State of the union: indescribable

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for January 6, 2026.

It's a wide-ranging condemnation of Donald Trump's actions: threatening to cancel elections, rewriting history and reversing the events of January 6, 2021, claiming that the demonstrators were peaceful and that the real villains were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.” 

She says:

As Biden prepared to leave office in January 2025, Trump claimed that the U.S. was in freefall, “a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” But Peter Baker reported in the New York Times that the opposite was true: Biden and his administration were leaving behind a country that was in the best shape it had been since at least 2000.

Trump claims that Biden had destroyed the U.S. economy. Peter Baker in The New York Times quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said back in 2021: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.” 

Trump is threatening Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Greenland, and Canada, and extending his threats beyond the Western Hemisphere to Iran. 

In Venezuela, the U.S. took Maduro and Flores but rather than supporting the actual winner of the 2024 presidential election, Edmundo González, or opposition leader María Corina Machado, the administration left the Maduro government in place, led by former vice president Delcy Rodríguez.

María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post today that in the hours since Maduro’s removal, the Venezuelan government has cracked down on those showing support for the U.S. operation. It detained at least 14 journalists, sent armed gangs into the capital, restricted protests, and arrested citizens who appeared to be “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.”

 Finally:

This evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “I am pleased to announce that the interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States! I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” 

Lovely. 30 to 50 million barrels of stolen Venezuelan oil are to be directed into a slush fund controlled by him, personally.

When's the State of the Union address? I can't wait to see how he describes this dumpster fire.