I DON'T BELONG TO AN ORGANIZED RESISTANCE -- I'M A DEMOCRAT

President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address next week. As The New York Times reported a few days ago, the Democratic response a year ago was scattered and occasionally laughable:

Democrats knew in real time last year that they had bungled their response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, making themselves a distraction rather than offering a cohesive message of resistance to his policies.

Representative Al Green, a liberal septuagenarian from Texas, was ejected from the chamber (and later censured) after disrupting the speech with a cane-waving tirade.

Actually, Green's protest was one of the first signs of life from a Democratic member of Congress in the second Trump presidency, and a lot of us were happy to see it.

The paddles that some Democrats waved with short messages on them — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and one that just read “False” — were widely panned as a hokey and incoherent response.

Yes, that was just sad.

As Stephen Colbert said in response to the paddles:

“That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting — or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on.”

And some Democratic women protested by wearing pink. So it was kind of a mess -- a little rage, a lot of gentility. Surely Democrats will have a tighter, more coordinated response this year, right?

Nahhh. Last week, Axios reported:

In a meeting of House Democrats' whip team ... [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries said there were "two options" for how to approach the State of the Union....

The first option: Lawmakers can boycott the event....

The second: They can sit in "silent defiance," which was Democratic leadership's preferred tactic for last year's speech.

And Jeffries is such a strong, firm leader that everyone has agreed to this approach, right? Again, nahhh:

Some House Democrats say they plan to defy instructions from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) not to protest President Trump during his State of the Union address on Feb. 24....

[Some] said they may walk out mid-speech, with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) telling Axios: "The only question for me is which of his disgusting lines prompts me to get up and leave, because at some point I will."

Some of the boycotters will be attending a competing event:

A counterrally, dubbed the “People’s State of the Union,” will be held at 8:30 p.m. on the National Mall.... The rally, which will feature “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda,” is hosted by liberal group MoveOn Civic Action, progressive media company MeidasTouch and other coalition partners.

Speakers at the event include Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), as well as Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), according to a press release.

And there's an alternate alternate event as well:

Another counterprogramming event, billed as the “State of the Swamp,” is planned at the National Press Club. The event will be hosted by Defiance.org, a website launched by Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official and fervent Trump critic.

Among the attendees at that event will be Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Eric Swalwell, Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, and Dan Goldman.

So: not exactly cohesive.

Will the two rallies get lost because they're overlapping with the actual Trump speech, as well as each other? Or am I misunderstanding how the press and social media work now? Is the point that there'll be lots of clips for people to watch the next day, from multiple sources, and it doesn't matter what people see in real time? Or maybe people are expected to be watching multiple screens simultaneously?

In any case, it seems as if it will be just as messy and incoherent as last year, though it will be a lot angrier (which is good).

Oh, and:

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger will deliver the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 24.

And:

... Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., will be giving the Spanish-language response to Trump’s speech.

Spanberger -- a moderate, and not exactly a dynamic speaker -- was apparently chosen (by Jeffries and his nebbish counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer) because she won't rile anyone up:

In a statement Thursday, Jeffries said Spanberger "stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who will lie, deflect and blame everyone but himself for his failed presidency on Tuesday evening."

... A person familiar with the decision emphasized that Spanberger’s 2018 victory from red to blue in addition to her relentless focus on affordability in flipping the Virginia governor's mansion serve as a playbook to success that Democrats hope to emulate in 2026.

"Focus on affordability"! That sound you hear is me banging my head on my laptop repeatedly.

If Democrats wanted to put on a united front against Trump, they could have had Spanberger delivering her rebuttal at the rally on the National Mall immediately after Trump's speech ends. One of the reasons State of the Union rebuttals tend to get poor grades is that they're usually delivered in a silent room with no audience, following a speech delivered to an audience that's half full of pumped-up presidential loyalists. The president gets multiple standing ovations. The rebutter gets silence. Why not change it up?

Or, instead of having the traditional speech by a rising party star, why not announce that the rebuttal will be given by the “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda” who'll be speaking at the rally -- a group that, as the Times says, includes "people who have been negatively affected by Mr. Trump’s economic and health care policies, as well as federal workers who lost their jobs and immigrants who have been targeted by the Trump administration"?

A few weeks ago, I watched this clip of an interview with Kaden Rummler, a 21-year-old Californian who was permanently blinded in one eye by a "less lethal" ICE projectile during a protest following the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Rummler is interviewed by Chris Wolfe of KTLA.

The Trump-Vance administration just used your taxes to pay for an ICE agent to do this to a 21-year-old kid, who was only protesting because another ICE agent killed a mother of three, who was only there because ICE agents are kidnapping your neighbors

[image or embed]

— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 3:23 PM

WOLFE: What can you tell us about your injuries now and the prognosis? Will you be blind in that eye for life?

RUMMLER: From what I've heard the doctors say, and everyone else, yes, I will be blind for life. They said my globe[?] was ruptured. I had, like -- my lower lid was, like, cut up, and they had to take skin from my temple to fix it. Um, there's a lot to it. I don't remember all the things that they said. I have fractures in my skull that they can't fix, and I can't sneeze or cough 'cause it's dangerous, too. Um, I remember also when they shot, there was pepper in it, and I had pepper down my throat. It made it hard to breathe for a long time. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. They said I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic all throughout my eye, and behind my eye, and in my skull. They also said that I had a piece of shrapnel metal about -- a few millimeters away from my carotid artery, and they said it was a miracle I survived, 'cause if it got any closer, if it hit the-- I would have died that night.

WOLFE: So are we blind right now?

RUMMLER: Yeah.

WOLFE: You see nothing out the eye?

RUMMLER: Nothing out of this eye. It's, uh, it's black.

It occurred to me then that the best State of the Union rebuttal might be a series of clips like this, perhaps introduced by a Democratic elected official. But rebutting Trump with ordinary people's speeches at the Mall rally might have been even better.