The Dispatch Podcast - The Dispatch Recaps Trump's State of the Union

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address on February 24, and The Dispatch hosted a special Dispatch Live to discuss it all. Steve Hayes was joined by Michael Warren, Kevin Williamson, and David Drucker to discuss the speech, and congressional reporter Charles Hilu, who was at the Capitol, also joined the show to share his reporting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

with the Dispect Live. Glad to be joined by my colleague Kevin Williamson and David Drucker. We'll soon be joined by my other colleagues. To talk about the president's rather lengthy speech, not quite two hours. We had some estimates before the speech that it could go as long as two hours, maybe even two and a half. It was mercifully shorter than that, but it didn't feel shorter than that. We are going to keep our conversation pretty tight here. And we're going to seek to answer some big questions. What did the president say? Why did he say the things that he said, what does this mean sort of at this point in his presidency? And what does this mean with an eye toward the 2026 midterm elections? So, Kevin, let me start with you. If you look at the way the president started, he's got an approval

rating stuck near his second term lows. It sounded to me like he was trying to basically reframe his presidency as the dawn of America's golden age, sometimes touting his often imagined achievements and excoriating anyone who would question them with particularly harsh attacks on the Democrats who are in the chamber with him. He started by describing, you know, a reality that I have to say, to be candid about it, doesn't really exist. A roaring economy that is roaring like never before. America respected again, perhaps like never before. We're the hottest country anywhere in the world, the hottest. Kevin, do you think we're the hottest country in the world?

I mean, we can look at the numbers on the economy. That's not true. What he said wasn't true. We can look at a wide variety of ways to gauge our respect in the world. I don't think that's true either. Are we the hottest? That seems to be the most subjective claim that he made. Yeah, hottest country in the world invites responses that

I assume would be inappropriate at this forum, but I would say per capita, probably not. Yeah, his, I just stopped making notes about which of his economic stats relies and, you know, just BS or just made up or otherwise defective. I hate trendy terminology, but the gas lighting is pretty strong. Yeah. So Americans, I think, probably know that prices today are 3% higher than they were a year ago. and whatever you say about inflation plummeting, which is not actually plummeting as far as I can tell CPI inflation is about the same as it was last January, at right around 2.4%, I guess,

and then the overall inflation year-over-year-over-year, about 2.9%, I guess, something like that. So people know this. They experience it every time they go to a Kroger or a Walmart or wherever it is they shop. and however many times you say it is not going to talk people out of their own experience and what they actually see. No one believes that Washington, D.C. is a city without crime. No one believes a lot of this stuff. And Trump's weird sort of habit of speaking exclusively in superlatives, you know, this thing like nothing else has ever happened before, I kind of get the feeling that the sort of daft charm of that is wearing operas on.

people, and I think that persistent inflation makes it hard to be charming. I think that's his number one problem. He, you know, he made a show of heaping scorn and contempt upon the word affordability and the Democrats' use of it. Interesting. Interesting. The most success that they've had with it. But I think that is largely what's on people's minds. Now, I think Americans should be thinking about Ukraine and Iran and lots of other things, and we should be thinking about our overall fiscal picture. But I think what Americans actually are thinking about is prices, groceries and the price of a new house or an old house, and college educations and health care and all the other stuff they've been griping about prices up with good reason, in many cases, for a long time now.

You know, Trump's first term essentially consisted of him signing off on a very conventional big Republican tax cut and then running his mouth and doing a bunch of social media and then trying to stage a cue at the end. And I kind of suspect that his. second term is going to end up turning up very much the same way with a fairly conventional Republican tax bill, some pressure for additional tax cuts and various kinds of, you know, shenanigans that are tax cut adjacent. And, you know, the tariff thing coming and going, the Venezuela thing and the other foreign engagements being sort of desultory. And not much else will be left more indebted and ultimately poorer country for his life.

lack of interest in doing anything substantive on the long-term economic and fiscal challenges our country faces. Yeah, David, I want to go back to the point that Kevin made about Trump's almost mockery of the Democrats and their use of the word affordability. I think if you sort of try to interpret what he meant to do there, I think what he was trying to say was this is a really heavily focused grouped word. word. And they're using this because consultants in Washington have told them that this is going to be an effective attack on Donald Trump. And as far as that goes, I think he's right. There's a reason that

affordability kind of popped out out of nowhere. Dora Mondani used it in New York City. It's become sort of the word of the year in our political conversation. So I think the president's right as far as it goes. But then he went further, and he really did sort of make fun of the idea of an affordability problem. And this is something that we've seen from the White House going back now several months, where on the one hand, the president is saying, you know, sort of what affordability problem. And on the other, he's proposing problems. I mean, he's proposing solutions to this supposedly imaginary problem. Did that moment, you know, State of the Union speeches, whether they're half this length or nearly two hours, really a collection of moments. And what matters, I think,

especially in this day of viral clipping and social media, the moments that are likely to live on. That one struck me as a moment that would be replayed probably in the next 24, 48 hours after the speech itself. And perhaps in Democratic ads come the fall. Yeah, look, Steve, I think you're right to hone in on that because the way the president mocks the idea of affordability and says that he's won an affordability. That fight is over. Is emblematic of the problem his party has heading into the midterm elections this year. You know, I had a very earnest conversation with the Republican congressman last year who asked me, very honestly, isn't all this concern about affordability the result of a media narrative

that you guys are writing about the affordability crisis and therefore voters are concluding that there's an affordability crisis. And what I explained to him is that, you know, actually, we didn't come up with the word. You know, for the reporting I've done for the dispatch, going back to the beginning of the Trump administration, I began to see political advertising and discussions using the word affordability, and I actually looked into it. And what I learned is that it was really sort of a continuation of concerns voters started to have in the 2024 campaign that helped Donald Trump defeat Kamala Harris, which is that the problem isn't just inflation. It's this idea that the cost of living writ large is out of control. I'm making a good living.

I should be doing pretty well, and yet I feel stretched, right? So this isn't just about voters at the lower ends of the economic ladder, but in the middle and even, you know, some of what we consider the upper middle. And so for the president to mock this or to say this thing's over, I fix this. That's exactly what voters don't want to hear because it's. not what they're believing and what they're feeling and experiencing in their own lives. And look, when you're the incumbent, you're always in a tricky place because if you say that there's a problem and you acknowledge it, well, and people are going to say, great, what are you doing about it?

If you don't acknowledge it and try to say there's no problem, people get angry at you. Right. One of the things we've seen in Poland continuously, and it's why this part of the speech, I think, is very significant, is that voters don't think Trump's focused on the right things, right? just focus, whether or not he's doing a good job or not. And they just completely disagree with him on a major issue. And affordability is not a made-up word or a made-up issue. And it's something, I mean, the media, we get a lot of stuff wrong. We do a lot of things that are wrong. But this is something that we picked up on from talking to voters and talking to politicians who are responding

to voters. And it's just something the president refuses to give on. And it makes him look like he's living in a Washington bubble. Well, and I think if you look back at the, the poll, that we saw when Donald Trump was elected. Look at the exit polling. Look at the things that led him to be elected. I think arguably the two most important issues were immigration and the economy. And we have seen pretty significant slippage from the president in those two areas in particular. If you look at, look back at the polls that ABC News has taken, Reuters Zipsoz has taken, the president is underwater. on those issues and pretty significantly in some respects. So it's certainly not the case that this is made up or that this is something that

journalists are imagining and voters are feeling. He's, you know, he's badly underwater on both of those issues. Mike, Warren, what did you see in the speech that stood out for you? Were there other moments that you think are likely to get a lot of attention? either what the president said or the way the Democrats in the chamber reacted to what the president said. We had a couple of moments where Rashida Tlebe and Ilan Omar basically engaged in as sort of a shouting match with the president, heckling the president, and he spoke about immigration in particular. You had other moments where the Democrats, this is such an own goal where they didn't stand and applaud for things that obviously deserved to applaud,

things that are not controversial, things that are not Donald Trump. whether it's the hockey team, whether it's, you know, some of the people that the president, even if it was over the top and I thought that it was, even if some of it felt like a caricature of the kinds of things that Ronald Reagan used to do. So these people deserve the applause that they got from mostly Republicans. That struck me as a potential own goal by Democrats. Yeah, I mean, this is all theater, basically, and sometimes it's really good theater. I mean, you're so cynical, Mike.

I know. In my old age, I've gotten so cynical. The, you know, like some of the theater is really good. Like when he brought the former political prisoner from Venezuela in to sort of greet his wife, I mean, it's like Oprah. It's like a talk show, you know, it's entertaining. And he, Trump, that is, sort of understands those moments. I don't know how important. they are for long term or short or even, you know, medium or short term political, you know,

where our politics are going to go. It's the show that was on tonight. I would say my, on the previous discussion about the economy, there were a couple of moments that just sort of made me laugh out loud. There was a point where Trump said that there were 70,000 new construction jobs. Obviously new jobs, positive jobs, growth is better than nothing, but 70,000 new construction jobs sort of seemed like impressive sounding until you sort of think about the scope of this country. But the one that really jumped out at me was 80 million barrels of oil from Venezuela. We're now getting because of our getting rid of Maduro in Venezuela. 80 million barrels of oil is, I mean, it's like a drop in the bucket.

I think we would, as a country, get through 80 million barrels of oil in a week or less. But the bigger sort of takeaway I had was, you know, a lot of times, and Trump as well, this used to apply to him, presidents will use these opportunities to tell uplifting stories about the country and bringing these people in to tell those uplifting stories. you know, so-and-so was in the gallery and they did this wonderful thing. And we heard that, again, from the hockey players coming down and being winners from people like the former political prisoner. But a lot of those stories were real sort of vintage Trumpian American carnage stories,

lots of descriptions of brutal deaths and in a way that I sort of understand why he's, why he feels he wants to sort of emphasize those stories to sell his very extreme immigration enforcement mechanisms. These are important because of these kinds of violent acts that some illegal immigrants take and do in this country. But it really, it felt like a real downer in that way. and there was just a lot of incongruence in sort of the state of the union is strong. Now let me tell you all of these really horrible stories.

No, I absolutely, I immediately thought of American Carnage as he started ticking through those stories. In greater detail, I think, than we're accustomed to hearing them. Charles, welcome. You were in the chamber tonight. Anything that you saw being in the chamber that might not have been obvious to those, us who are watching this on television, any of the sort of atmospherics that you picked up, was the contrast between Democrats sitting and Republicans standing as pronounced as it appeared to be as we watched it on television? I did hear you talk about that, Steve, a few minutes ago,

and there was a contrast, but I don't think it was actually that pronounced. Actually, the biggest moment of the entire speech and the most energetic moment was when they brought the hockey team in. And actually I noticed that both sides of the aisle were going, actually going crazy. I looked, I noted specifically some Democrats like Staney Hoyer was really into it. Ilhan Omar was standing and clapping and smiling. So for that, for that part at least, and also for the parts where he gives the soldiers and the veterans Medal of Honor or honors the, you know, these other, a lot of these other people, you know, it's mostly, mostly the troops, you know, these, these, these, especially these, these, especially these

heroes. Most of the Democrats did stand, you know, they weren't as energetic as they were or as the Republicans were. So not and not all of them stood, but they, they, I'd say most of them at those big moments did stand and clap. And, you know, we were talking about this earlier in the editorial meeting and Mike just made this point. A lot of it is theater. There is, you know, Trump wants to have this, this huge house chamber cheering for him and for these people. that he's bringing, you know, Democrats, they, you know, they feel sort of the impulse to cheer for these people, but they don't want the huge image of the House chamber standing and cheering for Donald Trump. So there's a little bit of hesitation there. And it can be a little awkward.

A Drucker brought up in the meeting this morning that Democrats sometimes do this weird half sit, half stand thing. They weren't, they weren't doing that. So it wasn't all that awkward. Most people were kind of committing to one posture. But the thing that was the most awkward for Democrats is that a lot of these moments, most of them stood, but not all of them stood. So that's what I observed there. And there were reports in advance of the speech that upwards of 70 Democrats were not going to show up to the speech. Was that obvious being in the chamber? It was notable, actually. It was pretty noticeable that there were a number of Democratic seats or empty seats on the Democratic side. In terms of the Democratic senators, I mean,

there were more Democratic House members that were reported. at least in this morning, I saw the number of House members was higher than the number of senators that weren't showing up. But the, the, it was especially noticeable for the Democratic senators. I mean, at least from my vantage point, which was I was up in the press gallery. So I was behind Trump. And then I was entirely to the left in the second row. So I didn't have the best view of the section where the Democratic senators were sitting. But their absence was especially noticeable. And then there were the empty seats on the House side. And then there were a few Democrats who walked out during the speech as well. So it got, it was actually pretty noticeable, the absent Democrats.

You've got a lot. And most, the most notable Democrat I'll note here is actually the number two Democrat in the House, Catherine Clark, you know, Leader Jeffrey is the minority leader. He was there. But his number two, Catherine Clark, the whip, she was not there. She was one of these Democrats who skipped. Yeah. You've got a lot of work ahead of you still. So I will ask you one more question. and we'll let you go. One of the things that I think we were anticipating seeing a moment that people wanted to see how it would play out in real life was when the president addressed the Supreme Court. There were four members of the court there tonight. And the president mentioned them. I think people who were thinking that there might be real fireworks that he might attack them

or really go after them, he didn't do that as much. I mean, certainly made clear he was displeased with the ruling on terror. from Friday, but anybody looking for a full frontal attack didn't see that. And I was told I didn't see this myself that he actually greeted Amy Coney-Barritt before he went up to give his speech, which, you know, just within the last couple of days, he was saying that, you know, she's an embarrassment to her family. That didn't happen. Did you see any reaction inside the chamber when the president talked about the Supreme Court and talked about tariffs in particular? No, they remain pretty much stonefaced the entire time.

I did observe Kavanaugh and Barrett giving these little kind of tepid claps during the part where they brought the hockey team in. But with that attack, like you said, it wasn't a full frontal assault. It wasn't, you know, a horrible insult to them personally. It was, you know, and maybe not the best thing for separations of powers concerns, but it wasn't exactly what we were expecting. and it wasn't what we've seen Trump. It wasn't the treatment that we've seen Trump give to people, or even as you brought up, give to the Supreme Court just against him just a few days ago.

So we didn't see that type of thing. And then we also didn't see much of a reaction from the four justices who were there. Three of them were in that majority that overruled his tariffs. The loan dissenter being Kavanaugh who was there. And honestly, the most noticeable thing was the fact that there were a lot of of Democrats actually who clapped for that Supreme Court decision. And then someone, uh, yelled, you know, they're right in front of you. So the reactions of the, of the, of the justices really wasn't that noticeable and neither. And Trump's attack, uh, wasn't all that notable either. Right, right.

All right, Charles, thanks to joining us. Did he, uh, did he decline to greet them when he was doing his opening remarks when he was talking about the second lady, which isn't a thing. But I don't think he said, you know, justice to the Supreme Court. I think he just kind of pretended like there. Yeah. I think, I think he might be. you're right. I didn't, I, I, I, I didn't hear him say, say hello to the Supreme Court justices in the introduction to his speech. And then I, I honestly did not see, I don't remember what he, what treatment he gave them as he was walking in. I didn't see that. Charles, go get to work. You've got a lot of work in front of you. It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with Westjet from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off.

Kevin, I want to come back to you on this question of how much this will matter. And I want to approach this in a couple different ways. If you look at Donald Trump's popularity right now, depending on the poll, I mentioned earlier, the ABC News, Washington Post-Ipsos poll, 60% of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump's job performance. 39% approve. And the strong disapproves in a variety of these polls that have been released over the past several weeks are really high, including defections. The president is seeing defections from Republicans who are frustrated with some of his policies and some of the ways that they're being executed. On the economy, specifically, 57% disapprove of the president's job performance compared to only 41% who approved, to your point, Mike. And on immigration, 58% percent, disapprove, 40% approve.

That's this, I'm citing the ABC Washington Post, Ipsos poll, similar findings in virtually every poll over the past couple of months. Is the state of the union the kind of moment that a president can turn those around? I mean, obviously people look at a speech like the state of the union and they look at a midterm election and they say, you know, this could be the moment that he sort of reframes. the way that Republicans can run in advance of the 2026 elections. Does it matter? Probably not. You know, as a writer, I always hate to emphasize this fact, but words don't really matter as much as we think they do.

And not in a way. Say it ain't so, Kevin. Say it ain't so. And not all talking about affordability because some really clever comms guy cooked up this word. We're talking about affordability because I'm paying $16 a gallon for milk. Now, granted, I buy pretty fancy milk. still. I think $7.99 for a half gallon times two comes out to just about $16.

I was an English major and I dropped out, but it's it's right around that number, I think. At the same, by the same token, if Trump thinks he can go in and give a speech in which he says, X, Y, and Z, and it's the greatest thing anyone's ever seen and no one thought it was possible and all this sort of stuff, that's going to really change the ground reality for people and what they see with their own eyes and experience with their own lives and see at the end of their at the month in their own bank statements, it's just not going to work. You know, in a sense, I think what everyone's kind of pissed off about is that the whole country feels like Manhattan right now, where everyone's like, I'm 33 years old, I make $125,000 a year

and I live in a one-bedroom apartment, and life's not going to get any better, and it feels like I'm making enough money that my life should be different. Now, I mean, you know, it's always sucked to be poor, and so that never really changes. That's kind of a political constant, but right now it's feeling like a lot of. little harder to be upper middle class, I think, for people than it used to. And their expectations are just not being met. And people sort of right in the middle, right at that 50th percentile, are really getting squeezed sort of on both sides. So I don't think you can fix that with a speech. And I don't think you can fix it with a tax cut either. You know, Republicans have figured out that they've

really played out the politics of at least income tax cuts, because when you've got 51, 52 percent of the population not paying any federal income taxes, there's not a lot of juice in federal income tax cuts. So you can do these, you know, direct payments and set up little bank accounts and put your name on it and say, I didn't choose that name. I didn't choose that name. I also didn't choose this name, but it all happened to be my name, which is a little bit of protesting too much, I think. You know, your ability to buy people off with government money is pretty, pretty limited at this point. What people want is inflation back down at one, one and a half percent. they want three or four or five strong quarters of economic growth and real meaning inflation-adjusted

wage growth that is strong for a couple of years. Right. And it's going to take a couple of years of that before people's attitudes really start to change and catch up. And we saw this, you know, in the 80s when there was a gigantic economic boom. But it took a while for people to really appreciate that it was in effect. You saw the same thing at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration, where you you had a really mild recession.

And it took till almost, you know, the beginning of Clinton's second term before people really started to figure out what a good economy they had. Yeah. Because these things don't just get communicating to people in an instantaneous kind of way, because that's not how life has lived. Have you considered pouring gasoline on your raisin brand in the morning? Because you could do that for about a buck 50s for a half gallon. Yeah.

Well, you know, speaking of gasoline, bragging about all the oil we're getting from Venezuela, Now, maybe just because all my friends live in Texas, nobody wants any oil right now. Oil is really, really cheap. If you're in Midland, Odessa, places like that, your life sucks right now because you can't make any money because oil prices are very, very low right now. It's one of the few things that it's really down there. And it's one of the few areas of the economy where some people are looking for a little inflation. They would like those prices to bump up a few bucks. The last thing in the world, the United States needs is a whole bunch of Venezuelan oil flood.

the market and bringing those prices down even further. Yeah. David, I want to go back to you on the question of whether this matters. You think back to two years ago next week, March 7th of 2024, Joe Biden gave the State of the Union speech that was variously described as energetic or feisty, and it was touted as the beginning of his comeback, this kind of in-your-face response to Republicans who had. said that Biden was struggling with mental acuity, wasn't as quick as he was, he was having

trouble completing sentences. And he gave this speech. And, you know, certainly it was the case that Democrats had a plan going into the speech that if he does even passably well, we're going to make a big deal of the fact that this guy just gave a speech that Republicans had said he couldn't give. And I think Republicans even joked that, you know, that President Biden may have been on drugs, may have been taking drugs, stimulants to give the kind of speech that he did. And so he got that response. Clips were played. It paused, I would say, this growing narrative that he wasn't fit to serve a second term. But his approval rating one week before that speech was 40 percent. And on March 1st, his approval rating one week after that speech was 38.4%.

the speech was meaningless. It didn't make any difference at all. And of course, Joe Biden was out of the presidential election less than six months after that point. And we just got to the point where people know that this is all theater to Mike's earlier point. And so they don't pay much attention to it that it's so filled with the kind of BS that we saw from Joe Biden. And we saw, I would say, in spades from Donald Trump tonight. Yeah, I think part of the problems, Steve, is that it's so obvious theater now.

It's so obviously theater, right? I mean, you know, there have always been elements in these states of the union addresses over the years where presidents bring in a few guests and tell some anecdotes, and there are theatrical elements. And, you know, who can blame them? It's on television. It's one of the reasons why presidents years ago started coming to Congress to give these speeches in the age of television.

And I think before that in the age of radio, radio. And so, you know, you can forgive them their trespasses on that. I mean, part of the, the issue is that it's become a caricature of itself. That's number one. Number two, we live in a very politically divided country where our politics are very entrenched, generally speaking. We're not open to hearing what the other side has to say. We don't want to hear what the other side has to say. We don't trust what the other side has to say. And the two parties now have become so combative in Washington that there's not, even this sort of, they don't even go through the motions when it comes to unity and to getting along. I mean, a few years ago, there was a big concern about this on Capitol Hill. And remember there was this movement for Democrats and Republicans to have a seatmate. They were all going to sit together and intermingle. So you wouldn't have the Republican side, the Democratic side. That didn't last too long.

But, you know, here's another reason why I think these speeches have become meaningless, aside from the political aspect of this and the fact that the cake is baked in terms of how Americans feel about the parties and the people in elected office. For better or worse, what I'd say in a way in retrospect for better, presidents would come to Congress to deliver these speeches. And in these speeches, there would always be a handful of initiatives that required working with Congress to fulfill. And there'd always be this proposal and this ask to work with both parties to try and get these things done. And they were usually pretty flowery things that at least from the perspective of the goal of the proposal, most people wouldn't object to.

And what we've seen over the years, but particularly with Trump because of his disregard for Congress and his desire to do everything alone is not even that. I mean, he did, you know, say a couple, you know, times that I caught Congress should codify this. But he didn't come with a even like an old Clinton laundry list of proposals and now let's get to work. And so what's the point of coming to Congress to offer a bunch of ideas and proposals if you're not going to work with Congress? And I think finally, it has the effective in a way being a turnoff because it just emphasizes government dysfunction. And people on the right and the left, never mind the center, believe the government is. dysfunctional and don't like it. Now, who they vote for, that might be partly their responsibility, I think. But these speeches no longer do anything to even give Americans for, you know, or many

voters, at least for a night, this idea that, hey, maybe government's working a little bit. Yeah, it's a really interesting point. That actually hadn't occurred to me. There is almost always some kind of an ask. And not only was there not an ask from President Trump in this speech, in the one area where you think he really ought to have made an ask, Kevin wrote about this for the website yesterday, he didn't make the ask of Congress on tariffs. I mean, that is an area where he certainly should have gone to Congress. In fact, he was defiant and said, I've got all these other options in front of me. I don't really need to go to you. He didn't make a specific ask, maybe ask for broad support, but didn't make a specific ask, which I think was interesting. We're going to wrap here in the next few minutes, but I want to just touch on a couple of kind of big picture issues, at least issues that I care a lot about. Virtually nothing on the debt, on deficits and the debt.

At one point, the president declared that he would protect Social Security and Medicare by which he means he's not going to even propose or entertain reforms to the programs that are driving our debt. And Republicans in the chamber stood and gave him a standing ovation. He's in some cases the same individual Republicans who voted for the kind of entitlement reforms that Republicans pushed as recently as a decade ago. Mike, there was another moment where he put J.D. Vance in charge of fraud and said, For so many reasons. Makes one of the way to do they. Oh, boy. They tried themselves.

and said that sort of led people to believe that really we're going to be able to balance the budget very soon because J.D. Vance is in charge of ending fraud. No, Trump actually said you get rid of the fraud, you balance the budget. Right. Which is balanced it overnight.

Exactly. Because we're going to fix some welfare fraud cases in Maine. Is that not? Does the math not work? You know, I haven't done. I misplaced my envelope where I was doing the back of the envelope, Matt. But I don't think it works that way. You have to at least also have waste and abuse thrown in there with fraud.

I think. This is Washington. We don't do math here. Exactly. Can I say, I know I interrupted you, Steve. But, you know, the thing that if we are talking about what to look ahead for, the thing that I was most disturbed by was. and to the point where he says things like this,

the president says things like this, and people maybe don't even bat an eye, but there was a moment where he was talking about voter fraud and elections. And he said in sort of a part of his kind of going after Democrats for not supporting things like voter ID and the Save Act, which is this federal legislation we've talked about on the dispatch podcast recently,

in the process of criticizing Democrats for that, he said this phrase. He said, the only way they, meaning Democrats, the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And, you know, as Kevin suggested, you know, this second term of Trump, you know, could very well end with some kind of attempted, attempted, attempt to deny an election result. Maybe it will happen in these upcoming mentors. But the fact that the president is sort of out there saying something so corrosive, the only way, the only way the other party could ever get elected is if they cheat, it just symbolized, I think, to me, the sort of the degradation of some of what Drucker was just talking about, about this sort of even pretending to get along for the sake of presenting a kind of united front. hey, the government, hey, we fight about things here and there, but we're all on the same team America here.

There was just really no attempt at it. And, hey, maybe that's good. Maybe we should stop pretending that there is that sort of unity if there isn't. But it seemed particularly vicious and particularly alarming, given all the things that we've been writing about the dispatch and talking about the dispatch about the concerns legitimate, I think, that Trump could deny an election. that doesn't go his way just as soon as later this year. And he's making that argument specifically, I think, to energize and activate the Republican base,

the Trump Republican base. I thought there were several other moments throughout the speech. In fact, I think much of the speech that was directed toward energizing the Republican base claims that he made that were, you know, balancing the budget overnight, that were so preposterous and we're certain to be fact-checked by. news organizations that aren't sort of the Trump boosting variety. You know, he claimed record jobs numbers. The Wall Street Journal had a fact check out about that almost immediately, saying the president

claimed the job market as robust during his state of the union saying more Americans are working today that at any time in the country's history, the job market actually weakened last year as companies slowed hiring. There was another moment where he claimed that he had with his prescription drug policies, proposals, take in prescription drugs from being the highest prices in the world in the United States to the lowest prescription drugs, he claimed, are the lowest priced in the United States now today. Not true. There were other claims about economic growth, stagnant economy. He also had a moment where it was an extended moment where he talked about banning insider trading. He seemed

sort of plant the flag. You know, we're not going to let members of Congress conduct or engage in insider trading any longer and positioned himself as the one who's really going to take the fight on that. It's worth noting that he pardoned a member of Congress who pled guilty to insider trading in Chris Collins, former representative from New York, who received a presidential parter. Pardon, although if you read the documents that led his indictment and the eventual guilty plea. It was about as open and shut a case of insider trading as you can possibly imagine. Before we end, I want to spend a moment on Iran. There's been a lot of reporting. I think it's true. I think it's credible reporting that the president is actively

considering serious strikes on Iran. The president talked about Iran, I would say relatively briefly tonight. He didn't, he wasn't specific. He didn't make a case in my mind for going to war. He laid up problems that he has with the regime, laid out the things that I think are commonly known and understood about the Iranian regime. Supporters of terrorism massacred their own people. He put the number at 32,000 people massacred. This happened after President Trump said, if you shoot them, we'll shoot you. And the United States didn't respond. He claimed credit for stopping some additional deaths because he said that they were, you know, he'd be threatened to go after the regime if they hung people and said that he deserved credit

for having prevented more hanging deaths. I was really struck by the fact that we didn't really get much of an argument for what seems to be likely U.S. attacks on the Iranian regime. Mike, was there anything that he said about Iran in that context that gave any hint of what's to come or when we might expect it? I mean, why would we expect him to make a case to Congress and the American people when it's very clear he doesn't know what he's going to do? He doesn't have a, he doesn't have the conviction at the moment. I agree with you on that reporting. I mean, I think it's pretty credible. He's weighing it.

He's trying to decide. But how do you make an argument, this is what we're going to do and this is why we're going to do it when he still hasn't made that decision himself or even feels any, I think, confidence in it. And so, I mean, if I could have missed, I guess I could have missed it was something about like 30 seconds of the speech that he discussed Iran, maybe a little bit longer. I was frankly shocked that he spent so little time on it and so much time, frankly, on things like the American Oki team, which I should say, I'm so happy we won. But it seems like the pending war or possible war with Iran is a little more important. I would think it is. Thank you all for joining us. We've been going live for 40 minutes now.

We are going to stop here so as to not go as long as Donald Trump went in his speech, in our analysis of the speech. Thank you, David, Kevin, Mike. Thank you for joining us to dispatch members. We appreciate your support. We're glad to have you. Thanks for paying our bills and allowing us to reinvest in the important journalism that we're doing on a daily basis. And for those of you who are not yet, dispatch members, please go to thedispatch.com slash join and consider signing up. Thanks all. Have a good night.