On February 24, 2026, Donald Trump, the president of the United States now in the second year of his second term, entered the United States Congress on Capitol Hill and delivered what Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter called “the Oprah State of the Union”: an entertainment opportunity with “tears, cheers” and “spectacle,” where “they handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: ‘You get a car! Everybody gets a car!’” There, broadcast live from the Capitol, were the signatures of the Trump era compressed into a single speech: the controversies (immigration, transgenderism);...
















