No analysis of The State of the Union is honest or thorough unless it includes analyses of the status of women, children, minority groups and ethnicities, immigrants, workers, small businesses, healthcare, public education, religion, and journalism. The State of the Union is the privilege of the President. The Address happens in Congress; this is the only scheduled occasion when the POTUS stands before Congress. All other presidential speeches before the full Congressional body are unscheduled, usually a declaration of war. Many are boycotting tomorrow’s State of the Union – because the President is a criminal and acting outside Constitutional authority. Viewers are boycotting television networks during the hour; many Democratic and Independent leaders in Congress are boycotting President Trump’s speech to participate in a simultaneous Address at a different location. Given that a criminal is in the White House, and the Republican party backs the criminal regime, Americans must boycott the speech.
Will Democrats and Independents use their public Address to include analyses of all the groups and institutions named above? Perhaps. They certainly should do so. They have the privilege to do far more than analyze a speech written for the Demented Old Rapist, they have the privilege given in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Americans must hear the Democrats and Independents speak honestly to them -- Donald J Trump will not; Americans must hear Democrats and Independents speak with boldness, authority, integrity, and wisdom – Donald J Trump will not. Americans must hear the Democrats and Independents defend the Constitution and the Rule of Law, defend the voices and civil rights of all people who reside in the U.S.A. – Donald J Trump will not.
Women are at the forefront of Resistance, women of all demographics: color, religion, age, citizenship status, financial status. Women across all demographics demand more freedom, not less: freedom to choose or not choose motherhood, to access appropriate and safe reproductive care, to get emergency abortions in our hospitals. Many states are criminalizing abortions and miscarriages, no matter that women die without appropriate medical care. Women are denied the jobs and honors they earned in the U.S. Military, NASA, the FBI, and in the DOJ. Women’s wages in 2026 are less than men’s wages in most jobs and professional organizations, especially in private enterprises. Their freedom to thrive and pursue financial stability while caring for children or aging parents is limited by less income than their male counterparts earn, hampered by workplace harassment and insult, obstructed by the DEI policies that the Republican party struck down. Apart from the group ‘wealthy white women,’ most demographic groups are struggling far more now than they were ten years ago. The Republican party put targets on the backs of transwomen and lesbians, outspoken Black and Brown women, women who protest this regime and ICE raids, women journalists who Speak Truth to Power.
Our children are less safe, have fewer avenues toward prosperity and personal aspirations, less able to get a good education from kindergarten through university, and have shoddier healthcare than at any time in the U.S.A. since WWII. National politics and legislation and budgeting, especially since the 1980s when the Republican party embraced Christian Nationalism, have not favored our children. Public education and public healthcare are collapsing under the right wing’s determined efforts to terminate social programs and eradicate socialism, under the centrists’ mediocrity and apathy, under liberal’s unwillingness to defy America’s wealthy class. The military industry and DHS grow fat and fascist with unlimited federal resources while children are hungry and sick in their homes, killed in their school classrooms. Their working parents rely on SNAP dollars and community food programs to feed their children. Their working parents lose health insurance and access to affordable healthcare for their children. Federal funds for public schools are diverted to private schools and right-wing religious schools. Student loan debts prevent our young people from buying homes or saving for their futures. The public education, healthcare, safety nets, safe and clean environments, family vacations, and freedom to play in safe neighborhoods that I enjoyed in the 1950s and 60s are unknown in most children’s lives in 2026.
Immigrants, refugees, and citizens who look or sound like recent immigrants have targets on their backs. The federal government, backed by billionaires and right-wing politicians, kidnap, harass, and kill them. Immigrants and refugees are afraid to go to work or send their children to school where ICE and BP are active, where masked thugs outnumber local law enforcement agencies and exercise unlawful authority. Journalists and citizen-watchers who ‘get too close’ to ICE activities risk their freedom and their lives. The Trump regime and Republican party are building private prisons and ‘concentration camps’ in every state. Reports of torture, abuse, neglect, and death abound. We’re a nation that is now violating human rights and promoting racist, bigoted, cruel policies.
Although human beings who despise some human groups – like Donald Trump despises women and all people of color but worships billionaires – often use religious zealots to empower their own racist and self-serving agenda, racist and self-serving people such as Donald J Trump always exist sans any religious teaching or practice. He believes only in himself; he does not worship with Believers or study religious text. Christian Nationalists helped raise this monster and give him power to enact his racist and cruel agenda. Why? Because there is ‘religious faith’ and then there is White Christian Male Supremacy…which Christian Nationalism promotes. Right wing religious groups like white fundamentalists believe in male supremacy, white race supremacy, and Christian theocracy. Our nation’s white evangelicals and fundamentalists believe so deeply in Christian theocracy that they willingly and fanatically raised a monster who would use any means necessary to build a Christian theocratic state for them. The simple reason that today’s Republican party must suffer utter defeat is that Christian Nationalists – like fascists, communists, criminals, theocrats, billionaire oligarchs, white supremacists – have no place in a Constitutional, democratic, representative, ‘liberty and justice for all’ government.
The status of this Union ranks lower than at any time since our civil war. Have we hit bottom? Look who is in the White House, who exercises national and international authority while personally profiting from office, who speaks for the worst of us, who protects rapists and pedophiles, who promotes white Christian male supremacy and rewards those who inflict cruelty on The Others, who supports this regime as a political party, who sat with this regime out of all all world leaders in Trump’s Peace Council, how ICE criminals and criminal behaviors are rewarded, who purposely destroys a stable economy so that billionaires can become trillionaires…
I hold onto some hope, not in Americans but in the Resistance. Out there, beyond our social media and blogs and private conversations, exists people and organizations who Resist this regime and the Republican party: journalists, judges, courts, news media, veterans, politicians, leaders, and others with the power and resources to strengthen the Resistance, expose the crimes, expound the truths, and inspire a revolution. We will not “take our country back” as America’s right wing likes to say; however, we will wrest freedom, justice, liberty, law, and peace from the clenched fists of the greedy, fascist, rapist, moronic, MAGA, Republican regime.