Donald Trump's State of the Union Was Long and Wrong | The New Yorker

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening. “It’s gonna be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” he had said beforehand. When it was all over, he was right about that: at a hundred and eight minutes, the speech easily beat the modern record, which had been set by Trump himself a year ago, for the longest Presidential address to Congress ever. Before Trump began talking, the historian Michael Beschloss noted that the Gettysburg Address was only two hundred and seventy-two words; the President’s speech on Tuesday night clocked in at more than ten thousand.

None of them was memorable. For all the blather, it was not only long but incredibly news-free. What we learned on Tuesday night is that Trump may or may not go to war with Iran—to stop a nuclear program that he claimed, once again, to have already “obliterated”—and also that, despite the Supreme Court’s “very unfortunate ruling” rebuking his overreach in imposing sweeping international tariffs, Trump wants to keep them anyway, by invoking other executive authorities that he may or may not legally have.

But Trump is all about superlatives. Everything he does has to be the biggest, the strongest, the mostest. Who cares that he managed to say almost nothing with all those words? He made history.

In the hours before the speech, the White House made it seem as though Trump were about to deliver a completely normal address to the nation, in which he would lay out a focussed, coherent “case for why he and Republicans are better suited to tackle—continue tackling—the affordability crisis that was created by the Biden Administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill,” as the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, put it.

But, if Tuesday’s speech proved anything, it’s that it’s hard to explain how you are going to get America out of a mess that you do not believe exists. A year ago, a mere six weeks into his second term, Trump opened his address to Congress by claiming that he had done more in that time than any President ever did, George Washington included; this time, he boasted that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before.” He said that prices were down and that “affordability” was “a word—they just used it.” All those complaints about the high cost of living in Trump’s America were just “a dirty, rotten lie.” Prices are not really too high, he said. But, even if they were, everything was fine, because “soon you will see numbers that few people would think it possible to achieve just a short time ago.” That’s some case, Madam Press Secretary.

The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy. “A short time ago, we were a dead country; now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world!” Trump said on Tuesday night. But the salesman is not who you want to talk to when you have the broken-down old jalopy towed back to the lot and demand a refund.

Based on the polls, it’s pretty apparent that America wants its money back. CNN’s latest survey had Trump at a sixty-three-per-cent disapproval rating, and just a thirty-six-per-cent approval one; other surveys show similarly brutal numbers. Trump, in other words, has sunk close to post-January 6th territory with the public—not exactly the moment for a speech that leaned hard into the President’s Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.

And yet the message could not have been otherwise. Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.

It was both the most theatrical moment in Trump’s speech and the most revealing. Did he think that he personally was responsible for winning that gold? Probably.

If only he had ended his speech there. The rest of the address turned out to be a reprise of Trump’s “American carnage” greatest hits: a bloody mess of murderous illegal aliens (“And we’re getting them the hell out of here fast”), “Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota,” and all the “stolen and rigged” bad things that Democrats had done to the country. This was Trump in dark mode, his only other setting for one of these speeches, which made a certain amount of sense. Who else but Trump’s most fervent supporters were still listening by this point, long into his speech? The President seemed almost relieved that there were enough Democrats who had not walked out of the room in disgust for him to taunt. “These people are crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”

Trump had been hemorrhaging public support, for himself and his policies, in the weeks leading up to the speech. After a public outcry over the heavy-handed tactics of federal agents, which led to the deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis, he was forced to back away from a major immigration crackdown in Minnesota. He threatened to use military force to seize Greenland, causing a serious rift with America’s NATO allies, before insisting that he had no intention of starting a war of imperial conquest for the Danish territory. On the morning of the speech, NPR reported that Trump’s Department of Justice had removed dozens of pages of the Epstein files related to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor. (In a statement, the White House said that the President has been “totally exonerated on anything related to Epstein.”)

Despite Trump’s many, many words on Tuesday night, none of this was mentioned, even by way of rebuttal. As for the troubled American economy, aside from the magical power of tariffs to transform the world, the President’s new program consisted of a vague suggestion to Congress that it should pass still more tax cuts, but for what and for whom was not clear. Forget the predictions and all the pregame hype. There was no resetting of the narrative, no course correction or even a meaningful explanation of what the course is—though, to be fair, Trump did hand out six medals to various guests he’d invited for the occasion, including two Purple Hearts, two Medals of Honor, one Legion of Merit, and one Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Before the start of the address, Jon Favreau, the former speechwriter for Barack Obama, argued that these State of the Union addresses have become little more than a pointless ritual, “a relic of a speech that barely matters for even the twenty-four hours anyone is paying attention.” As the ordeal dragged on Tuesday evening, I wondered if this might be, finally, the year that broke this ever more annoying tradition. Not all Democrats in Congress boycotted, but more than ever did. Actual news was scarce. Trump couldn’t shut up. No minds were changed.

“I think this could have been the best speech he has ever delivered,” Laura Ingraham said on Fox News, soon after the address ended. And, for all I know, maybe she meant it. ♦