TRUMP'S BASE WANTS HATE, NOT POLICY

The media was surprised last night when President Trump delivered a State of the Union address of record length but highlighted very few policy proposals. Katie Rogers of The New York Times wrote:

In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro told us:

There was no legislative agenda.

State of the Union addresses can sometimes descend into laundry lists of things the president wants Congress to accomplish.

Not this speech.

There were only about half a dozen specific things Trump asked Congress to do....

Punchbowl News said:

... overall, Trump’s speech was notably devoid of policy heft. Compare this to a State of the Union from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and you find a truly stunning difference.

But that's because the speech was aimed exclusively at the Trump/GOP voter base. That base -- the last people in America who still admire and respect Trump -- doesn't want the president and Congress to pass a bunch of laws. The people in the base want Trump to make them feel good, partly through simple-mided flag-waving patriotism, but mostly through endless Democrat-bashing. Like the rest of us, they've stopped expecting the political system to improve our lives. But they're content if Trump hurts the people they want to see hurt, demeans the people they want to see demeaned, and declares that America is strictly Republican.

That's why the same polling outfit that recently told us Trump has a 36% job approval rating and a 63% disapproval rating found that his speech went over well with the audience that watched it, which was disproportionately Republican:

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew largely positive marks from a heavily Republican audience, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS....

Nearly two-thirds of speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech, with a smaller 38% offering a very positive response....

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately align with presidents’ own parties....

The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 13 percentage points more Republican than the general public.

Trump began the speech with Power of Positive Thinking wishcasting:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. 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're just always losing. But now we're winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you're going to win again. You're going to win big. You're going to win bigger than ever.

This was addressed to Republican voters, the only people who actually find it plausible.

Trump segued to the awards-dinner part of the speech -- the U.S. Olympic men's hockey team, a couple of newly minted Medal of Honor recipients. And then the rest of the speech was Democrat-bashing interleaved with culture-war sob stories, which Trump recounted with lip-licking relish.

really remarkable how trump seems to relish sharing this lurid stories about the terrible pain people have experienced, and he does it exclusively to score some partisan points

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 24, 2026 at 10:21 PM

That's what Republican voters think his job is. That's what they think his job should be: inducing "liberal tears" while they and others are encouraged to hate Democrats even more. And that's what they'll expect J.D. Vance's job to be when they nominate him in 2028. (If he wins, he'll give them what they want. He likes hating and he likes stirring up hate. That's why he's leading in the GOP primary polls by nearly 30 points.)

Legislation? Who needs it? Republicans want a president who talks like this:

... these people are crazy. I'm telling them they're crazy.

Amazing. Boy oh boy.

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?

They want him to talk like that about Democrats and they want him to brutalize (or at least repress) people they associate with Democrats, particularly immigrants and people who protest on their behalf. They want his stories to make them even angrier at the people they hate, which is why they're not interested in anyone's fact-checks. They want Trump's stories to strain credulity, because their level of hatred requires enemies of superhuman monstrousness. Last night Trump said:

Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the Green New Scam, open borders for everyone — they poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions, they were murderers — 11,888 murders — they came into our country, you allowed that to happen.

They don't want to be told that the truth about the 11,888 (or 13,000 or whichever number Trump is using on a given day):

... those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president [in his first term], because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

They want Trump to tell them that the brutality of the people they hate is unspeakable, just the way they want Kristi Noem to tell them the people they've detained include at least one cannibal:

Kristi Noem lied about an immigrant being a cannibal. Of course it was all made up nonsense. Normal people didn’t believe it, just like we didn’t believe Haitians were eating pets. This is part of dehumanization of immigrants playbook. Fear and hate is the point.

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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) February 24, 2026 at 11:02 AM

This is what they want government to do. They want the sheer pleasure of hating and they want to believe that the people thay hate are being hurt. Affordability can wait. Anything that's not related to hate is of secondary importance.