President Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address was not only a political spectacle but a mirror held up to our republic itself. In the applause, the calls for boycotts, and the silences, one sees that habits Alexis de Tocqueville feared most: a people drifting toward intellectual conformity, mistaking party loyalty for principle, and surrendering the civic discipline of self-government for the easier comforts of tribalism. If democracy decays not through sudden coups but through gradual civil neglect and soft despotism, then the most important question raised by this address is not what the President said, how his words stood up to the rigor of fact-checking, but whether Americans still possess the independent spirit necessary to govern themselves. After watching the address, which ran for almost two hours, I could not help but think that there was a lot that President Trump should have included in his address, but did not, specifically for his supporters like me who feel confused by the direction America First seems to have taken. Also significant was the number of politicians, such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, advising caucus members to either attend with “silent defiance” or skip the State of the Union speech entirely. Former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich, had similar advice for the American people, imploring them to boycott the address and outsource their Tocquevillian civic duty as American voters to partisan commentators like himself rather than tune in. Coming from a person who constantly talks about democratic backsliding and the erosion of democracy, Reich’s hypocrisy is astounding.

Although I wrote a pitch on Merion West advising that President Trump was the only viable presidential candidate in 2025, I have been critical of friends and colleagues who have uncritically defended or rationalized his statements and actions regardless of evidence, contradiction, and, in the process, elevated President Trump to an infallible or quasi-sacred individual impervious to criticism. It is an undeniable fact that President Trump’s America First movement has morphed into something different than the promise he campaigned on: the end of military intervention on foreign soil. I am not alone in my view, as this is the very issue that has created a rift between President Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Senator Thomas Massie. In a very short time, we have gone from shifting the focus away from war and towards American interests, to talk of regime change in Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and the need to defend Taiwan should China invade it. Changing course is not always a bad thing, but to date, President Trump has not persuasively argued why the sudden shift in foreign policy, and I felt he was obligated to discuss all of the above in his almost two-hour speech. Unifying the fractured Republican Party, admitting that it does have a problem indeed, and getting on the same page within the party over issues ranging from Israel to rampant government spending, to a resurgence of the neoconservatism prevalent in the Bush/Cheney era, would have been a good start to the address. Apparently, these topics were still too substantive to discuss.

One of my conservative friends told me that Americans needed to watch the debate in a similar way to how workers in corporate America need to endure performance evaluations from their supervisors. His logic was that they wouldn’t have the option to bypass the evaluation because they didn’t feel their boss was worthy of their time, or because they disliked him personally. He argued that since President Trump was, in essence, the boss of the world, we are beholden to give him our undivided attention. I respectfully disagreed with that assessment and with Hakeem Jeffries’ idea that our elected officials should bypass the address. Politicians, especially Members of Congress, are far more obligated to attend the State of the Union than ordinary Americans are obligated to watch it, both formally and informally. Mandated under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the State of the Union’s key audience is Congress as an institution. Thus, the public watches by choice; Congress is supposed to attend in its governing role.

That notwithstanding, President Trump is not our boss; it’s actually the other way around. As Thomas Jefferson asserted, “the people are the only censors of their governors.” If our elected officials do not live up to our expectations, it is they who will be fired, not us. People like Robert Reich. Hakeem Jeffries and President Donald Trump are asking us to do exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville warned us about in Democracy in America, and it applies equally to the left and the right. Democracy weakens when party loyalty to party outweighs loyalty to process. The State of the Union Address, calls to disengage and boycott it, and reactions from both sides reveal a lot about where we are as a nation. Americans are less engaged, less informed, more tribal, intolerant of opposing speech, unwilling to defend constitutional norms when their party violates them, and are spectators, rather than active participants in our democracy. As my Columbia classmate Navy Corpsman Anthony Bunkley wisely stated in a personal conversation, democracy is a “moral discipline rather than a political arrangement, and its greatest enemy is the idea that one side, one ideology, or one institution can monopolize reality. He continued, “doubt is a civic virtue, and to think freely is to risk exile, mockery, or cancellation, but to avoid risk, or civic engagement, is to abandon freedom altogether.”

If doubt is a civic virtue, then blind allegiance is its enemy. The future of the United States will hinge on which habit Americans choose to cultivate.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)