Boycott Trump's State Of The Union Address. Here's Why Tuesday Night Requires Your Silence.

Your attention is currency, and Trump is banking on you spending it on his primetime performance. Don’t fund the con. Shut it off, and put your energy where it actually hits: the 2026 midterms, where flipping Congress turns applause into subpoenas, oversight, and budget control that will put his presidency on a short leash.

A Call To Action For Every American Who Still Believes In Democracy

You already know something is wrong. You feel it when you read the news. You feel it when you try to explain to your kids what is happening to the country. You fell it in your gut every single morning when you wake up and check your phone.

That feeling is not anxiety. That feeling is your conscience telling you that what is happening in America right now is not normal, and that your attention, your time, and your presence matters more than you think.

So let me be direct with you. This Tuesday, when Donald Trump stands before a joint session of Congress to deliver his State of the Union address, I am asking you to turn off the television, step away from the livestream, and refuse to give that moment one second of your time or attention.

This is not about partisanship. This is about accountability. And if you care about democracy, if you care about the courts, if you care about the safety of the people around you, then you need to understand exactly what you would be endorsing by tuning in.

Why Your Attention Is A Resource Worth Protecting

Every time you watch, every time you stream, every time you share a clip, you generate ratings. Ratings generate legitimacy. Legitimacy generates power. You are not a passive viewer. You are an active participant in a machine that runs on attention. Denying that machine your attention is one of the most concrete acts of resistance available to you right now.

A convicted felon currently occupies the White House. A man who a civil jury found liable for sexual abuse now commands the most powerful office on earth. These are not allegations. These are legal findings made in courts of law. I am a lawyer, and I can tell you with complete professional confidence that the legal record on Donald Trump is not ambiguous. It is settled. And I am not interested in doing or saying anything that supports or normalizes his presence in that office.

Let’s Remember January 6th. He Lit The Match And Then Pardoned The People Who Burned The Building

He stood on the Ellipse, told thousands of people to march to the Capitol and fight, and then watched for hours on television while they beat police officers, hunted members of Congress through the hallways, and came within minutes of reaching the Vice President. Federal courts convicted hundreds of participants, including members of groups found guilty of seditious conspiracy against the United States government.

Then Trump won the presidency, called those convicted felons patriots and hostages, pardoned every single one of them, and invited some of them to the White House. The man who lit the match, watched the fire, and then freed everyone who carried the flame now wants you to sit down on Tuesday night and applaud his State of the Union address.1

What He Said About The Supreme Court Of The United States

If you want to understand who this man is and what he is willing to do to the institutions of this country, you need to read what he said last Friday about the Supreme Court justices he appointed. Because what came out of his mouth was not political frustration. It was a public attempt to intimidate the federal judiciary, and it was one of the most alarming things any sitting president has ever said out loud.

To reset, SCOTUS ruled Trump’s sweeping tariffs were illegal. His agenda sent prices surging on everyday goods, from groceries to electronics to building materials, forcing American families and small businesses to absorb costs that economists across the political spectrum have described as a self-inflicted tax on the American consumer.

After the court delivered its 6-3 decision, Trump stood before cameras and said he was “ashamed” of the justices he appointed. He called their legal decisions an “automatic no” to anything he wanted. He called them a “disgrace to our nation.” He accused them of being “politically correct.” He called them “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.” He said they were “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” He claimed they were being swayed by foreign interests. He called them “obnoxious, ignorant and loud,” and then added that he believed “certain justices are afraid of that. They don’t want to do the right thing.”

He specifically targeted the two justices he nominated, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, saying their decision was “incorrect” and that they were an “embarrassment to their families.” He said Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett had been “barely, barely invited” to functions at the White House.

Read that again. The President of the United States and a convicted felon, publicly said that sitting Supreme Court justices, people with lifetime appointments who took oaths to uphold the Constitution, were an embarrassment to their families. He said this because they ruled against him.

This is what a man looks like when he believes he is above the law. This is what it sounds like when someone tests whether the judiciary will fold. And here is the part that should keep you up at night: if a sitting president is willing to say these things publicly, out loud, on camera, about the highest court in the land, imagine what he is willing to do privately.

Jeffrey Epstein Files: The Man Who Promised To Drain The Swamp Buried The Information That Would Name The Names

Jeffrey Epstein ran a documented child trafficking network that connected some of the most powerful people on earth, and the American public has demanded full disclosure of those files for years. Trump promised transparency, took office, and buried the most sensitive materials anyway, protecting whatever names and connections those documents contain.

The facts are clear. Trump had a documented social relationship with Epstein spanning years, described him publicly as a terrific guy, and then as president had every legal authority to release the full record and chose not to. The victims of that network were promised accountability and got more silence instead. A man who cannot explain his own relationship with a convicted child sex trafficker, and who actively suppressed the files that might explain it, now wants you to watch him deliver a speech about the state of your country.2

The State Of This Union Is Not A Speech. It Is A Performance.

The State of the Union address has always been part ceremony and part theater. This one will be pure theater. Trump will stand at that podium and tell you the country is thriving. He will use language designed to make you feel like everything is under control and moving in a direction you should celebrate.

What he will not mention is the economic pain his tariff policies have sent through working families and small businesses across the country. He will not talk about the human cost of his immigration enforcement agenda, the families separated, the people detained, the communities living in fear. He will not talk about the racial tension his rhetoric has poured fuel on, or the damage his administration has done to America’s relationships with its longest-standing allies around the world.

He will not mention the Epstein files. A president who ran on transparency and accountability quietly buried documents, through his Department of Justice, that the public has demanded for years. The decision to cover up those files will follow this presidency into the history books, and no State of the Union speech will scrub that record clean.

He will not talk about the pardons. The number of convicted felons he has pardoned, the people he has brought into his administration with criminal records and documented ethical violations, represents a standard for the executive branch that would have been unthinkable in any previous administration from either party. What he has normalized in terms of who gets to hold power in this country is not a policy disagreement. It is a character statement.

None of that will make it into Tuesday’s speech. What you will get instead is a performance engineered to generate applause, go viral on social media, and give cable news something to dissect for forty-eight hours. Do not give it your eyes.

The Midterms Are The Actual State Of The Union

Here is where your energy belongs. The 2026 midterm elections are the single most important opportunity this country has to course-correct what is happening right now. And I need you to feel the urgency of that in your bones.

Congress has the power of oversight. Congress has the power of subpoena. Congress has the power of the purse. When Democrats hold the majority in Congress, they can not only enact legislation that will help everyday American citizens, they can also demand documents, call witnesses, freeze funding, and put actual institutional checks on a president who has shown in every possible way that he does not respect those checks voluntarily.

Right now, that majority is in Republican hands, and those Republicans have largely chosen to protect their money, power, and Trump, rather than the Constitution. There’s been no meaningful legislation to help you. Just new laws to help billionaires.

The committee hearings that should be happening are not happening. The subpoenas that should be flying are sitting in drawers. The oversight that the Founders built into the system as a safeguard against exactly this kind of executive overreach is being deliberately withheld.

Flipping Congress changes all of that. A Democratic majority with subpoena power can drag every questionable decision, every suspicious financial relationship, every policy that harmed American families into public daylight. That is not revenge politics. That is the system working the way it was designed to work.

And when Congress controls the budget, Congress controls the president. A Congress willing to use the power of the purse effectively can neuter this administration for its final two years. It can block funding for the policies doing the most damage. It can force negotiation. It can make the last chapter of this presidency a story about limits rather than about unchecked power.

That is worth fighting for. That is worth knocking on doors for. That is worth getting every person you know registered and committed to voting.

What Protecting Democracy Actually Looks Like Right Now

Protecting democracy does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like you turning off your television on Tuesday night and calling a friend who is not registered to vote. Sometimes it looks like you signing up to volunteer for a local candidate who is running on accountability. Sometimes it looks like you sharing a voter registration link instead of sharing a clip from a speech you were angry about.

The resistance to authoritarianism is not built in moments of spectacle. It is built in the ordinary, consistent choices you make about where your attention goes, who you vote for, and whether you show up even when it feels exhausting.

You are exhausted because this has been relentless. The pace at which damaging decisions have come out of this administration is not accidental. It is a strategy. When people are overwhelmed, they disengage. When they disengage, power consolidates. Your exhaustion is being counted on.

So rest when you need to rest. And then get back up. Because the midterms are coming, and they are the real speech. They are the real address. They are the real state of the union, written not by a convicted felon at a podium, but by millions of Americans at the ballot box.

My Final Thoughts Before Tuesday Night

Skip the speech. Protect your attention. Refuse to generate ratings for a man who has called Supreme Court justices embarrassments to their families, who buried public records, who pardoned felons and elevated them into positions of power, who has shaken the foundations of civil society domestically and globally, and who a jury of his peers found liable for sexual abuse.

None of that is opinion. It is record.

Your job right now is to get to the midterms. Register. Organize. Donate if you can. Volunteer if you can. Vote as if democracy depends on it, because it does, and because the people trying to dismantle it are counting on you to stay home.

That is how you write the state of this union in your own words.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

1

January 6th and his Pardons: There is a sequence of events that every American needs to hold in their mind with complete clarity, because the passage of time and the noise of daily news has a way of blurring things that should never be blurred.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Americans stormed the United States Capitol. They broke windows. They beat police officers with flagpoles and fire extinguishers. They hunted members of Congress through the hallways. They erected a gallows on the lawn. They came within minutes of reaching the Vice President of the United States, who was being evacuated through a stairwell while the crowd outside chanted for his execution. Pipe bombs were planted at the Republican and Democratic National Committee headquarters. The certification of a free and fair election was physically interrupted for the first time in the history of this country.

Donald Trump watched it happen on television for hours. He did nothing. People who were there, people who worked for him, people who sat in that building and begged him to call off his supporters, have said so under oath, on the record, with their names attached to their testimony. His own daughter said he should have acted sooner. His own staff said they were desperate for him to intervene. He did not intervene. He watched.

Before the attack, he stood on the Ellipse and told thousands of people to march to the Capitol. He told them they needed to fight. He told them that showing weakness was not acceptable. He told them that if they did not act, they would lose their country. And then, when they acted, he watched.

Multiple federal courts reviewed the evidence. The bipartisan January 6th Committee spent eighteen months building a documented record. The Department of Justice charged and convicted hundreds of participants. Judges across the country, including judges appointed by Republican presidents, sentenced those participants based on findings of fact about what happened that day and why.

And then Trump won the presidency again. And one of the first things he did was pardon them. All of them.

He pardoned people who attacked police officers. He pardoned people who smashed through the doors of the legislative branch of the United States government. He pardoned members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, which is one of the most serious charges in federal criminal law. He pardoned people who were serving multi-year sentences for coordinated, planned, violent interference with the transfer of presidential power.

He called them hostages. He called them patriots. He invited some of them to the White House.

You need to sit with the weight of that for a moment. A sitting president pardoned people convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States government, and then celebrated them. He did not express regret about what happened on January 6th. He did not acknowledge the officers who were injured, some of whom later died, some of whom still carry physical and psychological wounds from that day. He reframed the entire event as a political persecution of innocent people.

When he stands at that podium on Tuesday, he will not mention any of this. He will not mention the officers who testified in tears about what they experienced that day. He will not mention the members of his own party who, before their political courage evaporated, called January 6th a disgrace and said Trump bore responsibility. He will not mention the convictions he erased or the message those erasures sent to anyone who might be thinking about what they can get away with in the future.

Watching that speech is not a neutral act. Watching it is a choice to normalize everything that came before it. And the people who lost something on January 6th, the officers, the staffers, the elected officials who hid under desks and behind locked doors, the Americans who watched in horror from their living rooms, they deserve better than your passive participation in the rehabilitation of the man responsible.

Turn it off. Show up for the midterms instead. That is the only response worth making.

2

The Epstein Files: There is a reason the Epstein files matter, and it has nothing to do with conspiracy theories or partisan politics. It has everything to do with a simple, documented question that the American public has been asking for years and that this administration has refused to answer with transparency.

Jeffrey Epstein ran a criminal network that trafficked minors and facilitated the sexual abuse of children by powerful men. That is not speculation. That is the legal finding that produced his 2008 conviction in Florida and the federal charges that preceded his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell. The network he operated connected some of the most powerful people in finance, politics, and entertainment across multiple decades and multiple countries.

For years, the public demand for full disclosure of Epstein’s client list, his flight logs, his contact records, and the full scope of investigative materials held by federal agencies has been one of the few issues that generates genuine bipartisan outrage. People across the political spectrum agree that the names in those files belong in public view, that the victims of that network deserve the full weight of accountability, and that any government with access to those materials has an obligation to release them.

Trump ran on transparency. His supporters chanted about it. His allies promised that he would be the president who finally ripped the curtain back and showed Americans what the powerful had been hiding.

And then he took office. And the files did not come out. What came out instead was a limited, carefully managed release that satisfied no one and answered nothing. The most sensitive materials, the ones that would name names and connect powerful people to Epstein’s network, remained buried. He told Marjorie Taylor Green that if he released the files and names, “his friends would get hurt.” The administration that promised to drain the swamp chose to protect whatever is sitting in those documents.

Trump himself had a documented social relationship with Epstein spanning years. He appeared in photographs with him. He gave interviews in which he described Epstein as a terrific guy who enjoyed beautiful women on the younger side. He hosted events at Mar-a-Lago that Epstein attended. None of that makes Trump legally culpable for Epstein’s crimes, but all of it raises questions that a genuinely transparent administration would have answered by now through full and complete disclosure.

The victims of Epstein’s network are real people. They have names. They have testified. They have spent years watching powerful men avoid the full consequences of what was done to them. They were promised accountability. What they got from this administration was more silence, more delay, and more protection for whatever secrets those files contain.

When Trump takes the stage on Tuesday night, he will perform the role of a champion of the American people. He will use words like justice and strength and truth. He will not mention the files. He will not mention the victims. He will not explain why a president who had every legal authority and every political motivation to release those documents chose to keep them sealed. Let’s make sure that when he speaks, he does so to an empty room and small audience resulting in poor ratings.