2026 State of the Union Response

State of the Union addresses exist to highlight the current status of the nation and how an administration plans to improve the issues facing us. What occurred last night was not that. Instead of giving the American people a straightforward explanation of how things are, Trump decided it was best to hold a campaign rally-style lie-fest in which the only objective was to give himself glory and heap praises on his sycophants while proclaiming every lying and racist talking point his administration has held since its inception. 

Americans suffer under a neo-fascist regime where people are kidnapped off the streets by the government's secret police force, losing their jobs at rates not seen since the Great Recession, and paying higher prices for almost everything they need to survive. Yet despite this, Trump stood for an hour and forty-seven minutes lying to our faces about the reality we see every day. This showed that the regime is clearly out of touch, as they continue to pretend as if stock market records matter to the everyday American who lives paycheck to paycheck. Trump showed how little he cares about the everyday American, pretending that our fundamentally broken system was now perfectly acceptable. His insistence that our rapidly declining healthcare system, made worse by last year’s massive funding cuts, is now better simply because of a website on which the purported savings for medicines are in reality a wildly overpriced non-alternative to what we already have. In short, he showed he is more in touch with the swamp dwellers he purported to be against when running his campaigns in both 2016 and 2024. 

All of these things are in themselves gross misrepresentations of reality, but the worst act conducted last night was the parading of victims, their families, and their stories exclusively to push an extremely racist and pedophilic narrative. It’s not new for the modern conservative movement to use racist dogwhistles and old racist tropes to demonize people in our country. It can be seen in the literal dogwhistles that are being posted next to government-run Twitter account posts. It’s not new for Trump to latch onto long-debunked beliefs held by white nationalists. It’s not new for the Republicans to blindly accept this behavior from their leadership. What is new is the normalization of overt racist behavior during what should have been a moment of reflection, and it is something that we cannot sit silent on and allow to persist. Additionally, Trump never once acknowledged the victims of himself and Jeffry Epstein. He spent almost 10 minutes praising the men’s hockey team, but said not one thing about the biggest scandal since Tammany Hall.

We will continue to oppose the behaviors of this administration that are harming our friends and neighbors. We will stand up for those who are victims of this regime. We will continue to demand that our Democratic representatives do more than sit in silence, giving a pass to extremely hateful rhetoric and actions. We will continue to promote liberty, equality, and more than just the pursuit of happiness. We will continue to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. We will continue to be just what they call us, anti-fascists. We will continue to provide our caucus members, our followers, and those who hold progressive values with concrete steps for them to follow to fight and retake our nation.