President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress Tuesday at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Jessica Koscielniak -pool / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders February 25, 2026 at 11:45am
If President Donald Trump’s marathon State of the Union address proved nothing else, it showed how wrong liberals are about his health.
There’s been no shortage of news coverage and commentary claiming that the 79-year-old Trump is losing a step or more in his physical and mental health during his second term.
But on Tuesday night, Trump proved just how wrong that was.
As Fox News noted, Trump spoke for one hour and 48 minutes, the longest State of the Union address on record.
NOW – Trump concludes his record-breaking 1 hour and 41 minute State of the Union speech: “The Golden Age of America is upon us. The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended.” pic.twitter.com/3NoyYCBnNG
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 25, 2026
It topped the previous record, Democratic President Bill Clinton’s final State of the Union address in 2000, which was just under one hour and 29 minutes, Fox reported.
It even beat Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress last year. (The first joint session speech of a presidential term is not technically a “State of the Union” address, because the new president is not responsible for the administration of the preceding year.)
And despite some sleeping Democrats in the audience, Trump’s speech was packed with action, from repeatedly challenging Democrats to the heartwarming reunification of a family torn apart by now-former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Through it all, the president didn’t miss a beat.
That’s not the kind of performance Americans might expect from a president who has been repeatedly characterized by Democrats and their supporters in the media as getting too old to govern.
The party that propped up former President Joe Biden for four years, even as signs of his obvious mental decline grew increasingly obvious, hasn’t been shy at all about making an issue of Trump’s age.
Even in July 2024, as Newsweek reported at the time, the Democratic Party and the campaign of its presidential nominee, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, were trying to convince Americans that Trump was too old. (Trump had just survived an assassination attempt, most readers might recall.)
On Jan. 21, the Beltway news outlet The Hill said Ty Cobb, a White House attorney during Trump’s first term, remarked in an interview with the leftist network MS NOW that Trump is showing “significant decline.”
And on Jan. 26, the leftist websites Slate and The Daily Beast both published articles along the same lines. Slate’s was headlined “Is Trump Losing It?” The Daily Beast’s was headlined “Trump, 79, Makes Awkward Mental Gaffe While Bragging About His Brain.”
(The gaffe in question was Trump momentarily blanking on the word “Alzheimer’s” as the disease that struck his father. The jokes are obvious, but the Biden years showed Americans what a cognitively impaired president really looks like.)
Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday should set any doubts to rest about his mental fitness.
Of course, Biden could be roused on occasion to deliver a lengthy speech, but he was outside the public eye almost all the time.
Trump, by contrast, not only does not avoid the media, he actively seeks out engagement with reporters, even knowing full well that most coverage isn’t going to be friendly.
Judging by polling, Trump’s performance went over well with viewers, as even CNN reported that optimism about his policies went up by 10 percentage points among those who watched.
That’s not how the country would be responding if Trump had shown them a president in decline.
That might be the narrative Democrats and their allies in the media are pushing, but it has a major problem.
On Tuesday night, in front of a national television audience, Trump proved how wrong they are.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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