Trump has lost the ability to entertain. Sadly, he hasn't lost the ability to offend [View all]

Trump has lost the ability to entertain. Sadly, he hasn’t lost the ability to offend
Moira Donegan
Throughout the speech, Trump seemed tired. He had difficulty reading from his teleprompter; he gripped the podium with a tightness bordering on desperation
Wed 25 Feb 2026 01.30 EST

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When he lies in public, and insists that his fantasies and distortions will dictate the course of government action, he makes those of us in the news business wonder if there’s any point, any more, in gathering and printing the truth.

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He has not, of course, lost the ability to offend. Trump lied, saying that he has brought healthcare costs down at a moment when his attacks on Affordable Care Act subsidies have in fact massively increased the premiums paid by many Americans in just the past two months. He made a non-sequitur tangent to attack the rights of trans kids; he claimed, with a kind of vulgar brazenness, that his kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro, and his administration’s subsequent economic blackmail of that country, was creating new opportunities for the Venezuelan people.

He claimed that Democrats’ withholding of funding for the Department of Homeland Security over abusive immigration enforcement was causing fallout for areas effected by this week’s east coast blizzard, as DHS was unable to help clear snow. (The federal agency does not do this.) Even his filler lines reeked with the stench of hypocrisy. “We are building a nation,” he said, “where every child has a chance to build higher and go further.” It was a sentiment that called to mind Liam Ramos, and all the other children imprisoned in ICE’s concentration camps, whose education, promise, dreams, and freedom have been sacrificed to the administration’s racism.

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Perhaps most galling of all, he blamed immigrants – in particular, the Somali-American population in Minnesota – for importing corruption to the United States. “There are large parts of the world where bribery, fraud, and corruption are the norm, not the exception,” Trump said, arguing, in a racist line of reasoning previously advanced by his vice president JD Vance, that corruption is an congenital condition of cultures that immigrants bring with them to America.

However it is Trump, not any Somali immigrant, who has repeatedly concocted thin pretexts to accept large sums of money from rich people and companies with business before his administration. If Donald Trump wants to find the source of corruption in America, he can simply look in the mirror.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/24/trump-state-of-the-union-speech