Five Takeaways From Trump’s Plodding, Scattered, and at Times Eerie State of the Union

President Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union back in office was previewed as “long,” and it met expectations. And though it clocked in as the longest ever, listeners will be left wondering what, exactly, warranted that length. The night was a slow plod through Trump’s take on his first year back in office, with vanishingly little grounding in fact, punctuated by moments that Trump clearly enjoyed more than the recitation of policy: introducing various guests, game show style, to laud their accomplishments or detail the horrors that were visited upon them. 

Large sections of the speech focused on these bizarre, staged displays. One involved a grimacing helicopter pilot who received a Medal of Honor for his actions during the Venezuela raid last month; another saw the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey team stand for a seemingly endless amount of time around the press corps.

Democratic members of Congress who were actually in the chamber during the speech refused to stand or clap or, except for a few moments, even speak out in protest. The silence seemed to get under Trump’s skin. He repeatedly chastised the group for not applauding things he felt should be applauded, like his campaign to terrorize blue cities as part of his mass deportation operation. 

The speech ended on a saccharine note. Trump read off lines about the country’s founding, the moon landing, westward expansion — all in florid language linked back to the country’s 250th anniversary this year. It was mostly devoid of the attempts to define America as belonging to an old stock of white settlers, a theme that makes its way into many other Trump administration speeches and that his administration is pursuing through its attempt to end birthright citizenship and through the continued employment and existence of Vice President JD Vance. But that was, in a way, fitting: there wasn’t one theme tonight. It was scattershot; two hours of jumping from grievance to accomplishment to applause.

Here are five takeaways from the night. 

ICE’s violent spree loomed over the night

One of the more dramatic moments of the night arrived as Trump went on an extended monologue about immigration with several complaints about the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. Democrats in attendance began to object. “You have killed Americans,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) shouted.

Trump didn’t acknowledge the point directly, saying only: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The killings of American citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both observers of his administration’s violent immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota in January, hung in the background of much of the speech. Trump declared a new “War on Fraud” directed at the Minneapolis Somali community, and did not expand on why it is that DHS is shut down. Rep. Omar gave the answer.

Trundling through affordability spin

Much of the first hour of the speech was an ambling tour through a series of statements misrepresenting Trump’s record on issues of affordability, including plugging the Don Jr.-linked “TrumpRX” website. 

While he spouted lies about the impacts of his tariffs, Trump’s diatribe on tariffs was relatively tame compared to his reaction last week after SCOTUS blocked many of the tariffs levied under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

“We’re making a lot of money,” Trump said about the tariffs. “There was no inflation, tremendous growth.”

In fact there was inflation, and growth, especially in jobs, is gnawingly stagnant.

Trump pitted himself as superior to Nobel laureate economists, and falsely claimed tariffs are paid for by foreign countries. Several studies have found U.S. companies and consumers foot the tariff bill.

On the SCOTUS ruling, Trump had only a few minor lines. “The big story was how Donald Trump called the economy correctly,” he says, before adding: “Then just four days ago an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court just came down.”

The ‘Big Lie’ rears its head as Trump touts the SAVE Act

Parroting part of the Big Lie, Trump falsely claimed undocumented people voting in elections is “rampant.” He took the opportunity to plug the SAVE America Act. Trump called it a voter ID law, but it’s much more than that. It’s a proof of citizenship law that would, among other things, require registering voters to show a passport or valid ID along with a birth certificate.

The law actually stands to disenfranchise millions of voters across the political spectrum, with voters in middle America red states being least likely to own a passport, according to a study from the left-leaning think tank, the Center for American Progress.

Dems destroyed the country, and are still destroying it, Trump insists

If you chose to drink each time Trump name checked former President Joe Biden tonight, you would have had to check out early. Trump mentioned the former president as the source of America’s woes early and often, attempting to achieve the impossible feat of remaining the outsider-populist while holding power. 

Democrats writ large were blamed for even more. At one point, the president blamed Democrats’ shutdown of the DHS for the snow blanketing the east coast, claiming the funding lapse meant there was no money to clean it up. 

Now that peace is taken care of, war?

After telling Congress that he ended eight wars last year, Trump moved on to one that he may start: Iran.

He makes a new claim, without evidence: that Iran is working on “missiles that could reach the United States.” He says that the country is doing the unspeakable, returning to its “sinister” nuclear ambitions. (Trump claimed over the summer that last year’s strike put a permanent end to all that — what changed?)

Trump adds that he’d prefer to resolve this “through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon.”

The mixture of vague threats, unsupported claims about foreign threats, and insincere cops to diplomacy are all extremely redolent of Bush-era War on Terror speechmaking. And his ominous tone toward Iran cast in a different light the night’s focus on patriotism and the military.