President Clinton once warned that if you are not talking about the future, you are losing. But President Trump—as he spoke 10,700 words over 108 minutes in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, setting records for the longest televised speech ever given by a president—didn’t find the words or the time to outline his own vision for the future.
Not even the unprecedented spectacle—the chants of “USA, USA,” the Olympic gold medals, two Medals of Honor, two Purple Hearts, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom—nor the genuinely moving tears of parents grieving the loss of their children could obscure the failure to outline a forward-looking Trump agenda.
Instead, the president contented himself with a self-congratulatory listing of what he sees as his past triumphs and dire warnings of what will happen if he and his party are punished in the upcoming midterm elections and the opposition Democrats are given any power.
"It was about the past and the present, but not about the future,” said William Galston, who was Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser in his first term. Galston voiced surprise that the White House had not saved some new initiative to make news in the speech. “As far as I can tell, there wasn't a single thing that was new.”
The closest Trump came was in announcing a “war on fraud” headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, which he promised will miraculously produce “a balanced budget overnight.” He asked very little of the Congress, apart from banning stock trading by members and passing the SAVE America Act, which would require ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register.
Politically, it was not surprising that Trump did what he always does in a major speech—aim at his base and offer nothing but insults to the opposition. “Because it was such an unyielding speech, oriented as the first year of his administration has been towards mobilizing the base rather than reaching out to the people who gave him the majority in ‘24 and are now turning their back on him,” Galston said, “he did nothing to solve the problems of the two or three dozen Republicans who are in danger of losing their seats.”
For a State of the Union, the insults were unusually pointed. One of the few times Trump referenced the future was to paint a picture of how bleak it would be if Democrats were to regain control of Congress in November. “If they ever got elected, they would open up those borders to some of the worst criminals anywhere in the world,” he declared. “The only thing standing between Americans and a wide-open border right now is President Donald J. Trump and our great Republican patriots in Congress.”
When Democrats did not rise to their feet to acclaim one part of his speech, he shook his head as if in sadness, and said, “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.” He added, “Democrats are destroying our country, but we've stopped it just in the nick of time, didn't we?”
While no other president has used a State of the Union to rail against his predecessor in office, Trump did just that again. Six times, he blamed his problems on Biden by name, or “my predecessor” or “the last administration.”
Beyond politics, the brief foreign policy section of the speech was sobering. Heading into the speech, news reports weighed the odds of an imminent American strike on Iran and speculation that the president would use the address to announce military operations. Those fears eased when Trump instead declared, “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.”
There were no similar assurances for those anxious about Trump having the United States continue to walk away from an ally brutally invaded by Russia. In his speech, the president barely acknowledged the continuing war in Ukraine. In those 10,700 words, he found space for only 51 words on that war, insisting he is “working very hard” to end it, while repeating his frequent assertion that it “would have never happened if I were president.”
That section dramatized more than anything else the consequences of the 2024 election. In the last State of the Union before Tuesday, President Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin and assured Ukraine. “My message to President Putin, who I've known for a long time, is simple,” declared Biden. “We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.”
But under Trump, who failed to mention that the speech came on the fourth anniversary of the invasion, the day also showcased two bow-downs to Putin and two slaps at Ukraine. Just hours before he rose to the House rostrum to speak, the United States pointedly did not send a representative to a somber commemoration in Kyiv that drew several European allied leaders.
Even more glaring, the United States sided with Putin at the United Nations. There, a resolution calling for “an immediate, full, and unconditional ceasefire” and “a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in line with international law” passed the General Assembly with 107 votes. But the United States abstained because Russia objected to its support for the “sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Those actions on the day of the speech were a powerful rebuke to one of Trump's proudest claims in the address: “Our enemies are scared … and America is respected again, perhaps like never before,” he boasted. Evidence for that assertion was hard to find inside the Kremlin, in the halls of the United Nations, or on the streets of Kyiv. And that spoke far louder than any promises made in the speech.
