February 19, 2026 - 12:40pm
A substantial number of House and Senate Democrats have announced their intention to boycott Trump’s State of the Union speech next week. Two separate events have been planned as an alternative to the speech. A “People’s State of the Union” rally will feature about a dozen Democratic members of the House and Senate. Another half-dozen congressmen are scheduled to appear at a “State of the Swamp” event at the National Press Club. And various other Democrats have simply said that they don’t plan to come to the State of the Union and have left it at that.
At first glance, the whole thing looks like the emptiest gesture imaginable. Not to be outdone, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has tried to present his decision to simply show up and honor custom as a kind of defiance, telling the press that “having grown up where I grew up, you never let anyone run you off your block.”
Apparently, this is the range of options for Democrats in 2026. At one end of the spectrum, you punish the President’s misdeeds with your absence from the room. At the other end, you follow protocol but justify it with an embarrassing attempt at tough-guy swagger.
In the last 13 months, the administration has captured a foreign head of state, threatened countries from Panama to Denmark with annexing pieces of their territory, initiated trade wars with close allies in pursuit of no particularly clear goal, and arrested or deported legal residents. In his aggressive use of immigration enforcement, multiple American citizens have been shot dead while exercising their constitutional rights to monitor and protest these agents’ activities.
Through it all, job growth has been almost non-existent and prices remain dramatically higher than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. Like the Biden administration before it, the Trump White House has been reduced to endlessly offering up charts and graphs to prove that really the economy is great, and anyone who thinks it isn’t must have been brainwashed by the media.
In other words, it’s hard to overstate the theoretical opening for the opposition. In practice, though, the Democrats’ response to all this has been tepid. Last year, when Republican healthcare cuts threatened to double or even triple health insurance premiums for many ordinary Americans, Democrats had a moment of defiance that led to a government shutdown. Then they folded, despite polls showing that the public blamed Trump rather than them for the impasse.
When Trump captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Jeffries and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer couldn’t bestir themselves to make more than mild procedural objections. They merely claimed that they should have been informed in advance. After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, with polls showing a majority of the public believed that ICE had gone too far, Democratic leadership triangulated in advance, content to ask for modest reforms.
But hey: at least a lot of them will leave empty chairs in Congress next week during Trump’s big speech. That’ll show him.
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