Trump defends his exclusionary vision and attacks Democrats in the longest State of the Union address in history

Donald Trump delivered the first State of the Union address of his second term on Tuesday at the Capitol. It was a speech filled with exaggerations, half-truths, lies and attacks on his rivals. It was also an extremely long speech, lasting 108 minutes, which broke a historic record. Nine months before midterm elections that do not look promising for his party, the U.S. President sought to paint a rosy picture of a country where “we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” and which many of his fellow Americans found difficult to recognize.

At odds with the truth as usual, Trump spun a narrative before a joint audience of congressmembers and senators — as well as millions of Americans who followed a Washington political tradition with global reach — that did not reflect either the economic data or the president’s approval ratings, which have been at rock bottom and stagnant for months.

It is a story according to which the United States is experiencing a “golden age,” “a transformation like no one has ever seen before and a turnaround for the ages,” said Trump, who appeared relaxed and surprisingly on script. “Our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” he declared at the beginning of his speech, in which he also brought up the upcoming celebration of the 250th anniversary of the independence of “the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of the Earth.”

It was by no means the only exaggeration of the evening, which the U.S. President used to praise the supposed achievements, mainly economic, of his administration, and to attack his predecessor, Joe Biden, who, he said, left him “a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world.”

The evening began with Trump taking a walk down the aisle, warmly greeting his supporters and being cold with the four justices from the Supreme Court, which last Friday overturned most of the tariffs with which Washington has unleashed a global trade war. It could have been worse: Trump had called the six (of the nine) justices who ruled against him “fools and lapdogs of the radical left,” but he managed to maintain his composure on Tuesday.

One of the Republican lawmakers greeted the president with a cap that read “Trump is right about everything,” while a Democrat, Al Green, carried a sign with the following message: “Black people are not apes.” He was referring to a racist video, manipulated by artificial intelligence and shared last week by the president, in which the Obamas appeared as apes.

Green was ejected from the chamber. The man in the cap was not, despite the fact that congressional rules require a certain decorum. The double scene served as an example of the tension that pervades American politics, which in a way condemns Tuesday’s ceremony, one of Washington’s favorite rituals, to irrelevance: surely no one changed sides after listening to Trump for nearly two hours.

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