Trumpski Gives a Tough Guy SOTU Speech

But MAGA popularity is lame. As are the Democrats.

The trio of the Great Flying Monkeys..

March 4 2025

By Marc Cooper

If you missed Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, I suggest you just shine it on and forget it. Unless you enjoy watching an addled and vicious liar with two other flying monkeys sitting behind him –Vance and Johnson— your time would be better spent watching the newest Sonic Hedgehog flick.

There was nothing new in what he said, he just said more of it, the whole time with his jaw jutted forward as if he had been coached by Mussolini.

With an unrelenting and self-aggradizing “tough guy” tone he vowed that “God saved me to make America great again…America is back… The dawn of the golden age is here”

That the market lost almost 4% in 24 hrs since he promised tariffs on half the world, and there were coast to coast street demonstrations a few hours earlier against him, I assume those are just some minor wrinkles in The Dream

Need I say anymore about the speech? Not really, but why not?

He claimed a “mandate” which caused Democratic Rep. Al Green to stand up and loudly heckle him as a chorus of fellow Dems booed the Prez. Vance and Johnson were visibly shaken and pissed by the negative chaotic response, which was gratifying, and the lapdog Speaker had Green ejected.

To make this easy recap easy, suffice it to say that 80% of the speech was Kulturkampf propaganda as usual, just longer and louder. The other 20% was good old fashioned Law-n-Order and worship of the police plagiarized from Nixon 1972. No, sorry, no mention of the 1500 hooligans he pardoned after they battered and choked the Capitol Police.

The shortest part of his nearly two hour speech was on tariffs and the economy, the story that dominated Monday’s news cycle. He did say that once the tariffs come into play this week it “might be rough for a while” but, natch, it will later be beautiful. The hard line conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board today called the tariffs “the dumbest mistake,” but the WSJ is just fake news. The old man then pandered to anti-vaxxers, revived Reagan’s fantasy Star Wars project (verbally), he let the world know his “administration will be taking the Panama Canal” and promised “we are going to get Greenland, one way or another.”

Then, of course, the longest part of the speech was about those damn migrants – the millions he claimed that “Biden waved in” from the world’s “jails, prisons, and insane asylums” and who he referred to as “criminals…”murderers” and “savages.” Then the de rigueur shots at DEI, wokeness, and the affirmation that there are only two genders.

Each combative sentence from Der Leader provoked an erect standing ovation from the odious Republican half of the house as if they all had an IV connected to a Viagra pump. They were never seated for more than 75 seconds.

Trump, on two occasions, broke with SOTU tradition and protocol. He stared and pointed at the Democratic side of the house and addressed them in the plural “you” when blaming everything including the world not being flat on the Biden administration. He even got in a dignified “Pocahontas” dig at Senator Elizabeth Warren seated in front of him.

Also, it has become routine now for any president giving the State of the Union address to highlight one average Joe or Jane in the gallery and praise them for whatever point he is trying to make. I actually lost count (and I’m not going to rewatch to get the exact number), but Trump put the spotlight on eight or ten "invited guests" in separate homages. Almost all of them were relatives of victims attacked or killed by those savage migrants.

I so dearly wish I had a better historical parallel, but this was really at the level of a certain German Fuhrer dehumanizing and demonizing those savage Jews. Truly repulsive and infuriating.

Trump also resorted to rolling out a somewhat hobbled 13-year-old cancer survivor wearing a police uniform and a badge given to him by some cop shop, making him a deputy officer. Then, in a heart-rending bit of political stage work, the head of the Secret Service appeared and gave the young boy credentials as a new Secret Service agent.

In some other galaxy far, far away, this would have been a truly sentimental moment. Unfortunately, Elon Musk, with Trump’s approval, has already axed most of the country’s cancer and childhood cancer research programs, somewhat diminishing the pathos of the whole act – to put it nicely.

The lies, distortions, and false statements were bountiful. In that category, the Oscar goes to Trump reading a long laundry list of "millions" of people aged 110 to, yes, 350 years old, who are still found on the Social Security database. Never mind that a week ago, this Musk-originated fib, which implied these dead folks were still being sent checks, was 100% debunked, but who knows? Somewhere in the deep, dank hollows of Appalachia, where the news don’t shine, you can be sure there were hundreds or thousands of MAGA supporters turning to each other in shock and saying, "Goddangit, Martha, that Social Security is nothing but one big Ponzi scheme." Or was it that highly educated father of 14, the richest man in the world, who said that? I don’t know. We report, you decide.

One thing is certain: despite Trump’s bellowing that he is cutting the "bloated federal bureaucracy run by a bunch of unelected bureaucrats," the real size of the federal workforce is the same as it was in 1980, but now it’s been slimmed down to being run by a single drug-riddled, unelected multi-billionaire.

I am writing this as the reviews of the speech are on TV and while follow-ups are being written, but I am sure this evening is going to be ranked as one of the worst SOTUs ever given... that is, if such criticism is allowed to appear in the now tightly controlled opinion sections of The Washington Post and The L.A. Times.

In truth, this flop of a speech is perfectly consistent with the tsunami of negative news about Trump these past days. Trying to convince Americans that Russia is our new buddy is a pretty big hill with lots of boulders. The reaction to the freeze on foreign aid, all the haphazard slashing of federal agencies and services like NOAA and the National Weather Service, the National Park Service, the FAA, the takeover of the FCC and the NLRB, the gagging of all our health agencies while Bobby Kennedy insists that Vitamin A and not a vaccine is the best defense against the measles outbreak, has finally begun to dawn on the American people that we are being reamed by this guy.

Protests are stirring and slowly gaining traction. Even a handful of elected Republicans have at least burped over Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and the bullying of President Zelensky by the repugnant, smirking son of a bitch JD Vance and his impaired boss.

Republican town halls have turned into chaotic shout-downs of the hosts as the peasants with pitchforks have finally caught on that THEIR retirement, medical care, and family farms are now in peril thanks to the putz they voted for.

I don’t think any political party is on the upswing when its congressional election committee is panicked enough to issue a "suggestion" that its current congress members hold no more town halls. No pun intended, but you know something is rotten in Denmark when Republican Party officials want to stop its elected reps from actually meeting with their constituents. This as Trump currently holds the record for the lowest popularity rating of any previous president at this point in their tenure.

Trump and MAGA are down. Not out, by any means. But being down is a REALLY good time to kick them some more and keep them down.

The congressional Democrats, however, displayed a rather lame response tonight blowing a God-given opportunity. They don’t quite get the simple proposition that the extraordinary state of emergency that Trump is plunging us into requires, no, demands an extraordinary counter. Kudos to the half dozen or so Democrats who boycotted the speech. And others inside held up small signs saying, "False... Save Medicare... Lies," but really? That’s the best you can do? That is supposed to demonstrate strength against the belligerent, aggressive bellowing of Donald Trump?

What are they afraid of? That if they do something naughty, they will get blamed by MAGA? They are already blamed for everything. Either the entire Democratic delegation should have boycotted the event or, even better, walked out en masse when the Speaker ejected Rep. Al Green about five minutes into the show.

I don’t want the Democrats to lead the opposition; that’s our job as citizens of a faltering Republic. But it would be nice if they helped set a tone and an example of serious opposition.

They will have another opportunity soon to do so, a key inflection point that is coming very soon. The government runs out of funding on March 14. A stopgap funding bill will be out any day, or maybe even a year-long bill. Look, both the Senate and the House have put out separate but equally squalid budget "outlines" on a strict party vote. The latter calls for $5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, and there are also murmurs about raiding Medicare and Social Security. Not to get too technical, but the two separate bills are now in the reconciliation stage from which a single budget bill will emerge and which both houses have to ratify. Mix in another related measure that will raise the debt ceiling. Unless that comes to pass, there will be insufficient funding for the budget and for the debt-ceiling buster of the planned tax cut for the wealthy.

Thanks to the half dozen or more Republican lizards in the House who are opposed to spending anything on anything, and with only a three-seat majority, MAGA most likely does not have enough votes to ratify the budget or debt ceiling raise. No raise, no budget, and the country goes into default, with the government defunded until or unless the lizards' tails are squeezed tight enough—and even that might not work.

At the end of the day, the GOP is counting on the Democratic leadership to give permission to enough of their own caucus to vote with the Republicans to avoid a government shutdown and default.

Last time I looked, the MAGA trifecta occupied the White House and held both majorities in Congress. Let them own the default and blame the Democrats all they want, but make it their baby. So, yes, I am supporting a shutdown forced by the Democrats. That, my friends, would be an extraordinary act in extraordinary times.

Yes, a government shutdown would be painful for some. But it’s a small price to pay to hobble an authoritarian regime that threatens democracy and celebrates the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. A default would not be the end of the world and would put tremendous pressure on Trump and his lickspittles to come up with a solution. After all, they are the elected majority and should be forced to take ownership of the chaos they are creating. I know it’s too much to hope for, but a man can dream, no?

One way or another, to quote Trump, a solution would have to be found. Dump the tax cut and the cuts to social services or… maybe… seek a bailout from…Moscow. +++