the slack, and the U.S.-led negotiations are going around in circles, waiting for Putin to become reasonable in a way that he has never demonstrated any inclination to do.
. . . In addition to live-blogging the State of the Union address at NR, I also live-blogged it at that other Washington publication. You may have noticed that between Ramesh Ponnuru, Dominic Pino, myself, and now our former associate editor Nicholas Tomaino joining the Washington Post op-ed page as an editor, the Post has never had more of a National Review flavor than it does now.