“In his first State of the Union address of his second term, President Trump offered a rosy portrait of a United States that has lost confidence in his leadership,” the New York Times wrote today.¹ And I suppose that is technically accurate. Rosy is one way to describe the color of a torrent of blood.

It is difficult to convey the sheer luridity of what the president unleashed last night. But I’ll try. Trump described no fewer than 17 separate instances of severe injury, violent death, or graphic bodily harm in his joint address, often in vivid detail. At least ten stories involved people whose loved ones were seated in the chamber. In several of those cases, the grievously wounded themselves were present. Conservatively, I’d estimate a quarter of Trump’s record-smashing 1 hour and 47 minute harangue, not including pauses for camera close-ups and extended applause, was devoted to staging scenes of death and dismemberment. Because much of this material was concentrated in the speech’s latter half, the cumulative psychological effect on those who watched to the end was likely more pronounced.

This might feel like a curiosity — another strange tic of a deeply weird politician who has, for the last decade and change, dominated American public life (and/or a tic of his speechwriters).² But it is much more than that. The constant invocations of people “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely,” “viciously slash[ed] … through her neck and body,” of “blood all over,” of legs shredded “into numerous pieces,” of “gushing blood … flowing back down the aisle,” all direct quotations from different passages of the speech, are part of a specific kind of politics. They were meant to do very specific political work: organizing power through the spectacle of injury and the promise and celebration of state-sanctioned violence.

There is a name for this. The political theorist Achille Mbembe called it necropolitics. His argument, laid out first in a 2003 article and more recently in a 2019 book, is that state power ultimately reveals itself not in how it fosters life but in how it organizes death — that, as the Cameroonian scholar writes, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” Who is protected and who is abandoned? Who can be confined, deported, or exposed to violence? Those political decisions are made easier when the public is trained to see the world as a battlefield of butchered innocents and lurking monsters.

Mbembe wrote years ago of the endpoint of that argument in the early 21st century, speaking in the guise of a government:

Mbembe was thinking about Europe. But as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a rapt Munich Security Conference last week, the “old world and the new” — by which he meant those who long for a return to unapologetic white Christian imperialism in the U.S. and Europe — “are part of one civilization.” So it wasn’t hard for Mbembe’s words to presage Trump’s second-term immigration policy almost exactly.

Nearly all of Trump’s victim Lenny Skutniks last night fit a pattern: they were either U.S. citizens injured or killed by immigrants, white people injured or killed by nonwhite people, members of the armed forces harmed by foreign militants, or Erika Kirk. In other words, members of the in-group, at least for the purposes of a televised speech, harmed by Others. Trump performed the same discomfiting ritual for each: they stood, the cameras zoomed in on their reddened, often sobbing faces, as the president described in gory detail the worst moments of their or their loved one’s lives.

These moments were interwoven with invocations of enemies abroad: Iran, Hamas, Venezuela. And of course, the “foreigners” at home, as Trump demonized Somali-Americans in Minnesota — calling a population that is predominantly U.S. citizens, many of whom were born in America, "Somali pirates." He went further, claiming absurdly that Somali-Americans and others in similar communities had stolen enough national wealth that its reclamation would result in a “balanced budget overnight.” This is all to sell the overarching mythos: We are Great, yet we are Under Siege, and only Trump can save us.

It is equally notable who did not get moments like those. Renee Nicole Good and Alexi Pretti were not praised as martyrs killed in the exercise of their constitutional rights, as Charlie Kirk was. The relatives of Ruben Ray Martinez, the 23-year-old U.S. citizen whose killing by federal immigration agents was covered up for months by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, were not honored with tearful close-ups; nor were there standing ovations for the families of the at least 39 people who have died in immigration detention during the second term — the most in over 20 years. And that’s to say nothing of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and several powerful people in that room, whose presence went unremarked upon by the man on the dais.

Trump underscored his visceral anecdotes with a bigger lie. He repeated his claim that the Biden administration had allowed “millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions” into the country. “There were murderers, 11,888 murders,” he claimed, apparently making a hash of the even more overtly neo-Nazi dogwhistle he debuted in October.³ The one partially accurate murder statistic he referenced, with no apparent awareness of the irony, was the fact that, rather than becoming more dangerous, America’s murder rates are going down — a trend that preceded Trump’s return to office by two years, though one he gleefully took credit for.

Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the night was Trump's interaction with Anya Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee whose daughter, Iryna, was killed by a fellow passenger on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system last year. Surveillance footage of the grisly murder went viral on the right. The Trump team made sure to position her right next to Erika Kirk, who amped up the pathos. As Zarutska openly wept, Trump dug in the rhetorical knife:

Did you catch it? In the middle of a John Carpenter-esque scene-setting, Trump dropped an out-and-out lie. The man arrested for Zarutska’s murder, Decarlos Brown, did not come “in through open borders” — or any borders at all. He was born in Charlotte to what, by all appearances, is an African-American family with deep roots in the South. The immigrant in the case is the victim, Iryna, who fled Ukraine amid the invasion ordered by Trump's ally, Vladimir Putin. But the victim is white, and the American-born accused killer is Black — an internal Other. That’s all necropolitics needs to work.

As Mbembe had written, borders in the modern era are “no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities” but “the name used to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general.” "In fact, everything leads back to borders,” he writes. “These dead spaces of nonconnection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet … that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.”

Trump’s other register — really his only other register besides victimhood, ever — was triumphal. Each of the victim-Skutnik moments ended with a promise of restoration: a law to be passed, a border sealed, a criminal punished, a budget balanced. A nation purified.