President Trump was only three minutes into what would be the longest State of the Union speech in history on Tuesday night when a commotion erupted in the chamber.
Rep. Al Green of Texas, waving a sign that read “Black People Aren’t Apes,” was being escorted from the House floor. He was apparently making a gesture in response to a video Trump posted on Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and his former First Lady Michelle Obama, as apes, which was taken down but without any apology from Trump. It was the second time Green had been removed from the House chamber during a Trump address.
Trump was recounting the wars and chaos all over the world when suddenly he was confronted with the disturbance. It only temporarily delayed an unbroken chain of lies and exaggerations about his first year of his second term in office. Green’s gesture was only one representation of the national frustration with the president for many reasons. As expected, he recited a string of false accomplishments, each one accompanied by a denunciation of the previous administration under President Joe Biden. “Today, our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, and incomes are rising fast,” he said. “The roaring economy is roaring like never before, and our enemies are scared, our military and police are stacked, and America is respected again, perhaps, like never before.”
This was just the beginning of a long litany of exaggerations, theatrics, and obfuscation, as one account observed. Mostly, he bragged about how he had turned a dismal economy around, and not one of those claims would stand up to a thorough fact-checking, though he failed to mention his firing of more than 27,000 federal employees. Unmentioned, too, were the events in Minneapolis where ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens. But he devoted considerable time to boasting about his tariff initiatives and how they have rescued the economy from a plunge.
Nothing was said about the numerous fatalities in the Caribbean or the Cubans killed in the unauthorized raid in Venezuela. There was no direct attention to African Americans, Latinos, or Asian Americans, and when he did veer in that direction he only said, “That is why I’m also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities that protect the criminals and enact serious penalties for public officials who block the removal of criminal aliens … They’re blocking the removal of these people from our country, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
For the most part, it was a speech laden with misinformation and merely gathered ammunition to counter what he recognizes as possibly terrible setbacks in the November midterm elections. He spent a lot of time and words on the upcoming celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which has already been given plenty of Trump attention, especially festooning his name all over the place.
“The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended. It still continues, because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot,” he concluded. Good evidence of that flame is the recent polling that shows him as one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history.