In completely unsurprising fashion, Joe Biden arrived 20 minutes late for his own State of the Union on Thursday. Once he finally took the podium, it became clear that he shouldn't have shown up at all.
Perhaps it was a screw-up on the dosage by his drug cocktail team, but Biden spent the first half hour of the speech screaming uncontrollably, while intermittently coughing and slurring his words. It was surreal and by far, the most unhinged and angriest State of the Union in history. There will no doubt be headlines proclaiming otherwise, and they will be false.
There were also plenty of instances of the president's senility showing through. In the early part of the speech, Biden brought up January 6th and proceeded to completely flub two of his big zingers.
The president then threatened the Supreme Court, albeit in the most mentally deficient way possible, shouting that "women are not without electrical power."
Biden's inability to read a teleprompter aside, why would the Supreme Court need to realize women aren't without electoral power? They aren't politicians, and they don't exist to set policy. They interpret the Constitution as it stands. Biden's misleading about the court is outright dangerous. It's putting lives in danger, so he can perform for his radical base. Unfortunately for him, he's not capable of even doing that coherently.
There were some other head-scratching moments throughout the speech, such as this random mention of Moscow. Good luck figuring out what he was trying to say, but he had Russia on the brain.
I could keep posting videos, including a doozy involving Laken Riley (a must-read separate piece on that is coming), but the general presentation of Biden's speech was just awful. He came across as a divisive lunatic delivering a badly written stump speech, not a president addressing Congress and the American people seriously about issues that matter.
If the idea was that this performance was going to turn around his 2024 prospects, Biden failed miserably. Nothing he said is going to appeal to your average swing voter. Instead of addressing the issues those people care about, the president spent the first part of his speech talking about Ukraine and comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. It was a completely out-of-touch display, offering evidence of the White House's arrogance and disrespect for voters.
There was nothing game-changing about this State of the Union. On the contrary, while his most hardcore supporters were fist-pumping, I'd suspect most Americans were rolling their eyes. That he kept shouting at the oddest moments only compounded how incredibly weird the entire scene was.
This is a president whose failures have been laid bare. If the goal of this speech was to deflect from them, Biden failed at that as well. Members of the mainstream press will swoon because they were always going to swoon. Their reactions were written before he spoke the first word. You can't fool the American people, though, and you can't shout them down in a drug-induced haze.
Biden made history with this State of the Union, and not the good kind.