I got a message today from a rando telling me she felt sorry for me if I thought the SOTU was a win. Since I had already posted a favorable take, I suppose I’m the grateful recipient of her unsolicited concern. She wrote:

“The dems were boycotting Trump and his lies! All he did last night was bully the dems and complain about former policies and presidents! That’s all he ever does! Ridicule and divide and if you think that shitshow last night was a win, then I feel sorry for you! WTF IS HIS PLAN TO SUPPORT AMERICANS GOING FORWARD! Crickets! He has no plan except continue lying about the evil dems, immigrants, woman and past presidents! Give me a break!”

Setting aside the emotional punctuation, let’s unpack this.

First, the Democrats weren’t “boycotting lies.” They were boycotting the speech. In a representative republic, boycotting is a coward’s move. You show up. You listen. You rebut. You don’t take your ball and go home because you dislike the speaker. What they staged was performative protest—tailor-made for social media clips. It was so comically ineffective, I almost felt sorry for them.

Almost.

Second, on bullying, ridicule and division, Democrats tried to remove Trump from the ballot, bankrupt his businesses, imprison him, and casually labelled him and his family Nazis, racists, and dictators. Since 2016, that has been the Democratic playbook—all while elements of their coalition aligned with Jew-hating pro-Hamas demonstrators, defended illegal immigration as a moral imperative, and treated American sovereignty as something faintly embarrassing. If ridicule has infected the bloodstream of American politics, it did not originate with a Trump punch line.

On immigration, the administration is not targeting immigrants—it is detaining and deporting illegal immigrants. That distinction matters in a nation built on laws. The stray reference to “woman”? I assume that is meant to suggest misogyny or some Epstein-adjacent smear. There is zero evidence for that—actually the opposite—but in modern politics, accusation is often treated as conviction.

They say you can judge a man by his enemies. On that measure alone, Trump is doing just fine.

Now to the “no plan” accusation.

This is the standard progressive critique: if you’re not cutting a check, you’re not governing. Democrat presidents have perfected that model—stimulus payments, expanded entitlements, loan forgiveness schemes, and trillion-dollar spending packages that create the appearance of compassion while quietly expanding debt and dependency.

Strategy, however, is not about immediate gratification. It is about structure.

There have already been measurable shifts: reductions in federal employment rolls, a serious effort to close the border and accelerate deportations, billions identified in waste and fraud, a middle-class tax cut delivered by a GOP Congress, and inflation trending back toward the two-percent range. None of that makes for dramatic cable-news monologues, but it represents real movement.

Step back and consider the broader landscape. America endured five years of extraordinary economic damage. Democrat-led states shut down large portions of the economy during COVID, fracturing supply chains and distorting labor markets. Then came years of Biden-era spending that pushed inflation to levels not seen in decades, and the largest influx of illegal immigrants in our history through what amounted to a de facto open border. Billions in taxpayer dollars were redirected toward housing, benefits, and healthcare for individuals never authorized to be here.

Simultaneously, we endured an ideological war on domestic energy—pipeline cancellations, lease suspensions, regulatory chokeholds—while mandating green energy products manufactured largely in China. We were outsourcing both our energy independence and our industrial future, congratulating ourselves for virtue while hollowing out our capacity.

These are real structural issues.

Imagine your car has four flat tires. You replace them and feel productive. But your engine is seized because you ignored the warning light and never changed the oil. You can admire your new tires all day—you’re still not going anywhere. The engine is the real issue, and it’s expensive to fix.

And here we are.

The Trump administration is focused on the engine: restoring supply chains, expanding domestic energy production, confronting healthcare cost distortions, rooting out entitlement fraud, curbing illegal immigration, restraining inflationary spending, and recalibrating foreign policy to reduce endless conflicts that disrupt trade and empower adversaries. There is also a deliberate effort to peel Western Hemisphere partners away from Chinese and Russian influence, reorienting economic and security relationships back toward the United States.

Those initiatives are systemic and strategic. They cannot be solved in a single speech or a single fiscal year. So, when someone shouts “crickets,” what they often mean is, “I do not see an immediate personal benefit.”

You may dislike Trump’s tone. You may hate his delivery. You may bristle at his instinct for ridicule, but to claim there is no plan requires either ignorance or willful blindness. It is not that he is doing nothing. It is that he is doing everything at once—repairing structural damage accumulated over decades.

If that looks like chaos, perhaps it is because some people truly just prefer the comforting 𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 of motion.