President Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in recorded American history on Tuesday night, speaking for one hour and 48 minutes before a joint session of Congress deploying the occasion primarily as a defence of his first year back in office and a mobilisation exercise ahead of November’s midterm elections rather than a substantive case for the major unresolved questions his administration faces on Iran, Ukraine, and the economy.
Trump opened by declaring the beginning of a “golden age of America” and credited himself with achieving what he called “a transformation like no one has ever seen before, and a turnaround for the ages,” in a speech that was as much a recounting of his first-year record as an agenda-setting document for the year ahead.
An NPR survey published this week found that 60 per cent of Americans said the country was worse off than a year ago, the worst domestic approval rating of Trump’s second term. Reuters/Ipsos polling places 56 per cent of voters disapproving of his handling of the economy, against 36 per cent who approve. The speech also came in the second week of a partial government shutdown caused by a congressional deadlock over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, arising from Democratic demands for reforms to immigration enforcement following the deaths of two US citizens at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis in January.
The economy dominated the speech’s first hour. Trump praised his tariff programme, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act tax cuts, and what he described as falling prices for petrol, food, and pharmaceuticals. He did not acknowledge government data showing that overall food prices have continued to rise, that the economy lost factory jobs in 2025, and that job creation was anaemic.
He promoted a “Rate Payer Protection Pledge” requiring technology companies to provide their own power for AI data centres, responding to voter backlash against electricity bill increases linked to the AI infrastructure buildout. He confronted the Supreme Court’s ruling directly, telling the chamber: “Tariffs paid for by foreign countries will substantially replace the modern-day system of income” taxation, a claim broadly rejected by economists, and vowed to impose replacement levies under different legal authority, a promise that has already unsettled some congressional Republicans.
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The chamber produced its most dramatic moments when Trump turned to immigration. Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota shouted “You have killed Americans” as Trump criticised Democrats for blocking DHS funding. Representative Al Green of Texas was escorted from the House chamber near the opening of the speech after displaying a sign reading “Black People Aren’t Apes,” a reference to a video Trump had reposted to Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as primates. Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and others heckled Trump at multiple points during his remarks on immigration, crime, and Somali communities in Minneapolis.
Trump responded to the cumulative disruption by turning directly to the Republican members behind him: “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy. Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time.”
On Iran, Trump praised the June 2025 strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities and vowed Tehran would never acquire a nuclear weapon.
“My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy, but one thing is certain: I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon,” he told Congress. He gave no indication of whether he was moving toward or away from military action, saying only “we’ll find out” when pressed on the direction of his thinking, a deliberate ambiguity maintained despite a pre-speech classified briefing by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe to the Gang of Eight congressional leaders on the state of the Iran situation. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries expressed scepticism about the administration’s rationale: “The president made the representation that Iran’s nuclear program was completely and totally obliterated. If that, in fact, was true, what is the urgency as of this moment? The American people need a real explanation.”
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China, which received six explicit mentions in last year’s address, received none. Greenland was not mentioned. The Ukraine war received only a reference. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump championed extensively a year ago, went unmentioned.
Among the theatrical highlights, First Lady Melania Trump placed the Medal of Honor around the neck of 100-year-old Korean War veteran Navy Captain E. Royce Williams, who had shot down four Soviet MiG aircraft in a classified engagement whose details were withheld for decades to prevent escalation with Moscow.
Trump reunited a man who had been held in a Venezuelan prison under Maduro with his niece, in an emotional segment that drew from the chamber’s rare bipartisan applause. The US men’s Olympic ice hockey team, fresh from defeating Canada for gold at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, was introduced to bipartisan standing ovations.
At one hour and 48 minutes, the speech exceeded the previous record of one hour and 28 minutes set by President Bill Clinton in 2000, and surpassed Trump’s own address to Congress last year by eight minutes.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response, focusing on affordability, healthcare, and immigration enforcement. California Senator Alex Padilla delivered a separate Spanish-language rebuttal, opening with: “We just heard Donald Trump do what he does best: lie.”
