Trump showed how desperate he was tonight

At 9 pm, Donald J. Trump began what would become the longest State of the Union address in American history. For one hour and forty-eight minutes, he stood in front of the country and delivered a speech that was not about the state of our union at all, but about the state of his own power, and how desperate he is to hold onto it as it slips further and further out of his control. It was full of deliberate lies from start to finish, packed with racist talking points, made-up statistics, twisted grievances, and the kind of unhinged rhetoric that made clear just how afraid he is, not only that the truth about his ties to Epstein will finally come out, but that the full impact of what he’s done to our economy, to our international alliances, to the rule of law, and to the basic systems that hold this country together will finally catch up to him.

And if there was still any doubt about what this night was really about, he erased it himself with this: “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Amazing. We’re lucky we have a country. With people like this, Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we?” That’s what the President of the United States said tonight, into the microphone, on national television, in between demands for applause and pauses to catch his breath.

“This is the golden age of America,” he said, through mouth breathing, while leaning on the podium for support. And that’s when the lies began. He said the economy was bad before he took office, and now it had a “stunning economic turnaround”, the “biggest in history.” And then he launched into one of the most bizarre moments of the night: “People are asking me: Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.” No one is saying this. No one has ever said this. This is a man constructing a fantasy in real time and then responding to it as if it were a conversation he actually had. And the room clapped for it.

Then came the line he always circles back to, the one that slipped out again tonight without hesitation: “So in my first year of the second term, it should be my third term, but strange things happen.” He said it like a joke. But this isn’t a joke. This is the President of the United States once again suggesting that the two-term limit doesn’t apply to him. That what happened in 2020 was somehow stolen. That the rules are optional when he doesn’t like the outcome. Is he saying he had no plans to leave? That he still doesn’t? We can’t pretend these moments don’t matter. Because he keeps saying it out loud. And the danger is pretending he doesn’t mean every word of it.