President Donald Trump, typically an aggrieved orator, was in a cheery mood Tuesday night as he delivered the 2026 State of the Union address.
Over a record-breaking speech spanning nearly two hours, Trump chirped about how “hot” America has been over the 13 months since he returned to the White House. He bragged about what he saw as his administration’s greatest accomplishments (“We ended DEI in America!”). He declared his inexplicably self-destructive tariff war a success, “paid for by foreign countries,” while throwing in some of his patented lies about the 2020 election.
In one of the more memorable early moments of the speech, the president seemed to genuinely get a kick out of introducing members of the gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team, surprising goaltender Connor Hellebuyck with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
And Trump lit up every time he heckled Democrats in the room, repeatedly calling them “sick people” and “crazy.”
But his ebullient demeanor was in stark contrast to the content of much of his speech, which included racist rhetoric about Somalis, maximalist condemnations of the opposition party and a litany of violent imagery as he nodded to his invited guests — including family members of people killed by illegal immigrants.
As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted, “I’ll never forget the joy with which he describes these murders.”
Indeed, there was an exploitive, voyeuristic element to the way Trump used tragic stories to demonize illegal immigrants as inherently violent threats.
He introduced the mother of Lizbeth Medina, a 16-year-old cheerleader murdered in 2023 by an immigrant who overstayed a work visa, by laying out in graphic detail the circumstances of Lizbeth’s murder and discovery in a bathtub. “Lisbeth’s killer was a previously arrested illegal alien who had broken in and brutally, really just brutally extinguished the brightest light in her family’s life, violently and viciously,” he said.
There was an exploitive, voyeuristic element to the way Trump used tragic stories to demonize illegal immigrants as inherently violent threats. Trump later introduced the mother of the Ukrainian-born Iryna Zarutska — whose horrific murder on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train in August 2025 was captured on video and disseminated widely. Trump spoke about how Iryna’s killer “stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body … No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life.” Trump added that Iryna “had escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America, came in through open borders,” though NPR noted there is no evidence Iryna’s killer was an immigrant at all. Which is why Trump saying, “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country,” seemed awkwardly shoe-horned into his speech — especially as his administration scours for legal justifications to denaturalize foreign-born citizens and end birthright citizenship. Lest his most ardent apologists claim the president was only concerned about fraud and not seeking to impugn an entire ethnic group, he said the quiet part out loud: “The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota, remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception. Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the USA. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes and perhaps most importantly crime. We will take care of this problem. We’re going to take care of this problem.” For a leader who spent the better part of two hours talking about horrible tragedies, Trump seemed relaxed and confident. But it’s not hard to imagine that in one year from now, Trump’s State of the Union demeanor might not be nearly as sunny. His historically low approval ratings continue to tank, dragging his party’s midterm prospects down in the process. But for now, he has convinced himself he’s winning. And he’s in a good mood.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
The Trumpian juxtaposition between exuberance and callousness was probably best exemplified in the portion of his speech when he said “members of the Somali community … pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.”
