My state of the union 2026

 So, every year, I often make my own state of the union speech as well, and this is my own response.

 My fellow Americans, the state of the union is NOT strong. We are in dangerous times. We have a madman on the loose in the white house, with an army of bad faith actors wanting to push America in the worst directions possible. 

 A huge front and center issue is the cost of living crisis. I agree, this is central economically, I have my own thoughts on it, but first, I want to discuss some even darker issues going afoot.

We have an accused child rapist in the oval office. We have evidence that he and much of his inner circle is complicit in participating in these sex crimes against children. This should break any president, but with Teflon Don, it's like half the country just doesn't care. He could rape a child on fifth avenue and not lose any voters. 

Trump is working with several groups all pushing their own dystopian agenda. He's working with evangelical nutcases to move us closer to Christian theocracy. He's working with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and other tech billionaires in undermining our democracy and creating dystopian 1984-esque databases on people. 

He's filling those databases with the information of millions of Americans, and also putting dissenters and critics of his on terrorist watch lists. He's using his institutional power to bully critics and the media and academia into silence or submission. 

His deportation program against "illegal immigrants" is Hitleresque. Rather than just targetting dangerous illegal immigrants like he spun it in his speeches, he's going after harmless ones as well. he's targeting legal residents, green card holders, people who leave the country temporarily and come back. He's even targetting naturalized citizens, and possibly citizens themselves. 

Rather than deport them humanely, he's sending them to concentration camps like CECOT in El Salvador, and to places like Libya. He's building a network of concentration camps based on CECOT in the United States. 

ICE now has the funding of some country's standing armies, and is flooding American streets. Their hiring standards are low, their training is minimal, and their officers are acting like violent thugs. American citizens are being shot in the streets without due process. 

Those who protest him in person are having their pictures taken to be added to Trump's dystopian databases where they're being called "domestic terrorists." Those who criticize him online are getting their information subpoenaed and being added to databases. He's adding critics of his administration to databases. This is dystopian crap. 

Look, I'm not opposed to deporting illegal immigrants, especially violent ones. But you gotta do it legally, constitutionally, and humanely. Trump is not doing that. he literally is acting like a Hitler.

However, unlike Hitler's Germany, our democracy is not dead yet. We still have our power to vote him and his party out of office. In the past year alone, public opinion has shifted eight points to the left from its 2024 baseline. 2026 looks like a bloodbath in the house. The senate is much harder, but despite a map hostile to democrats, we have a shot at flipping it. In 2028, Trump's replacement (probably Vance) stands to lose 319-219 to the eventually democratic nominee (probably Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom). We can remove these people, and we can hold them accountable for their crimes if we do. 

Right now, Trump is immune to prosecution despite his severe crimes because he consolidated power in the executive branch, and controls the FBI and the justice department. The fact is, no matter how bad it looks for him, his administration full of loyalists will cover for him. As long as congress remains in the hands of the republicans, they wont impeach him either. So the key to taking care of Trump is through electoral means. We must vote him out, and democrats must hold him accountable.

Trump knows this and is still trying to break democracy as a result. he's trying to pass his "Save Act", which will severely restrict voting. Voter ID is a bad idea for the following reasons. First, there's very little voter fraud that actually occurs and what does occur is caught. Second, the point of voter ID is to restrict voting by acting as a poll tax. It can be hard for some to get the appropriate documents for the ID, and this can lead to the disenfranchisement, particularly of the underprivileged. The voter ID law Trump wants is so strict it could displace married women en masse. Have trouble getting the appropriate documents to get a real ID as a married woman! Good luck doing that to vote.  

Look, the point of this is to suppress the vote. The fewer people vote, the better republicans do, it's that simple. And that's what Trump is trying to do here. So....we gotta oppose the Save Act to preserve our democracy. Democracies dont always die in one fatal blow, they die from a thousand cuts, a thousand small measures to shift the outcome and make it impossible for opposition to win. A lot of authoritarian states seem democratic on paper, it's only when you look deeper that you realize that their democracies are broken.

Our democracy has been broken for a long time. We have a two party system, with both parties controlled by the billionaire class, and that class is responsible for a lot of our dysfunction. I've long been a critic of the two party system as a result. But right now, Trump is trying to break us to turn us into a ONE party state. Rather than simply being an oligarchy, he's trying to break our system to become an autocracy. He cannot succeed or we're all screwed. 

With that said, if and when we manage to get out of this crisis, the democratic party needs to come back to ensure that this never happens again. The original new deal was implemented not necessary out of the goodness of the hearts of the political establishment, but because they realized that American democracy had become so precarious that they had to act to ensure that they saved it. We need to do it again. We need a new new deal for a new century if the democrats retake power. A milquetoast neoliberal democratic administration talking "abundance" isnt gonna cut it. We need a transformative set of policies to reshape the economy for the new century to ensure that things work again. We need universal basic income, medicare for all or a public option, free college, student debt forgiveness, a mini green new deal, and a reduced work week. Some may disagree with me on specifics, they may downplay the UBI and go all in with a jobs program and more labor protections. That's their prerogative and I'm willing to have that debate, as long as we can agree on some sort of transformative vision on making things better for the people. It was the democrat's failure to act that got us into this mess, and democrats need to go big or go home in 2028 and beyond if they want to ensure a lasting peace in this country.

  Failure to do this could just lead to another republican administration in 2032 or 2036, with a new wave of MAGA far worse than this one. The next wave of MAGA might literally be outright nazis. I'm not kidding, look at nick fuentes and the debates between the base and the establishment in the republican party. Fascism is going to be a lingering threat to America for a while after Trump is gone. As much as I hate to admit it, Trump did realign the country toward fascism and his base is even crazier than he is in some ways. We need to be ready for it. 

As it stands, we need to deMAGAfy the government if democrats take power again. Project 2025 concentrated power within the executive branch, and attempted to replace career civil servants with trump loyalists. Those loyalists need to be fired and replaced with career civil servants again. We need a bureaucracy that works for the people again, and is dedicated to the high minded ideals of our constitution, not loyalty to trump and MAGA. 

We need to hold the worst members of the administration who committed serious crimes against the constitution and humanity to account. We need an investigation into Trump's immigration policies and possibly new Nuremburg style tribunals if serious crimes against humanity are found. We need to hold Trump and his cronies accountable for whatever serious crimes they have committed, Epstein related or otherwise. We need justice, to ensure that an administration like this never happens again, and that the republicans cant just come back in four years with someone worse.

And ultimately, we need to strengthen our democracy in the long term. We need to expand voting access, not restrict it. We need to give Americans more options to represent their views, not fewer. We should have things like universal voter registration, ranked choice voting, open primaries, the end of gerrymandering, the repeal of the 1929 reapportionment act, publicly funded elections, etc. The fact that our democracy has already been sick by its flawed and oligarchic nature is how we got into this mess. We solve it by making democracy more democratic, not less. 

There was a lot of talk about the founders in both the SOTU and the response tonight, but here's my take. The founders created an excellent system, but it was always a system with flaws and compromises. Over time, it has been improved, but sometimes we live with some of these flaws and compromises to this day. Every generation has its issues, and ideally, every generation attempts to solve them and make the world a better place than they found it in. The same is true of ours. I dont believe the founders would want us to embrace the system exactly as it was envisioned in 1789. Rather, they would want us to be like them and to continually improve it, believing in the spirit of it, but also recognizing its downsides. 

I also believe that we need to remember Federalist #10 in these times. The key to our system, with our separation of powers, checks and balance, etc., is to contain factions and to stop them from becoming tyrannical. Our system works well in some ways, but still, Trump's administration is just about one of the most dangerous threats to it that we've seen. It holds in some ways, but it shows weaknesses in other ways. The two party system is one weakness. Money in politics is another. One wave election and we risk losing our democracy because the republican party is willing to act as a cohesive unit to advance the president's agenda, even if it leads to democratic backsliding. And of course, money being an unaccountable fourth branch of government is responsible for this crisis happening in the first place. The fact is, this system is not responsive enough to the people, and does not truly represent the individual voters well. It's very flawed, and this has led to apathy, which has led to this situation in the first place. 

If we want to restore Americans' faith in democracy, we must ultimately make democracy work for them again. 

And that's my message this year. We are in dangerous, precarious times. We very well may come out of it, but this is a warning. We need to shape up, or we could lose our democracy to the forces of autocracy, if we have not already done so. Priority one, stop democratic backsliding. Step two, get republicans out of office. Step three, reform the system to ensure this can't happen again. And yeah, that's where we gotta go from here.