Man, proud man

“If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” — Henry V, Act 4, Scene 1

Last night the House chamber seemed small. That was my overriding impression. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in that room, especially during the year and a half I spent covering Congress in my twenties. I even attended a State of the Union — one of Baby Bush’s, in 2005. Normally a famous room seems smaller in person than it does on TV, but the House of Representatives was cavernous, especially when filled to capacity. Not last night though. Last night, it seemed downright claustrophobic.

Some of that may have had to do with the fact that a few Democrats stayed away. Or that the rest stayed seated demurely with their little ineffectual signs throughout the speech — with the notable exception of Rep. Al Green of Texas, who staged a brief and largely inaudible protest in the first few minutes that got him escorted out by the Sergeant at Arms. But the smallness really came down to the man giving the speech.

In 1990, the political scientist Mark J. Gasiorowski summarized “personalistic authoritarian regimes” like this: “Those in which heads of government rule arbitrarily, exercising authority mainly through patronage networks and coercion rather than through institutions and formal rules.” He was drawing a comparison to “populist authoritarian regimes,” such as the postwar regimes of Juan Perón in Argentina or Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, in which a “strong, charismatic, manipulative leader” ruled only through the mobilization and graces of some parts of the lower class. The personalistic authoritarian regime, by contrast, is just that: personal, transactional, based on the whims of one person—almost always, as Robert Paxton found of fascist regimes, a man. Gasiorowski rooted his definition in studies of Sub-Saharan Africa. His source text, a 1982 book called Personal Rule in Black Africa, summarized it thus: “To put this in old-fashioned, comparative government terms, the state is a government of men and not of laws.”

In short, it is the rule of a king. But not just a king; a petty tyrant. King John before the Magna Carta. Capone in Chicago. Nero in Rome.

That’s who was on the dais last night. The longest State of the Union-style speech in American history was a grandiose exercise in personal score-settling and personal rule. Trump opened with a laborious recap of his electoral victory, lying about the size of his “mandate” and popular vote margin. That he even mentioned the win is notable in itself: As far as I can tell no previous incoming president has ever so much as bragged about having won the last election in his first address to Congress: Biden didn’t. Obama didn’t. Reagan, who started the tradition of incoming presidents addressing a joint session of Congress in February (as opposed to the outgoing president giving a last speech in January) didn’t even mention the words “election” or “Carter.” Our most vainglorious imperial presidents until now played up the aww-shucks, we’re in this democracy together thing in their post-victory addresses: Lyndon Johnson greeted his old friends in Congress and talked about “a new quest for union” in 1964. Nixon didn’t even give a speech in 1973—the first after he cheated and burgled his way into a truly historic re-election landslide¹ —submitting a series of written letters to Congress instead.

Then, after likening himself to George Washington, he chastised the Democrats for refusing to affirm him with cheers or applause. He underlined this point by going into what can only be described as either a hallucination or a weird prediction: claiming that the opposition party wouldn’t even fulfill his desire for a standing ovation if he found “a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to greatest economy in history or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded.” He then seemed to get genuinely mad about his own hypothetical, griping that “these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these”—again, completely made up—”astronomical achievements.” The Republicans did, however, applaud.

Indeed, that’s what they did all night: Laughed at every joke, no matter how bitter or lame; applauded every lie, no matter how patently false. They ate up his tendentious claims about the alleged super-strength of trans athletes and gasped fulsomely at the notion that Social Security benefits were being paid in the name of a colonist born in 1665. Elon Musk clapped for the lie that his own fake agency has found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” — even though he surely knows that, as of the start of this week, the (almost also certainly fake) top line on his DOGE.gov was “$65 billion”—not all of it purported “fraud.” (The site was dutifully updated to “$105 billion” on Tuesday morning, which still isn’t what the president claimed, but at least inflated over the century mark.)

Trump called out cabinet secretaries by their nicknames (“Bobby,” “Pam”), beckoning the heads of his powerful executive departments to stand awkwardly and shower him with mute praise as he belittled and shined the spotlight on them. (None were more awkward than Elon Musk, who stood up a bit too early, then bowed over and over again, like an embarrassed courtesan.)

None got it worse than Marco Rubio. After lying about the history of the Panama Canal² , and then announcing “we’re taking it back,” Trump turned to his Secretary of State. He said: “We have Marco Rubio in charge. Good luck, Marco. Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.” There was a shudder, then a titter of laughter, including from Rubio, perhaps at the bluntness of the threat—though the smile quickly faded from the secretary's face. Not content with this dressing down, Trump twisted the knife further, praising Rubio on having secured the confirmation votes of every Democrat in the Senate, but remarking: “I’m either very, very happy about that or I’m very concerned about it.” Having preemptively declared the most senior member of his cabinet a traitor, just in case, he moved on to threatening another longtime ally, Denmark, over Greenland.

The king pronounced on matters large and small. He announced to the world the arrest of a man he called "the top terrorist responsible” for the Abbey Gate bombing at the Kabul airport during the 2021 U.S. withdrawal, saying he was “right now on his way here to face the swift sword of American justice.” (The DOJ press release simply says the arrested man is accused of merely “helping prepare” for the attack, though not until after Attorney General Bondi credited “President Trump’s strong leadership on the world stage” for the arrest.) He took credit for the release of Israeli hostages and prisoners of war from Gaza — “our hostages,” he called them.

He showed favor to his supporters’ children. He paraded a bewildered 13-year-old cancer survivor from Houston, whom for no apparent reason he made an agent of the Secret Service, pledging “Bobby” would cure childhood cancer (somehow) even as Musk slashes funding for every other child’s cancer research. Then he called attention to a teenage Skutnik named Jason Hartley, whom he’d invited apparently for the sole purpose of being able to personally announce that the kid had been accepted into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, as if he were responsible for the decision. (And who knows, maybe he was.) Everyone applauded the president and his fan, who wore a flag-emblazoned cross—a literal image of Christian Nationalism—on his lapel.

Trump also emphasized his personal relationships with the symbolic victims of his Kulturkampf. There was the former high-school volleyball player who has claimed to have suffered a debilitating brain injury from a ball spiked by a transgender opponent (“It's just such an incredible honor, and I'm so thankful, and I can't believe I'm getting invited,” she gushed to Fox News about Trump’s invitation.) The anti-trans activist mother who claims her 13-year-old child was “socially transitioned” without her and her husband’s consent (emails filed as part of a dismissed federal lawsuit contradict that story). And of course, the families of murder victims killed by undocumented immigrants, including the family of Laken Riley, whose name was appended to the new law permitting federal agents to deport non-citizens without legal visas who have been arrested (but not necessarily convicted) of property crimes, including theft.

The latter might have been a more standard bit of tendentious political theater; their genuine tears exploited to cloud the inconvenient fact that there is no link between immigration and crime rates, and that immigrants—even undocumented ones—are both arrested and convicted for violent and non-violent crime at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens. But the president made sure that, in the end, it was about him. “I told Laken’s grieving parents that we would ensure their daughter would not have died in vain,” he said. “Our beautiful Laken Hope Riley.” The mother of a 12-year-old Houston girl (“a woman I’ve gotten to know”) murdered by two undocumented Venezuelan men (“savages,” he said, inflating their number to three) got an even more personalized favor: Trump asked Vice President JD Vance to hand him an executive order renaming an East Texas wildlife refugee after her martyred daughter. “I signed an order keeping my word to you,” he said, showing his ostentatious signature to the room, again to half a chamber’s worth of rapturous applause.

The subtext here is text: Ally with and subordinate yourself to the king, and you may get favors showered on you. Your injuries may be healed, your children avenged, your place in the sun secured—whether as a West Point cadet, the namesake of some piece of agitprop, or a member of his cabinet. Turn on him, betray him, hinder his aspirations, and you will pay the price: You will be hunted by his DOJ and FBI. (“Pam, good luck. Kash, wherever you may be, good luck.”) You will be blamed for his failures. (“Good luck, Marco.”) You will get nothing.

"Here we arrive at the central feature of personal rule,” wrote the authors of Personal Rule in Africa. “It is a dynamic world of political will and action that is ordered less by institutions than by personal authorities and power; a world of stratagem and countermeasure, of action and reaction, but without the assured mediation and regulation of effective political institutions.” The United States was founded to be the opposite of that; for all its founding sins and crimes it was in most ways what John Adams called “a government of laws, and not of men.” Each day without effective opposition or a gameplan to stop it, this nation lurches farther, perhaps irretrievably, toward the reverse.

1  Nixon won nearly 61% of the popular vote and 96.7% of the electoral vote in 1972. Compare that to Trump’s “landslide” of 49.8% and 58.3% respectively.

2  “38,000 [American] workers” didn’t die building the Panama Canal. The real death toll of the American project was closer to 5,600, the vast majority of those being Afro-Caribbean workers who toiled under segregated conditions under white American and European overseers. The estimated American deaths were closer to 350. You can add in the estimated 22,000 (again, largely Jamaican) workers who died during the failed French attempt to dig a canal in the 1880s, some of the work of which ended up contributing to the American effort, but that doesn’t come close to his claimed overall total nor add more American deaths to the total. And the most recent canal expansion project—the one that makes the canal useable for shipping today—was undertaken almost entirely by Panamanians from 2007 to 2016. Nor did Jimmy Carter sell it “for $1.” For more information on the U.S. history of the Panama Canal, see Chapters 6 and 9 of this award-winning book.