The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality. David Frum [View all]

He writes long paragraphs



President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was very like the man who delivered it: divisive, abusive, and childish.

The speech turned reality on its head in many ways. The president who has enriched himself and his family by more than a billion dollars in his first year in office called on Congress to clean up its corruption. The president who has collected about $175 billion in illegal tariffs from the American people falsely told them that he had given them a great big tax cut. The president solemnly condemned political violence—the same president who ended his first term by inciting a mob to sack Congress and overturn an election. Maybe most shocking, Trump demanded that members of Congress rise to agree that it’s the first duty of government to protect American citizens—even as his own government by its brutal police methods has shot American citizens dead on the streets and then tried to deceive the country about how those Americans had been killed and why. Then of course there were the many misstatements of fact about the economy, about crime, and about wars and peace—many of which look like deliberate decisions to deceive the public watching on television.


The most radical fantasy in the speech, though, was its claims of a new golden age of prosperity. That misstatement surely deceived nobody. Prices continue to rise; the job market stagnates. In almost every way that can be measured, Americans are communicating economic anxiety and discontent. Trump insisted that they are all wrong. It is as if the nation were being soaked by a torrential downpour, water rolling over umbrellas and into boats, soaking everyone’s clothes—and the leader whose job it is to lead them through the deluge insists that it is not raining at all, that in fact it is sunny, the sunniest day ever.

But there comes a point when sad realities must be faced. The speech last night was empty and uselessly garrulous. Its length was its first declaration of disrespect for those obliged to sit through it. Trump’s name-calling of his predecessor and of the members of Congress in the chamber, his demands that legislators rise at his command, his strategic deployment of systematic untruth in service of those demands to rise and clap—put together, he misused the State of the Union ritual in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question. Are members of Congress really supposed to sit meekly and quietly while the president uses the rostrum of their chamber to abuse and insult them in the ugliest language? The president is present in Congress as a guest: That’s the reason for the famous language about the “high honor and distinct privilege” of welcoming him to speak. He has no right to be heard in person; it’s a courtesy.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-childish-state-of-the-union/686133/?gift=j8JiJIlliWfcdD_mDVMd94I5LFigbGOIYL8rso4U9_Y