02/27/2026
To each his own.
Lilla told me a story once from her college days. She had enrolled in a sociology class and there was going to be an essay test the next day on a certain chapter. Maybe it wasn’t sociology, I can’t remember that part, but it doesn’t matter. Anyway, she walked in and sat down and suddenly realized that she had read the wrong chapter. But rather than lie and put down a bunch of obvious baloney, she elected to say, Guess what? I screwed up. I somehow didn’t read the section you assigned and so instead I’m going to write about the section I did study. Hope that’s okay.
The teacher was impressed by her candor and her ability to speak on the other topic, and she ended up with an A on the test.
I bring this up as a segue into what took place last night at the State of the Union speech in Washington, D.C. To wit, the president spent nearly two hours of our valuable time talking about things only he was interested in. These were not, in my view, topics that touched directly on the pain we are feeling at the moment. Quite the contrary, in fact. He talked about our terrific men’s hockey team, he talked about the surging stock market and how everyone’s 401K plans were growing fatter by the minute, he talked about how our southern border was now safe and secure and how fentanyl usage was way down. And since he hasn’t an ounce of humility, he naturally took credit for every bit of it.
Leaving aside whether the numbers and “facts” he was quoting were true, there is a much larger concern: namely that he ignored the front page issues the rest of us are fixated on. He did not, for example, mention the tragic killings in Minneapolis and the traumatic impact that ICE’s marauding gangs are having on everyone. I don’t think the word ICE even came up in the speech. As a political matter, he also was vague about what he might do differently in advance of the midterm elections to ease the rising anxiety among his fellow Republicans. They sat there and applauded him like trained seals; he thought that was his due, apparently. He doesn’t realize that their fate and his are deeply intertwined. And of course, there was the (you should pardon the expression) elephant in the room: Jeffrey Epstein was a no-show.
Ideally, the State of the Union message is supposed to be a moment of reset. The president usually takes a victory lap for whatever good he has achieved thus far. But he also leaves ample space for charting a fresh direction. Here, Trump failed spectacularly. By his myopic reckoning, he had done nothing wrong, nothing his predecessors had come close to, certainly nothing to apologize for. Instead, we were treated to a bizarre variety show, a queen for a day parade whereby heroes–from the recent Texas flood to our invasion of Venezuela, even back to World War II days–were trotted out and publicly awarded medals. Trump also went on several rampages about murderous incidents in this country, all of which, curiously enough, seemed to involve illegal immigrants. He devoted an extraordinary amount of time on this subject, asking the victims in the gallery to rise and be recognized for their suffering while he went on and on in graphic detail. It was a display of violent p**n that he seemed to relish, even as most of us were revulsed by it.
If the president really cared about us and wanted to address our concerns, he would have taken a different tack. If he were honest, the State of the Union could have been a cathartic experience. He is underwater in virtually every public poll in the country, on every issue from immigration to the economy to trusting government officials. But honesty and Trump are words that probably will never be used in the same sentence. In the end, he is a carnival barker; if it’s not larger than life, he has no interest.
Lilla was honest back then. She admitted she was wrong before she launched into her essay, and not only did she get an A on the test, I’m sure she slept soundly that night.
–Andy Weinberger
