- Perspectives on last night’s State of the Union address;
- Followed by personal thoughts about ICE and why conservatives are only concerned about crimes committed by immigrants.
We saw only a bit of the SOTU address last night, mostly sections where Trump highlighted someone in the audience for this or that or the other and presented them with some award. Was there anything about the actual state of the union? Fortunately I check lots of sites every morning that provide their spins.
All posts are from today unless otherwise indicated. Start with this.
The Bulwark, William Kristol, 25 Feb 2026: Revealing Omissions
Here are a few terms that President Trump never uttered last night:
Equality.
Rights.
The rule of law.
The Constitution. (Trump mentioned the Declaration of Independence only once, in passing, despite this being its 250th anniversary.)
Republic (though Trump referred to Republicans six times).
Democracy (though Trump attacked Democrats nine times).
Immigrants (“immigration” was used three times, in each case negatively. And when Trump claimed—falsely—that he supports legal immigration, he referred to people “coming in,” but didn’t call those people “immigrants.”)
Other terms central to the meaning of the United States were used very sparingly.
Opportunity appeared only once (“And here is one more opportunity to show common sense in government”), but never in its broad thematic meaning.
Justice was used twice, but both times in the sense of punishment (ensuring justice for a wrongdoer), rather than as a purpose of government or a feature of our society.
Speaking of justice, I should also remark that Donald Trump predictably took no notice of the Epstein survivors present in the gallery. Nor did he mention the Epstein files his Justice Department has not released.
And for all the many tales of violence and bloodshed Trump seemed to enjoy relating in the speech, he never mentioned these admirable individuals killed by agents of the federal government sent to Minnesota by Donald Trump: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Our president has no interest in elevating what is distinctive and admirable about America. Nor does he have any interest in addressing instances of gross injustice in America. For now, those are our tasks, and our duty. It is, after all, our Union, not Donald Trump’s.
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Paul Krugman, A SOTU Like No Other, subtitled “So little truth, so much time”
Like Kristol above, Krugman didn’t watch it, but read the transcript.
Trump’s State of the Union was historic in at least one respect: It was the longest SOTU ever. Was the plan to turn public opinion around by boring America into submission?
The address may also have been historic in another way, although it would be hard to quantify. Did any previous SOTU contain so many lies?
For the most part they weren’t Big Lies, lies that are persuasive because people can’t believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. They were, instead, small lies that added up to a false — and completely unpersuasive — portrayal of where we are.
Krugman then presents actual statistics on the economy from Jan. 2025 to now. And surveys among allies on whether the US is creating problems, or solving them. (One guess.)
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Tom Nichols, The Atlantic: President Trump’s State of the Union Variety Show, subtitled “Were you not entertained?”
The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, emcee, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.
Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs. (He referred to the “unfortunate involvement” of the Supreme Court on the tariff issue, as if the justices had barged into his office like interlopers.)
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Zack Beauchamp, Vox, 24 Feb 2026: The most important line from Trump’s State of the Union, subtitled “The president’s grim, anti-democratic address, explained.”
Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was the longest ever given. But to understand its core purpose — arguably, the core purpose of his presidency — you need only to hear one line.
It came during a discussion of the SAVE Act, a Republican bill designed to combat the fictitious scourge of noncitizen voting. Democrats, Trump claimed, only opposed the bill because “they want to cheat.” And then he took it much further.
“Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” Trump said on Tuesday night. “We’re going to stop it. We have to stop it.”
Think about that for a second. This is the president of the United States, speaking to the country in a ritualized national address, claiming that the opposition party is not only wrong on policy but fundamentally illegitimate, so much so that if they win an election it must be because they cheated.
Taken literally, that is the president announcing that the stated policy of his administration is preventing the opposition from winning any future election.
Projecting again. He considers Democrats not rivals, but enemies.
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David Frum, The Atlantic: The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality, subtitled “Donald Trump misused the annual presidential tradition in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question.”
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.
Living in a fantasy world in which the only truth is what is said by Fearless Leader.
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Amanda Marcotte, Salon: Trump hides in plain sight at the State of the Union, subtitled “The president waited until most viewers had tuned out to reveal his worst impulses”
After a year of Donald Trump being restored to the White House, Americans are increasingly sick of the president. In the 2024 presidential election, he clearly benefited from having been out of office — and from the short attention span of swing voters, who clearly forgot the chaos and incompetence that defined the former reality TV host’s first term. Now that he’s in everyone’s faces again, his polls are rapidly sinking. But Trump, ever the narcissist, apparently thought he knew a way to win back the hearts and minds of the American people: by droning at them for nearly two hours in a State of the Union address that was as dishonest as it was tedious. While it’s unlikely he won people over, Trump did showcase his ability to manipulate viewers, largely by saving the worst parts of his speech until most of them had long gone to bed.
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He complained about the ingratitude of those who don’t understand his singular economic genius in pushing tariffs. He griped about the word “affordability,” implying Democrats made that concern up, while also blaming them for prices. He groused repeatedly that the party was not giving him the same phony love bombing that Republicans offered. Some Democrats did angrily shout back, but I wouldn’t make too much of it. Most Democrats did not give Trump the angry reaction he wanted. A few were caught sleeping on camera, the only response this speech deserved.
Once he could be certain that most sane people had shut the TV off, out came the unvarnished racism. He attributed crime and fraud explicitly to non-white immigrants. Crime, he argued, is mainly, if not solely, the result of “importing these cultures,” an especially rich claim from someone who, by all appearances, spent over a decade as the best friend of the American-born Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender whose records are being covered up by the Trump administration in the most ham-fisted way. The president even pretended that the budget will be balanced simply by ending immigrant fraud, a laughable claim that even his most racist fans will have a hard time buying.
And so on. (Thought here about ICE, immigrants, and crime.)
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Briefly:
JMG: Trump Declares “Golden Age” In Lie-Filled Speech
Quoting ABC News, Associated Press, and NY Times.
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Fact checks:
PolitiFact: State of the Union fact-check: Trump exaggerates on economy, immigration
CNN: Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, annotated and fact-checked. Very long. This is a transcript of the speech, plus.
AlterNet: Revealed: Trump’s ‘biggest policy announcement’ was actually a plan signed by Biden. Once again, Republicans are taking credit for the accomplishments of the previous administration.
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Enough about that. Now the thought.
Conservatives support ICE, because they dislike immigrants, especially undocumented ones, and they’re concerned about crime, and somehow conflate those issues, thinking (as racists do) that non-white people must be committing all the worst crime. But that certainly can’t be true. What about all the heinous crimes committed by white people? Why isn’t there a special task force out breaking into people’s houses and shooting people on the street to find them, and send them to concentration camps?
The conservatives keep insisting, immigrants are bringing crime to our country.
In fact, there’s no evidence of that. Immigrants, legal or not, commit less crime than ‘native-born’ Americans. Studies have been done. (Immigrants are especially careful about living clean lives because they don’t want to be deported.) The animus towards immigrants is pure racism.
For that matter, I don’t entirely understand their point about immigrants being illegal. Until 80 years or so, IIRC, there were no immigration requirements. People came and went, across borders. It was racism in the US that set limits to immigration from other countries, beginning with China. Again: why is their being illegal an issue? It’s a technicality about paperwork. If MAGA was concerned about breaking the law, then why is Trump, convicted of all those felonies, still in office? If technical issues about immigration papers are so important, then why aren’t ICE-like folks going after people with parking tickets? Seriously.
And in fact, America has lived by immigration, for centuries. (My family, on both sides, were immigrants from Ireland and mainland Europe, in the 1800s.) Cut off immigrants, and the farms suffer, the factories suffer, and the US population increase slows. This is what is happening now.
