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The State of the Union Was a Rally for an Ailing Strongman

An increasingly unpopular Trump lurched from plodding teleprompter readings to gothic MAGA fantasies in his long-winded speech.

President Donald Trump giving his State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2026.

Aglance 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 façade—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’s 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........

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