This Union's In A State!

Trump's Speech, summarized

If you’d rather read about two weird parties—one for a conservative magazine, the other sponsored by Pornhub—boy howdy do I have something for you:

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My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is hot. We are the hottest country. Trump says this in every speech—every single one—and I would like to find whoever said that to him first and strangle them with my bare hands. Hell is too good for them.

If you missed Trump’s State of the Union speech last night, you made the right call. The President said a lot of things over the roughly 110 minutes he spent talking, and here is a rough summary of some of them. Is it interesting? No. Does it help us better understand the moment we’re in? Also no. Nevertheless, here it is: The State of the Union, redux.

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Here’s the most politically interesting thing that happened last night, at least to me: Trump said he does not need congressional approval to set new tariffs. This statement suggests he’s more interested in undermining the balance of powers than imposing arbitrary and ever-changing duties on the nations of the world; otherwise, he’d be talking about how Congress needs to pass this and how only traitors wouldn’t pass this. Trump’s desire to set the Constitution on fire isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s also as exciting as this summary is going to get. Strap in. It’s all downhill from here.

To be fair, last night wasn’t a total waste of time for everyone. For example, Republicans got an incredible quad workout. Every Trump statement earned a standing ovation—sometimes reluctantly, as when our President bragged about the 80 million barrels of oil from “our new friend and ally, Venezuela,” sometimes with the fervor of a Baptist revival, as when he claimed to have “ended DEI in America.” Mostly, the Democrats sat stone-faced, which Trump pointed out several times. It really is funny how much that gets under Trump’s skin.

Everything is going great, guys—I don’t know if you knew that, but it’s true. Inflation was allegedly down to 1.7 percent in the last months of 2025 (false). The Big Beautiful Bill liberated us all from taxes (or at least, it liberated the wealthy) and got 2.4 million people off food stamps (because Trump cut the program). Pay no attention to the man behind the checkout counter handing you a receipt with PTSD-inducing numbers—grocery prices are down, everything is cheaper, you might even own a home someday!

And then there’s the DOW—who can forget about the DOW? Not me, unfortunately; this song has been going through my head for like two weeks straight:

The point is: everything’s amazing, and if you don’t think so you’ve either got Trump Derangement Syndrome or you’ve injested a dangerous amount of victory:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me: “please, please, please Mr President, we’re winning too much, we can’t take it anymore! We’re not used to winning in our country, until you came along we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.” And I say no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big, you’re going to win bigger than ever. To prove my point—to prove my point!—

To prove his point, Trump then introduced the Men’s Hockey Team, which stood in the upper gallery in their jackets and gold medals. MAGA’s version of winning doesn’t involve a raised standard of living or a happier personal life. It’s living vicariously, claiming others’ actions as your own. Trump talked about hockey for a really long time, then bestowed upon their goalie the Presidential Medal of Freedom: our highest civilian honor.

Not that America is entirely without problems, of course. You already know who and what Trump thinks those are.

The president accused “Somali Pirates” of “pillaging” Minneapolis, and declared fraud committed by a few individuals within that much larger community evidence that some places are lawless hellholes full of barbarians who cannot be allowed to come to America—a place where, infamously, no one native-born has ever committed fraud, and certainly not our President.

Trump then introduced us to Delilah, a very young child who nearly died in a car accident that involved an undocumented person, and announced that “Delilah’s Law” would make it illegal to give an undocumented person an CDL license. Because no one native-born has ever gotten into a car accident that hurt a child before.

Have you heard about Angel Families? They’re families who have lost a loved one in a crime involving an undocumented person. Trump invited some of those families to his speech and talked at length about the terrible immigrant violence that stole so many innocent lives. Because no one native-born has ever killed anyone. We were the Garden of Eden before the serpent of immigration slithered in through Sleepy Joe’s open borders and offered us the fruit of Doing Crimes.

After a laundry list of violent criminal aliens and their violent criminal crimes, Trump reminded everyone that if the Democrats were ever to be re-elected they would open those borders yet again and cackle gleefully as all those foreigners rushed into our country to murder us all in our sleep. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Trump then said several times to the left side of the chamber, which made the Republicans hoot and holler and chant “USA!” for a while. Because Democrats, infamously, are not members of the USA.

“Democrats are destroying our country, but we stopped them in the nick of time, didn’t we?” Trump asked his audience after introducing a victim of Gender: a child named Sage who was “socially transitioned” by his school, then ran away from home to avoid being detransitioned by his parents. There he is in the audience, lips pressed together in a dress and cardigan and long hair and earings. A tiny wave as his mother beams and claps. It’s always the trans men they trot out, have you noticed that? Trans men are always victims and trans women are always perverts, because transphobia is misogyny with extra steps. That’s a conversation for another day.

And then there’s Schrödinger’s Iran, which both does and does not have a nuclear program days or weeks away from mushroom-clouding America. Trump doubled down on the claim that he “obliterated” the program, but claimed they’ve started over and are once again threatening us with armageddon, which you have to admit is impressive. Trump also claimed that Iran is close to developing long-range missiles capable of hitting the US, which is probably not true. No war declared tonight. The will he/won’t he game continues.

There’s more, of course, but I am tired of writing this, which means you are doubtless tired of reading it. Erika Kirk cried on cue. A soldier wounded in the Venezuela operation received the Medal of Honor, as did a 100-year-old Korean war veteran. Everything is the Democrat’s fault. We used to be a dead country, but now we are a hot one—hotter than Ivanka, hotter than a 16-year-old masseuse on Little St James.

What is there to say. The horror has become banal. Trump has normalized so many things; a State of the Union that would have killed me dead ten years ago just made me vaguely sleepy. I have no special insight, no large-scale analysis, just a headache and a strong desire to go to bed. The State of the Union? Not good, man. Not good.