An increasingly unpopular Trump lurched from plodding teleprompter readings to gothic MAGA fantasies in his long-winded speech.
President Donald Trump speaks during his State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2026.(Daniel Heuer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
A glance across the news headlines on Tuesday morning bore eloquent witness to the state of our union. President Donald Trump continues to threaten to invade Iran—even though he’s failed to offer a coherent rationale for it; meanwhile, the top general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warns that an Iran strike would likely trigger a rapid descent into a military quagmire. (The president took to Truth Social to dispute this report, but as usual, he was lying.) Ryan Schenk, a former instructor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified on Capitol Hill that agency leaders cut 240 hours of “vital classes” in its already slapdash training program for new recruits, while running roughshod over Fourth Amendment protections for detainees and lying about their handiwork before Congress. Goldman Sachs analysts issued a report finding that the booming AI investment sector hyped by the Trump White House has added basically nothing to economic growth—which isn’t all that surprising since overall GDP growth nearly flatlined over the last quarter of 2025. Trump’s Justice Department—which now sports a Mussolini-like banner of the president’s visage on its facade—has reportedly suppressed key documents in the Epstein files that reference Trump allegedly sexually assaulting a minor. The White House is scrambling to contain the damage from Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying that Israel has a biblically sanctioned right to rule over the entire Middle East, while Ambassador to France Charles Kushner has been relegated to persona non grata status there for trying to whip up militant right-wing sentiment over the assassination of a far-right leader.
As a consequence of all this corruption, stupidity, and authoritarian squalor, Trump has logged a historic swoon in polling; his approval rating now sits at a dismal 37 percent. In another poll, 61 percent of respondentsi—including 30 percent of Republicans—say that Trump has “become erratic with age.”
In a normal presidency, this barrage of bad news and self-owns would provoke an across-the-board reset, and a State of the Union address would serve as the ideal platform for it. In Trump’s second term, however, the clear evidence of total strongman failure is only further proof of the mandate to keep strongmanning harder. That was the message of Trump’s marathon speech Tuesday night, which began and ended with invocations of Trump’s idyll of the new American golden age he imagines himself to be launching, and was punctuated throughout with the awarding of civic and military medals to a corps of heroes invited to attend.
The running ceremonial callouts reinforced Trump’s preferred image of himself as the unrivaled bestower of honor and prosperity—even as his own craving for adulation undermined the solemn displays of state heraldry. As the two-hour speech wound down with one last award—a Congressional Medal of Honor given to 100-year-old Navy aviator Royce Williams, Trump ad-libbed on how he also “always wanted a Congressional Medal of Honor” but regrettably had neither the qualifications nor authority to bestow one on himself. It made for a cringeworthy segue into the speech’s conclusion—a prolonged hymn of American exceptionalism to mark the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary, which invoked the nation’s destiny as the handiwork of “Providence” and declared that “when God needs a nation to work His miracles, He knows exactly who to ask.”
One might imagine a benevolent creator rather distressed to be downgraded into a de facto Trump supplicant—particularly in view of the president’s Epstein notoriety and his role in fomenting a deadly coup at the very site where he was letting these sonorities loose. But that was the uneasy tenor of the whole performance: When Trump was sticking closely to the script in his teleprompter, his delivery had a flat and grudging feel. “The spirit of 1776 keeps shining through,” he intoned at one point as something of an infomercial afterthought.
When he veered off script into his preferred mode of sneering, insulting, and mob-baiting, he was in his element—calling out Democrats promoting a new affordability agenda for promulgating “a dirty rotten lie” or defaming “Somali pirates” in Minnesota whom he again accused without evidence of engineering a multibillion dollar scheme of welfare fraud.
These lurches into gothic MAGA fantasy were no doubt more frequent because Trump was playing to a lopsided house. Many Democratic lawmakers elected to boycott the address in order to underline just how badly the second term Trump presidency has defiled the country’s traditions of self-government and aspirations of civic virtue. So the House chamber, which normally hosts a narrow-to-vanishing four vote Republican majority appeared for the speech’s duration to be a bastion of Trump country. So as Trump continued to riff on his pet themes of MAGA dominance and fantasies of immigrant-and-Democratic social predation, the traditional pieties of the State of the Union address succumbed to the spectacle and rhetoric of a Trump rally.
The shift in mood was apparent at the outset. Texas Democratic Representative Al Green stood in the chamber with a placard reading “Black people are not apes!”—a reference to a video that Trump posted on his TruthSocial account depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in that fashion. Security guards ushered Green out just as Trump delivered the first big selling point in his speech: “I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before, and a turnaround for the ages.” The GOP lawmakers began to chant “USA.” and it was impossible to tell whether they were responding to Trump’s grandiose claim or Green’s coerced departure.
Pundits were primed to see whether Trump would continue whaling into the Supreme Court for its decision overturning his tariffs agenda, as he did in Friday’s paranoid press conference on the ruling. But here too Trump mostly kept grudgingly to his prepared remarks, calling the decision “unfortunate.” He likewise didn’t signal any bellicose new turns in his Iran policy, stressing that he would prefer to reduce the country’s progress toward obtaining nuclear weapons diplomatically, but wouldn’t hesitate to use military force if diplomacy fails. (No mention, of course, was made to his petty and unprovoked cancellation of the Obama White House’s nuclear deal with Iran nor to his claim to have completely wiped out Iran’s nuclear capacity in last summer’s unconstitutional strike.)
What there was of a domestic agenda in the speech was far thinner. Trump couldn’t credibly make claims for significant economic progress on his watch, so he cherry-picked achievements, calling out his symbolic cessation of taxes on tips and the miniscule deduction for interest paid on auto loans. Absurdly, he claimed to be yet again overturning the Affordable Care Act for a hand-waving proposal to direct government subsidies away from big insurers and toward “the people. ”The same GOP Congress who was cheering for Trump eliminated ACA subsidies, and as a result, premiums are doubling for at least 22 million Americans. He touted the House’s recent passage of the SAVE America Act—the regressive voter ID bill sponsored by Texas GOP Representative Chip Roy—and urged Senate Majority Leader John Thune to move it through his chamber “before anything else happens.” Trump again went off script with relish here to depict an election system besieged by “rampant” fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants (none of which is true), while claiming Democratic opposition to voter suppression measures is because “they want to cheat. They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”
In his most gleeful moment of MAGA choreography, Trump set himself up with the kind of civic-textbook introduction that he rushed through over the balance of the speech, announcing that “one of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their legislators really believe.” Then he reverted to rally mode, telling his audience, “So if you agree with this statement, stand up: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” When the members of the thinned-out Democratic delegation remained seated, Trump once more reveled in his dominance, theatrically shrugging and grimacing at them. “Isn’t it a shame?” he called out. “You should be ashamed of yourselves for not standing up.”
No, we should all be ashamed that these kinds of demagogic stunts are now what passes for political discourse; it looks more and more as though Obama’s know-nothing heckler, South Carolina GOP Representative Joe Wilson who shouted “You lie!” at a 2010 joint address to Congress on health care, was a man ahead of his time. But Trump is hemorrhaging public support amid economic stagnation and a bloodthirsty and illegal mass detention-and-rendition campaign—and nothing in his stock arsenal of taunts and stunts is likely to reverse his political free fall. Maybe he’ll give himself that Medal of Honor as his final petty consolation prize.
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).