Caffeinated Politics

Under the U.S. Constitution, the president is required to “give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” The framers didn’t include that line as a suggestion or a ceremonial nicety. They understood that the nation’s chief executive owes the public a sober, coherent accounting of where the country stands and where it’s headed. It’s supposed to be a civic moment — not a circus act.

Which is why, for many Americans, watching the State of the Union on Tuesday felt less like witnessing a constitutional duty and more like being trapped in a two‑hour open‑mic night hosted by someone who mistook volume for leadership and insult for insight. The speech’s disorganization, the caustic partisanship, the whiplash tone — all of it landed with the grace of a dropped piano. As I was getting caught up this morning about the speech last night, I thought of the piano falling down a long flight of stairs multiple times in Laurel and Hardy’s film The Music Box. The national speech from the House chambers should not have produced thoughts of idiocy. But, of course, it did.

And the fact that so many people shrugged and said, essentially, “Well, that’s just how things are now,” and “No one expected anything different,” might be the most troubling part of all. Because this isn’t just about one speech. It’s about what the country now accepts as normal.

Once upon a time, Americans dressed up to go to the movies. A good friend of mine over the decades speaks about how his mom and dad would put on a nice dress and a suit jacket for the movies. Now you can buy popcorn next to someone wearing pajama pants and slippers. Grocery stores have become a parade of “I just rolled out of bed and decided society can deal with it.” Funerals — once the last bastion of collective dignity — now feature attendees whose idea of formalwear is their “best” T‑shirt, which usually means the one without a barbecue stain.

These aren’t trivial observations. They’re symptoms. A nation’s standards don’t collapse all at once; they erode slowly, one lowered expectation at a time. And eventually, the erosion reaches the top. No one can deny the facts while watching the most absurd SOTU to date.

So when the president of the United States stands before Congress and the nation and delivers a performance that many viewers described as rambling, chaotic, or buffoonish, the reaction shouldn’t be, “Well, that’s politics these days.” It should be an alarm. But instead, a sizable portion of the public absorbed it as the new baseline — another sign that the bar for national leadership has sunk so low it’s practically subterranean.

The danger isn’t just that institutions are being undermined. It’s that people are becoming comfortable with the undermining. A country can survive bad speeches. It can survive bad leaders. What it cannot survive is the normalization of lowered expectations — the collective shrug that says, “This is fine,” when it very clearly is not.

Respect for the nation begins with respect for ourselves. If we accept sloppiness in our civic life the same way we’ve accepted sloppiness in our public behavior, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the highest office in the land reflects that same decline back at us. The State of the Union isn’t just a speech; it’s a mirror. And right now, the reflection is not flattering.