This Tuesday night, America will bear witness to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term. I know—the mere thought of it rots a little piece of our souls that we’re never getting back. At least you can skip it; I have to watch it.
When I was young, I used to love the pageantry of State of the Union addresses. Even when Ronald Reagan was president, the part of me that honored our democratic customs enjoyed tuning into the C-SPAN pre-game show, as it were, and watching the senators and House members file into the chamber, along with the Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices. The First Lady would take her seat in the gallery, alongside invited guests. I liked watching the president standing outside the rear door, and I loved hearing the Clerk of the House—in Reagan’s time, he was appointed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and thus spoke with a Boston accent as heavy as clam chowder—bellow: “Mistah Speakah, the President of the United States!”
During the Reagan years, the president would go on to spend the next hour and change promoting ideas and policies that I found largely repugnant. Even so, I appreciated the ceremony of the event. The State of the Union, like the opening day of a new session of Congress or the certification of electoral ballots, helped anchor our democracy—the address was as good a roadmap as any at to what we’d be debating over the course of the next year. In addition, even as I objected to Reagan’s views, I understood him to be committed, in his way, to the broad American experiment in representative government and to ensuring its continued existence.
We cannot say remotely the same of Donald Trump. He is largely and proudly ignorant of those traditions; to the extent that he grasps them, he has contempt for them. He is interested in unlimited power and in squeezing every corrupt dollar out of the presidency that he can wedge into his pockets. And he’s in desperate need of the fulsome and brain-curdling sycophancy of those around him, a hallmark of both a weak, insecure man and a leader with an undeniably fascistic personality. The only thing keeping him from facing accountability from very real crimes is the supplication of his party, who have readily accepted being beaten down into cultlike submission.
These things and many more enrage millions of Americans. That rage is given expression every day, in streets protests all over the country, in social media posts, and in columns for those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to write them.
But there’s another emotional current that courses through the bloodstreams of the majority—and yes, it is a majority—that dislikes and disapproves of Trump. It isn’t discussed as much as rage, because it doesn’t get as many clicks and perhaps isn’t thought to change as many minds. But it’s still important that we note it and give it its due. It is sadness. Many millions of Americans are absolutely heartbroken at what Trump and his menagerie of moral misfits are doing to our country.
We cannot believe the things being done in our name, and we are sick over it. The shootings, violent and point-blank and wanton, of citizens. The rounding up of noncitizens who may have come here illegally (but also may not have, as we’ve seen in some cases; even a handful of citizens have been detained) but have been living law-abiding lives who now find themselves thrown into what are essentially concentration camps living in unbearable conditions. The idea that some Americans are well-advised to be carrying their papers, as if we’re living in a police state.
There are also the relentless assaults on public health. The completely unnecessary outbreak of measles, a disease that shouldn’t even exist but is multiplying in this country in part because of RFK Jr.’s promulgation of ignorant lies that the vaccine causes deaths. More sickness and death will be on the way when RFK Jr.’s batty and shockingly irresponsible policies fully kick in. The United States is now an anti-science country, explicitly comparable to the Soviet Union under Lysenko, who, like Kennedy, spouted absurd theories and claims, denying scientific reality to satisfy the state’s ideological imperatives.
I could fill pages with these indictments. The horrifying and plainly illegal sinking of those boats. The illegal military action in Venezuela. The clearly unethical legal pursuit of those he regards as political enemies. The primal urge to remake the physical landscape of the nation’s capital in his fascist image. This last is a minor thing, compared to the actions that are doing real harm to real people by the millions, but in its way, it is no less repulsive: These moves prove that Trump believes that he is the state, and he needs to be glorified in a manner we associate with ancient emperors and totalitarian madmen, not democratically elected leaders who are servants of the people.
The corruption: Its scale is nearly impossible to comprehend, which I suppose is the point. The New York Times found last month that Trump had made at least $1.4 billion since re-entering the Oval Office, but the paper emphasized that “we know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.” To watch someone abuse the presidency like this is sickening to many millions of Americans.
And worst of all, in a way, is the cocoon of fantasy in which he lives. He surrounds himself with flatterers and flunkies. He spends his weekends surrounded by extraordinarily wealthy people who have no idea what working people’s lives are like and who know that if they want his attention for 10 minutes, they must tell him that he is the greatest president ever. This is ridiculous, but it is not just ridiculous: It’s profoundly undemocratic and destructive. It is not how democratically accountable leaders live.
This totalitarian-style toadyism will be on full display Tuesday night. Trump will tell lie after lie about the economy, about his tariffs, about American being the “hottest” country in the world, about countless other things, and congressional Republicans will interrupt him 40 or 50 times with rapturous applause. Yes, Democrats interrupt their presidents with applause excessively, too; but Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and for that matter George W. Bush—weren’t openly engaged in a war on democracy. Trump is, and Republicans in Congress are cheering him every step of the way.
It’s enraging, but it’s also heartbreaking and disgusting, to see this malicious buffoon and his evil and cowardly minions destroy the world’s oldest democracy and congratulate themselves for doing so. They are an affront to everything we have, or once had, to be proud of as Americans. Most of the country now feels this way, and that, this week, is the real state of this union.
