State of the Union Address--The Horror

On Tuesday evening, President Trump delivered his 2026 State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. It was the longest such address in American history—one hour and forty-eight minutes—and it was, by any honest measure, a masterful performance. Regardless of one’s politics, the speech was disciplined, mature, and effective. Trump spoke with the confidence of a man who has weathered impeachments, indictments, an assassination attempt, and exile from public life, and emerged not diminished but fortified. He declared that America had entered a “golden age,” and he made the case with a directness and clarity that his opponents could only answer with scowls, protest signs, and coordinated theatrical outrage. What the speech revealed was not merely the distance between two political parties. It revealed to everyone watching a heart of darkness inside the Democrat Party.

The contrast was impossible to miss. On one side of the chamber, representatives stood, applauded, and engaged with the President’s proposals—on border security, on the economy, on protecting American citizens, on supporting law enforcement. On the other side, Democrat members sat with arms folded, scrolled through their phones, or simply boycotted the event altogether. More than thirty members of Congress chose to skip the address entirely, attending instead a so-called “People’s State of the Union” rally sponsored by progressive advocacy groups. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut announced that Trump “doesn’t deserve an audience.” Representative Al Green of Texas was physically escorted from the chamber after waving a political sign. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib interrupted the President with shouts from the floor. This is not governance. This is performance art by people who have confused disruption with dissent.

The most damning moment of the evening came when President Trump introduced the mother of Iryna Zarutska, a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion of her homeland only to be stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina by a homeless man with fourteen prior arrests. Iryna’s mother, Anna, sat in the gallery weeping as the President told her daughter’s story. The Republican side of the aisle rose to its feet in a prolonged standing ovation. The Democrats sat. They did not stand. They did not clap. They did not acknowledge a grieving mother whose daughter was murdered by a repeat violent offender who never should have been free. Trump looked across the chamber and said what every decent American was thinking: “How do you not stand? How do you not stand for a mother who lost her daughter to a monster who should have never been on our streets? You should be ashamed of yourselves.” Several of these same Democrats wore Ukrainian flag pins on their lapels. They will perform solidarity with Ukraine as a geopolitical talking point but will not honor a Ukrainian mother mourning her murdered child ten feet in front of them. That is not politics. That is moral bankruptcy.