Petulant Trump's State of Dementia Address

As he prepares to tell the American people a bedtime story, the world will see a comedy special, while Americans cringe and peer through their fingers as he rolls out his grievance greatest hits.

Federico Ielapi as Pinocchio./Getty Images

On the day when the President of the United States gathers the alleged great and the good in the halls of power to report the state of the union, never has America been so divided. A year into his second presidency, the rich have got richer at the expense of 90% of the population and the environment, to name but two. Meanwhile, the world has lost faith in the US as a trade and global security partner, as the Trump regime adopts a policy of geopolitical Darwinism. The descent into moral decay has become the hallmark of a country led by a man prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone in the service of self-enrichment.

This is no longer about protecting and promoting US interests around the world; it’s an attempt by a convicted criminal to rebrand America as a tasteless, tacky, wholly owned subsidiary of a long-failing brand. One that’s no stranger to filing for bankruptcy and sullied by a now president having been found guilty of stealing from his own charity, while consistently evading taxes and being declared an adjudicated rapist. In the words of Emerson Lake & Palmer, “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside

Today, the eyes of the world will be on a man who, in real life, would not pass vetting to be a security guard a Hamleys. Yet this evening, he will deliver a largely incoherent diatribe of ludicrous self-congratulatory rhetoric drawn from his infantile vocabulary. The world will bear witness to a litany of deceit that will once again attempt to convince people not to believe their own lying eyes. He will do this to the thunderous applause of Republicans. Lawmakers who have abdicated their responsibility to the Constitution, and those who elected them to uphold an oath of office long abandoned in the service of a crime boss operating an international extortion gang from the Oval Office.

I feel it’s important to mention that the man who will deliver this fairytale to the nation this evening will do so courtesy of just 34% of those eligible to cast a vote in November 2024. Despite claims of a landslide victory and a ‘massive mandate’ from the American people, the reality is that Trump carried the election with a plurality of the vote (49.9%), NOT a majority. The margin was around 2.3 million votes, with his share of the popular vote being one of the lowest ever.

A similar plurality was achieved by Hamas in the Palestinian elections of 2006, in which they won 42.9 % of the vote, giving them a parliamentary majority, with 74 of the 132 seats. This shatters the misconception that even 20 years ago, Hamas received overwhelming support, as is so often claimed by those attempting to justify the Israeli murder of innocent woman and children in Gaza. A conflict from which Trump now seeks self-enrichment from the misery of 2 million Palestinians.

There have been no recent landslide victories for either party. In terms of Republican landslides, we can measure Trump’s 312 electoral college votes against Nixon’s landslide in 1972, when Nixon won 520 of the 538 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan averaged 507 in his two victories in 1980 and 1984. He was the last Republican to break the 500 electoral vote barrier, although George H.W. Bush did win 426 in 1988. While Democrats look back with pride on Obama’s 2008 victory, he won with just 350 electoral votes but did so by a 10 million-vote margin. The bottom line is that Trump is little league when it comes to voter margins. You would do well to remember that as Trump recites his bedtime story.

While today sees the delivery of the State of the Union, it also marks the 4th Anniversary of the start of the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The irony should not escape anyone that this was the war Trump claimed he would end in 24 hours. Just another failed promise he will not speak of today.

Rescue workers rest after exhuming bodies from a mass grave in a forest on the outskirts of Izyum, east Ukraine, where hundreds of other graves were found, 16 September 2022 - Photograph by Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Above is just one of the images in a heartbreaking collection of in a piece by Matt Fidler in The Guardian, from an unprovoked war perpetrated by an indicted war criminal, aided and abetted by a president of the United States, who will this evening lose himself in an ocean of self-congratulation and lies about the number of wars he’s ended. Ukraine these days is often just a passing thought in the minds of far too many, but it is very real and brutal. The film below is one I made about a year into the conflict. It’s very difficult to watch, but was made with the approval of the loved ones of those so brutally murdered as they tried to flee danger.

Today, the world will be subjected to an attempt to impose a narrative with no basis in reality. The story will be the same story told by dictators throughout history, as the veil of madness descended on their malignant narcissism and their desperate attempts to hide from the truth. Trump will speak of closed borders and the deportation of the worst of the worst, as children languish in for-profit child detention facilities. He won’t mourn the loss of two murdered US citizens and the attempted cover-up of crimes by those who, in the words of Assistant Chief Counsel Ryan Schwank, a man who resigned in order to speak out against an ICE training Academy program that is, in his words, “deficient, defective and broken”

Mr Schwank had extensive experience in law enforcement at both the state and local level before joining ICE in 2021. This is his testimony under oath, which I feel is vital to take note of given the risk to the public from Trump’s masked state militia.

On my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant. For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program by cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program. Classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, and firearms training. The use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of an officer’s authority.

For example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. This means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable. The very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force.

He concludes by saying:

In the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job

It’s clear that the administration lied when it told the public that trainees receive all the training they need to do their work and that no critical materials or standards had been cut. Deliberate shortcuts across both detection, enforcement and detention are in my opinion, why communities are being terrorised, and what have contributed to 32 immigrant deaths in custody in 2025. With a further 4 in the first 10 days of 2026.

Trump will proudly announce that mass deportation is working, this, after suspending the publication of public data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. As ever with Trump, the real numbers are obscured, so it’s difficult to assess their veracity. According to DHS, the cost of deporting an undocumented worker is between $17,000 and $18,500. However Penn Wharton did do a budget model in July 2025, that paints a different picture. I’ll leave you to decide which numbers are accurate.

What Trump won’t tell you is that deporting 4% of the US workforce will result in an estimated GDP drop of up to 4%. To provide some context, GDP contracted by 4.3% during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009. He’ll also not tell the American people that they are paying billions of dollars to inflict economic self-harm in service of nothing more than white Christian nationalist ideology.

This brings us nicely to tariffs and the economy, which, once again, will be a fairytale of trillions in economic investment and blockbuster tariff revenues, until he was thwarted by a disloyal Supreme Court, for whom, of course, loyalty to Trump should play no part. I discussed the economic impact in my piece linked below:

The important takeaway is that Trump can claim all day long that the SCOTUS ruling will have no impact on his tariff strategy. He’ll claim again to have won a landslide victory with a huge mandate. If these statements were true, why has he been petrified to take his tariff case to Congress? I think we all know the answer to that. The Big Beautiful Bill was big for a reason: he needed to wrap up his whole legislative agenda in one bill so he could then rule by daily proclamation, through executive orders.

His petulant threats however, are now limited because under the new tariff routes, he’ll be forced to face oversight that he is unfamiliar with. Overseas trading partners are now biding their time, while they assess how to respond to these new restraints. While there is no question that, in desperation, he will push the envelope, the days of waking up and deciding to impose a ridiculous tariff on a country that has criticised him are receding, and that makes him weaker on the global stage. People should recognise that the moment any trading partner can stick the knife in, they will do so with glee.

As expected, he’s now facing lawsuits from big corporate importers that have handed over billions in taxes disguised as tariffs. As for the public, they won’t see a cent, as the same companies that passed these costs on to them ‘double dip’ yet again. Another win for Corporate America at the expense of its unwashed victims.

Image - The Times

This is a president who will begin his bedtime story as the most unpopular president in modern memory. In a humorous quip by Rex Huppke in USA Today, he notes:

Trump’s polling numbers are so deep down the toilet they’ve reached the sewage treatment plant. Do you know how hard a Republican has to work to be disapproved of on both immigration AND inflation?

Tonight’s tall tale would be the envy of Hans Christian Andersen as Trump embarrasses himself attempting to defend the indefensible, while painting a ‘jam tomorrow’ picture of a fantasy booming economy. He will praise his mighty military poised to rain terror down on Iran if they don’t comply with his wishes to do a deal on enriched uranium he has already claimed to have obliterated.

In conclusion, I would say this: despite his claims to the contrary, he HAS been weakened by the SCOTUS ruling, and that is not lost on a small number of Republicans who are conjuring up thoughts of a political mass extinction event in November. We are going to see more and more irrational actions by Trump, which may well result in conflict with Iran. A conflict for which the consequences will be nothing like the non-existent retaliation from Venezuela and this may cause him much more embarrassment that the Epstein files.

The stage is set for Trump to roll out his greatest hits from his grievances double album to thunderous applause from Republicans in the mosh pit. They will be supplemented by a hand-picked guest list, excluding Democrats, of course, many of whom have their own plans. Me? I’m a glutton for a comedy act, so I dare say I may not be able to resist, if not only to watch what I believe may be his final State of the Union Address.

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