Opinion: The President Speaks, and the Truth is Revealed

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

President Donald J. Trump delivered an interesting State of the Union address on March 4, 2025 (technically, that’s not what it’s properly called in the first year of an administration, only in subsequent years, but there is no alternate name for it).

The Republican side of the aisle was happy; the Democrat side was not.

This much isn’t unusual: the party of the guy giving the SOTU is always fired up, and the opposition party always sits on their hands.

But there were some interesting differences this time. In many ways, the things that upset the Democrats the most – the things that rallied the Right and embarrassed the Left – were all avoidable. There were all things that should never have been needed in the first place.

Consider the President’s pride in having issued hundreds of important executive orders within his first 43 days. They were almost all reversals of idiotic, destructive, and/or illegal and unconstitutional executive orders or departmental regulations issued by past Democrat regimes.

If the Democrats hadn’t destructively implemented DEI across the federal government, the Right wouldn’t have this rallying issue, and the President wouldn’t have been in a position to issue these EOs.

Similarly, if the Democrats hadn’t insisted on the government forcing school districts, sports teams, and park districts to allow boys to pretend they’re girls and beat up on the girls in sporting competitions, the president wouldn’t have had to issue orders to end the practice, and the Right wouldn’t have this common sense issue either.

If the Democrats hadn’t invited in millions of foreign drug dealers, indigents, mental patients and gang recruiters, the president wouldn’t have been elected in a landslide to close the borders and eject these freeloaders and criminals.

Of course, it wasn’t just a list of executive orders. The Congressional majorities – both Republican, fortunately, by however slim a margin – are also passing common sense laws, to permanently enforce the border, to criminalize such child abuse as “transitioning surgery” for minors, to investigate past corruption, to protect hospitality workers from being hounded by the IRS for taxes on their tip income.

In every case, a rational, thoughtful government would never have done the things that President Trump and the Congressional leadership need to reverse.

No sane bureaucrat would order a girls’ volleyball team to allow a brute with anger issues to join a girls’ sports team. No sentient president would allow millions of illegal aliens to flow across the border to overwhelm our schools, hospitals, criminal justice and social welfare systems. No honest tax collection agency would hound hospitality workers for precise reporting of their tip income. But they do. They have, for years and years and years.

The Left did all this, on purpose, creating all these issues to be fixed by the common sense American Right.

Most Democrats – or at least the few somewhat sensible, strategic ones – have to have had some degree of an epiphany during this speech, as they realized how they have done all this to themselves over the years.

A particularly important difference between this speech and most such speeches is that, in recent decades, the SOTU has become a laundry list of the policy points that the president hopes to pass in his first year or two. They are the major issues, major expenditures, major Big Government pork projects that they hope to pass in their next annual budget.

By contrast, since the Trump administration has started out of the gate at such a fierce gallup, much of what President Trump was able to list was a stack of things that have already been accomplished. The audience isn’t given the usual opportunity to wonder how much of this will actually happen, and how much will be DOA in Congress when the bills get out of committee. They’ve happened already.

The president was therefore able to boast about promises already kept, rather than challenging Congress to support or oppose agenda items yet to be introduced. That changed the dynamic of the speech, and certainly contributed to the general malaise on the Democrat side of the aisle throughout the evening.

But perhaps the most important thing that the President did, at least as significant as anything else, was taking the time to list many of the specific revelations from the DOGE project, particularly the outlandish projects funded by USAID.

Some have argued that DOGE isn’t revealing anything new, because the nature of these expenditures were already public record. Perhaps so… but if so, nobody had noticed most of them until Elon Musk’s team started publishing these expenditures on X.

All of a sudden, people who subscribe to DOGE’s or Elon Musk’s personal X account have been learning of utterly outrageous, unjustifiable projects funded by the American taxpayer.

And by listing a representative sample of these in his SOTU speech, President Trump has now shared that information with the people who had not yet heard about them.

As the president checked off these outrages, one by one, the audience couldn’t help but be affected by three aspects of the scandal:

-The incredible amount of our tax dollars involved – we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars here, not just thousands or tens of thousands, again and again and again.

-The alternatingly ridiculous, moronic, or horrifying purposes of the grants, from research on sex change operations on mice to funding deviant children’s programming.

-And the unbelievable amounts of money being sent – weekly, daily, hourly – to distant third world countries for such things.

Until last month, when the average American thought of the concept of “foreign aid,” he assumed it was either food and other charitable assistance for the starving poor, or military assistance for weak governments trying to defend themselves against Islamofascist terrorism or Cuban/Venezuelan communist advisors, spreading insurgency around the world as the old Soviet Union used to do.

Today, however, the American voter has learned that his money – his tax dollars, and worse, his grandchildren’s and great grandchildrens’ future tax dollars – has all been wasted for years beyond count on all these outrages, all over the world, for products, projects, and philosophies utterly contrary to the American culture and our taxpayers’ values.

This kind of revelation will have a different effect on the American public than the standard “budget sales pitch” ordinarily found in a SOTU address. Much of America was innocent before; that innocence is now lost, and this newfound knowledge will be accompanied by righteous anger.

The president’s presentation was a long one, just shy of 1.75 hours, but he had his audience riveted to our seats (with the exception of that one addled Democrat Congressman who had to be physically removed by the Sergeant at Arms for disruption).

This wasn’t so much a request for support, as an expose on the disloyal opposition, a prosecuting attorney’s opening statement at the beginning of what promises to be a fascinating four year long criminal trial. The Democratic party is now exposed as never before.

This was a 1.75 hour history lesson, showing America and the world how our ruling class – Democrat politicians (and a few Republicans too, sadly), federal bureaucrats, NGOs, academia, and the press – has been abusing and robbing the American people for years, weakening our economy, endangering our neighborhoods, hurting our future, diminishing our standard of living.

Many use the term “populism” with derision, largely because it is a word lacking a single universally-agreed definition. The Left confuses it with a personality cult, but it’s anything but that.

If President Trump is a “populist,” a man siding with the people against an enshrined establishment, then this speech told us what that term really means today, at least in the context of the MAGA movement.

Today’s populist is one who stands for the revealing of truth, the exposure of decades of government-engineered fraud against both our own nation and the world, one who stands for a return to honest, honorable, ethical, and severely-limited Constitutional government.

President Trump laid out the reality of our long-corrupted government, for all to see. May Divine Providence continue to watch over this administration and this country, as he and his team keep moving forward.

Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo