February 25: America Speaks to Itself

At 9:11 p.m. on February 24, 2026, President Donald Trump stepped to the podium in the chamber of the House of Representatives and began speaking. He would not stop for one hour and forty-eight minutes — the longest State of the Union address delivered by any president in at least sixty years, surpassing even Bill Clinton's near-record 2000 address. By the time he finished, he had touched on the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and the aspirations of a nation, performing a ritual that American presidents have carried out, in one form or another, since George Washington first addressed Congress in New York City in January 1790.

The Room Where the Nation Takes Its Own Temperature

The State of the Union is unlike any other event in American public life. Once a year, the three branches of government assemble in a single chamber — justices, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, and the president — in a ritual that is equal parts constitutional duty, political theater, and national self-examination. The Constitution requires only that the president "from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union." For 236 years, presidents have interpreted that spare mandate in their own image. Washington and Adams delivered the address in person; Jefferson, deeming it too monarchical, sent a written message instead, a tradition that held until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913. Franklin Roosevelt used it to articulate his Four Freedoms. Lyndon Johnson moved it to prime time. Ronald Reagan introduced the gallery guest tradition in 1982 — a custom that endures, and that Trump employed Tuesday night to honor the gold medal-winning U.S. men's Olympic hockey team, who received a rare bipartisan standing ovation, and a 100-year-old Korean War veteran presented with the Medal of Honor.

What makes the State of the Union historically durable is precisely what makes it dramatically unpredictable: the entire apparatus of American democracy is compressed into one room, and anything can happen. Tuesday night was no exception. The chamber crackled with tension as Republicans applauded and Democrats largely sat in silence, with occasional vocal interruptions that led to one congressman being escorted out. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response, continuing another tradition — the opposition rebuttal — that dates to 1966, when Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford first answered Lyndon Johnson on television. Every element of Tuesday night's address, from the theatrical to the contentious, has a precedent stretching back generations. The specific words change; the ritual endures.

Future historians will parse Tuesday's address for what it reveals about this particular moment in American life — the priorities, the anxieties, the ambitions. But they will also recognize it as a link in an unbroken chain. Every State of the Union, however charged the political atmosphere, is ultimately an act of democratic faith: the belief that a nation can gather, argue, and still govern itself. At one hour and forty-eight minutes, Trump's 2026 address was the longest in living memory. It was also, in the most fundamental sense, a continuation of something that began with George Washington standing before the First Congress 236 years ago — a president, a chamber, and the enduring American habit of reckoning publicly with where we are and where we mean to go.