Trump will be the first convicted felon to deliver the State of the Union

Trump is also making history other ways--and it's all bad!

This Tuesday we will see a great deal of history made—but all of it is bad for the United States. That is when Donald Trump will give in essence a “State of the Union” address (SOTU) to a joint session of Congress. (Technically, this is not a SOTU given the speech is only two months into his first term--but everything about it will look and feel to viewers like the SOTU.)

We know Trump’s speech will filled with lies, pro-Putin talking points and excuses for why inflation is up while consumer confidence and the stock market are down. We also know that history will be made as Trump checks the boxes for many firsts:

1. Trump will be the first convicted felon to deliver a SOTU. On May 30, 2024, a New York jury unanimously convicted Trump of 34 felonies for cheating in the 2016 election. This case was never about “hush money” as corporate media dubbed it but election corruption as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg repeatedly noted. After the verdict, Bragg again reminded people of that stating, “Donald Trump is guilty of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election.” And Bragg’s office reiterated this point in their press release after the conviction noting, “Trump engaged in a scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election and went to extraordinary and illegal lengths to hide this conduct from the American voters and public.” Well, come Tuesday, that convicted felon will address a joint session of Congress—marking another dark first for our nation courtesy of Trump.

2. Trump is the first to address a joint session of Congress after being charged with crimes for attempting a coup to overturn a US presidential election. After Trump lost the 2020 election, we all witnessed Trump attempt to overturn the results and illegally remain in power. That is why on Aug. 1, 2023, Trump was charged with four federal felonies for crimes committed in pursuit of that illegal goal. The federal indictment of Trump returned by a grand jury reads bluntly: “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.” From there, as detailed in the indictment, Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” However, the GOP controlled corrupt Supreme Court delayed the case to help Trump and then found Trump had immunity if his crimes were “official acts.” Before that determination could be made, Trump won the election and Special Counsel Jack Smith was forced by Merrick Garland’s DOJ to dismiss the charges given their internal rule that a sitting President cannot be prosecuted.

3. Trump is first person to deliver SOTU who incited a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. As the Jan 6 congressional committee’s final report noted about the Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol: “The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.” We all know that. After losing the election, Trump radicalized his supporters with lies about the election being “stolen” and then instructed them to come to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 for a “wild” time. On that day, Trump incited the crowd knowing they were angry and many were armed with lines like: “The Democrats are trying to steal the White House. You cannot let them.” From there, he literally directed them to head to the Capitol to “stop the steal.” All of this is why Special Counsel Jack Smith stated that the Jan. 6 attack “was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy” fueled by Trump’s lies that were “targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government--the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

4. Trump is first to deliver the SOTU after being found by a court to have engaged in an insurrection in violation of Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment. In December 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump had “engaged in an insurrection” in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. As the Colorado court found, Trump’s goal with the insurrection that “he himself conceived and set in motion” was to “prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.” The court concluded that Trump was “disqualified from holding the office of President under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.” Later the US Supreme Court ruled that only Congress—not the states—can enforce this constitutional provision against a presidential candidate but the Court did not overturn the finding that Trump engaged in an insurrection.

5. Trump is first to address Congress after pardoning people who had waged a terrorist attack on the US Capitol. On Trump’s first day in office, he rewarded the terrorists who waged the deadly attack on the US Capitol in service of Trump’s attempted coup with a pardon for all. Trump’s own hand-picked FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that Jan. 6 was an “act of domestic terrorism.” So yes, the people who committed violence in furtherance of Trump’s political agenda on Jan.6 are terrorists under federal law. This is akin to Bin Laden pardoning those involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Yet that is what Trump did.

There are other firsts as well when Trump takes to the podium on Tuesday. He’s the first person to deliver the SOTU who had been charged with 31 counts of violating the Espionage Act as part of his classified documents case and the first adjudicated rapist. Add to that, Trump has the lowest approval rating of any past president in the modern era just six weeks into his second term.

Corporate media wants you to forget who Trump is. We never will.

The only speech Trump should be delivering Tuesday is to his fellow inmates in his cell block. But due to a corrupt system where Republicans protected Trump and oligarchs funded him, this is where we are. Angry yet?!

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