Trump’s 2026 State of the Union: A Master Class in Demagoguery

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On February 24, 2026 President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union Address, the second of his second term. Admittedly, the first one from March 4, 2025 was given the historically pettifogging title “Address to a Joint Session of Congress” on the ground that a newly elected (or re-elected) President could not be fulfilling his constitutional mandate to “from time to time give Congress Information on the State of the Union.” But in both these speeches, Trump not only directly insulted the opposition party, he made clear his determination to govern the country alone, without input from Congress, the judiciary, or the American people, which judging by opinion polls are increasingly unhappy with his job performance.

Trump started speaking at 9:11 p.m. Eastern time. Within four minutes, he’d already indulged himself no fewer than three times in one of his most annoying rhetorical quirks: saying that something he really likes is the greatest the world has ever seen. It was a fascinating speech from a pathological standpoint, though I’m not saying that to hint that Trump is mentally ill or suffering from age-related dementia the way his father, Fred Trump, did with Alzheimer’s disease. Trump is actually a brilliant public speaker, and in the State of the Union he was mostly at the top of his game, though he did seem to tire as the speech wound on and on and on (107 minutes, the longest on record, breaking the 99-minute record Trump himself set last year).

Trump indulged to the max one of the tricks his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan brought to his State of the Union speeches: inviting a litany of heroic Americans to sit in the audience and be called out by name. Trump went Reagan one better and actually pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor on two World War II servicemembers, both nearing 100 years of age, during the speech. He also gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Connor Hellebuyck, goaltender for the U.S. Winter Olympics hockey team, which had just won the gold medal in overtime two days earlier. Trump had extended invitations to both the men’s and women’s hockey team, but the women’s team had wisely turned him down because of scheduling conflicts.

One got the impression from the all-white faces that turned up when Trump introduced the men’s hockey team that Trump picked them to honor because hockey is one of the few sports left played mostly, if not exclusively, by white people. In fact, that was the tone throughout the speech. Trump, both literally and figuratively the son of a Ku Klux Klan member (Fred Trump was one of seven people arrested at a Klan rally in New York City on Memorial Day, 1927), picked a lineup of heroes to honor that, with two exceptions (a Venezuelan dissident politician named Enrique Gonzalez and his niece Alejandra), were all white.

Immigrants Are to Trump What Jews Were to Hitler

Throughout his State of the Union speech, Trump repeatedly demonized what he called “illegal aliens” and said they were at the root of all America’s ills – when he wasn’t blaming them on the Democrats and his political opponents generally. As he did throughout the speech on issue after issue, Trump proclaimed victory; he said, “In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.” While he then paid lip service to documented immigrants – he said, “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country” – what that means in practice is, “We will always allow people to come in who are white, speak English, and have politics similar to mine.”

The one group of people to whom the second Trump administration gave blanket refugee status to were Afrikaners, white Dutch-descended South Africans who claim the current Black government of South Africa is discriminating against them. The claim is false; in fact, as part of the peaceful settlement ending South Africa’s apartheid regime and transitioning the country to majority rule, the Black South Africans had to guarantee they would maintain white ownership of most of the land and much of the country’s economy. That’s been a flash point of discontent for many Black South Africans ever since the change happened in 1990, in which they’ve seen most of the country’s wealth remain in white hands even though state power is now held by Blacks.

In his State of the Union speech, Trump boasted that the day before “I hosted a ceremony with Americans who lost their treasured loved ones to the scourge of illegal immigration. People came into our country. How we allowed this to happen with our open borders. These are the angel moms and families that for decades our government betrayed and our media totally ignored. Totally. It was terrible. Hard to believe, actually.” One particularly horrific case he cited was that of Iryna Zarutska, an 18-year-old Ukrainian woman who, Trump said, “was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail, stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. No one will ever forget. … She had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America [who] came in through open borders.”

There’s just one problem with that story: according to the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/trump-state-of-the-union-factcheck), Iryna Zarutska’s alleged killer, DeCarlos Brown, Jr., was not an undocumented immigrant. “Trump has long insisted that non-citizens are responsible for violent crime throughout the U.S.,” wrote the Guardian staff. “Data show that relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.” But Trump has never let the facts get in the way of his anti-immigrant jihad.

One of the low points in Trump’s war on immigrants has been his attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota. While at least he didn’t accuse Somalis of stealing and eating people’s pet dogs and cats the way he did in his September 2024 debate with Kamala Harris – which, as I wrote then, was exactly the sort of scurrilous group libel against Jews the Nazis used to “justify” their mass murder – he did say that in Minnesota, “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. We have all the information. And in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” (Other estimates put the amount of the alleged fraud at $9 billion.)

During the occupation of Minneapolis by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in early 2026, which resulted in the killings of American citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, Trump justified his refusal to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to cooperate with local law enforcement to investigate the Good and Pretti slayings by citing the fraud allegations. He also claimed, without evidence, that Minnesota had rigged the Presidential elections all three times he ran so he officially lost the state when he “really” should have won it. Trump said he would create a task force to investigate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federally funded social service programs and put his vice-president, J. D. Vance, in charge of it. Like Ronald Reagan, he claimed there was so much “waste, fraud, and abuse” in these programs that ending it could balance the federal budget. (Hint: it didn’t work for Reagan.)

Trump also used the fraud allegations against the Somali community in Minnesota as an object lesson in why immigrants from certain parts of the world should never be let into the United States. “The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption, and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” Trump said. “Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings us problems right here to the USA. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes, and perhaps most importantly, crime. We will take care of this problem. We're going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.”

Trump’s Whack-a-Mole Game on Tariffs

Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union speech just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated his signature economic initiative: the willy-nilly imposition of tariffs on just about every country in the world under the so-called “economic emergency” provisions of a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The day the justices announced their decision, which was 6-3 and included three Republican justices, two of them appointed by Trump in his first term, Trump was furious. He said the six majority justices were “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINO’s [‘Republicans in Name Only’] and the radical left Democrats.” About the two justices Trump appointed who joined the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump said, “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families.”

Trump was only marginally less combative towards the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address than he’d been in his impromptu press conference four days before. “Many of the wars I’ve settled were because of the threat of tariffs,” Trump said on February 24, adding that his tariffs “will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes. And they have been tested for a long time. They're a little more complex, but they're actually probably better — leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary. It's already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”

There you have Trump’s tariff policy in the proverbial nutshell. Instead of paying attention to the Court majority’s holding that he doesn’t have the power under the Constitution to impose tariffs unilaterally, he’s going to play a game of whack-a-mole. He’ll keep finding new statutes on the books (a number of which were already helpfully pointed out to him by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the only Trump appointee who dissented) he can use to impose tariffs willy-nilly without Congressional approval. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he boasted, adding that he hopes that the income from tariffs will enable him and future Republican governments to abolish the income tax altogether and fund the federal government almost exclusively through tariff revenue, as was the case before 1913 when the U.S. enacted its first federal income tax.

The SAVE America Act: Trump’s Secret Weapon for Perpetual Power

Quite a lot of Trump’s critics are holding out hope that the American democratic experiment will fulfill its purpose once again and vote Trump and the Republicans in the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) coalition out of power. All too many hosts on MS NOW (what used to be MS-NBC) recite current polls showing how unpopular Trump is with the American people overall, on the economy, and even on immigration, Trump’s signature issue. But the hopes that the American people can vote for a Democratic Congress to constrain Trump after 2026 and replace him with a Democrat in 2028 are being trashed by a truly diabolical piece of proposed legislation to which Trump, of course, gave a full-throated endorsement to in his State of the Union speech.

It's called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or “SAVE America” as its proponents label it. It would impose a nationwide voter identification law, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It would require every American voter to provide proof of citizenship status both when they register to vote in the first place and every time they cast a ballot. According to the U.S. State Department, valid documents for proving citizenship include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a consular report of birth abroad, a certificate of citizenship, or a naturalization certificate. Your standard photo ID, even if it’s a so-called “Real ID,” isn’t good enough.

Just about all these documents require fees, often substantial fees, to obtain. My husband Charles and I recently acquired U.S. passports, which cost us $165 each for the passports themselves plus an extra $20 for the identity photos. This has led some critics of the proposed law to claim it’s effectively a poll tax, in violation of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.”

It also has some other quirks, including the fact that not everybody’s name currently in use matches the one on their birth certificate. Women who take their husbands’ names after marriage, as the radical Right urges them to, would have to bring in their marriage license along with their birth certificate to verify their identity. So would people who have changed their names to conceal their identities from former partners who abused them during their relationships. It would come down particularly hard on Transgender people who have undergone gender transition – an especially fraught group of people under the Christian nationalist regime Trump and his minions want to impose on America. (See below for the truly weird case Trump cited to bolster his argument that children are being subjected to gender transition willy-nilly without their parents’ approval.)

The SAVE America Act would also restrict the use of mail ballots. While it wouldn’t abolish them altogether (though Trump did say in the State of the Union speech that he’d like there to be “no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel, none”), it would require that only mail-in ballots received before Election Day could be counted. Existing law in many states allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked before then. This is a particularly sore point with Trump, who was leading in the 2020 Presidential election in same-day votes but lost several key states when mail-in ballots came in afterwards.

And perhaps the worst provision of all is it would require all states to send their entire voter rolls, including people’s actual registration forms, to the federal government. Trump has already been demanding this. His Justice Department seized all the ballots and registration forms for the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, on a warrant signed by a judge in St. Louis, Missouri. And more recently Attorney General Pam Bondi told the state government of Minnesota that one of her conditions for ending the ICE and CBP occupation of Minneapolis was that they turn over all the state’s voter records to her department. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rightfully refused, but the spectre of their personal information being forwarded to the feds could be enough to discourage a lot of potential voters from registering at all.

Indeed, the SAVE America act is a huge and far-reaching blueprint for massive voter suppression. Its real purpose is to use the spectre of non-citizen voting (which hardly ever happens; the total number of people convicted of illegal voting in 2024 because they weren’t American citizens is in two digits) to disqualify whole swaths of the electorate who wouldn’t be likely to vote Republican from being able to vote at all. Trump had already tried to rig the 2026 midterm election by having Republican-controlled states like Texas gerrymander their Congressional districts to elect more Republicans, but this failed because Democratic-controlled states like California fought back and redrew their maps to elect more Democrats. Now Trump and the Republicans are pushing this latest and far more extreme strategy of disenfranchisement.

Trump said that Democrats “don't want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: voting in America.” That sums up one of the biggest differences between the two major parties in the U.S. in 2026: Republicahs regard voting as a “privilege,” while Democrats call it a “right.”

The Curious Case of Sage Blair

One of the oddest passages in Trump’s State of the Union address was about Sage Blair, a 14-year-old from Virginia who allegedly reached puberty uncertain about their sexual and gender identity. Here’s how Trump told their story: “In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn't it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home. After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time.”

A post by John Russell on the Queer-friendly Web site lgbtnation.com (https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/invited-an-ex-trans-christian-student-to-the-sotu-yesterday-who-is-she/) told a more complicated version of Sage’s story. First of all, the woman who attended Trump’s State of the Union speech with Sage is not her mother, but her grandmother Michele Blair, a radical-Right Christian activist who legally adopted Sage when Sage was two. “Michele Blair … sued the Appomattox County School Board, several district employees, and a Maryland public defender in August 2023,” Russell reported. “Blair’s lawsuit cites the ‘“distress” about her body’ Sage experienced ‘with the ‘onset of puberty in 2019,’ which allegedly included hallucinations, depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.

The lawsuit claims that Blair supported Sage’s gender-nonconforming “dress and interests” when they started high school at Appomattox County High School (ACHS) in August 2021. Around the same time, Sage was diagnosed with “‘severe gender dysphoria’ and related symptoms.” The same day, Sage indicated to ACHS counselor Dena Olsen, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, that they identified as a boy and was told they could use the school’s boys’ restroom. Sage also reportedly expressed a desire to use he/him pronouns and the name Draco, and allegedly told Olsen and another counselor, Avery Via (also named as a defendant), that their parents were not supportive of their gender identity.

From then on Sage’s story, as reported by Russell, became truly horrific. Sage said they were subjected to multiple instances of bullying and assault at high school when they were identifying as male and using the first name “Draco.” According to their lawsuit, Sage decided to run away out of fear of how Michele might react if she found out about their gender identity, which in turn led Sage to be victimized again, this time by a male human trafficker who kidnaped Sage, took them to Washington, D.C. and Maryland, and allowed them to be drugged and raped by multiple adult men. Sage’s attorney, Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan, had Sage placed in a Maryland Department of Juvenile Services facility for boys, where the abuse started all over again. Sage escaped and fell into the trap of yet another abuser who took Sage to Texas, where they were “raped, drugged, starved, and tortured” until rescued by state police.

“But today, all of that is behind them,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech. “Because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Rachelle, please stand up. And thank you for your great bravery.” The university she’s attending is a dead giveaway about how she’s being used by the radical Right to advance their anti-Trans agenda. Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia was co-founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1971. Control passed to Falwell’s oldest son, Jerry Falwell, Jr. upon his father’s death in 2007, but allegations of sexual misconduct against Falwell, Jr. led the trustees to replace him with his brother Jonathan in 2023.

Sage Blair’s regrettable and tragic case has become a cause célèbre among anti-Trans activists in particular and the radical Right in general. One part of Michele’s lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2024, and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in 2025. Michele’s other lawsuit, alleging that Sage’s high school violated their rights under Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by acting with “deliberate indifference” to the threats Sage was being subjected to, is still pending. Beginning in 2023, Republicans in the Virginia legislature have regularly introduced bills called “Sage’s Law,” which would require that Virginia high schools immediately inform their parents or guardians whenever a student comes out as Trans.

Trump’s State of the Union address was a blueprint for the America he and his supporters want to see. It’s one in which the vote is restricted as much as possible to well-to-do white people while Blacks are sent to the back of the bus, Latinos live in constant fear of deportation without trial or any other legal process, women are sent back to what the Nazis called “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”), and Queer and especially Trans people live in a continual state of terror every moment of their lives. It’s also one in which an unholy alliance of politicians and businesspeople run the economy with absolute control, and the environment is continually plundered for short-term profit until the earth finally rebels and becomes uninhabitable for humans.