On February 24th, 2026, President Trump delivered the longest State of the Union Address in American history. His speech addressed a range of topics such as the U.S economy, immigration, foreign policy, and defense. Many of his claims were either exaggerated or completely false. But even more striking was his framing of members of the Democratic Party as enemies of the American people. In multiple instances, he blamed them for the government’s shortcomings, regardless of whether the claims were factual.

When discussing healthcare for example, Trump mentioned his healthcare plan in these terms: “And I did that in my first term, and the Democrats immediately terminated it, with the full knowledge that they were doing a very bad thing for the people.” Further in the speech, he continued to blame. After making false remarks about children being taken away from their families to be forced into gender transition, he noted: “We’re lucky we have a country. With people like this — Democrats are destroying our country. But we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time, didn’t we?” After the speech occurred, the official White House website published a list of what Democrats refused to applaud for in Trump’s speech.

Just 11 years ago, this rhetoric of blame was not on the main stage. In his State of the Union Address on January 20th, 2015, former President Obama used unifying language instead. For example, he argued that “a better politics isn’t one where Democrats abandon their agenda, or Republicans simply embrace mine. A better politics is one where we appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears.” Later in the speech, he stated: “I commit to every Republican here tonight that I will not only seek out your ideas, I will seek to work with you to make this country stronger.” Obama demonstrated, at least rhetorically, the need to sometimes put partisan politics aside, and, crucially, his respect for the opposition despite differences in beliefs.

What Obama’s past speech demonstrates, and Trump’s does not, is S. Levitsky’s and D. Ziblatt’s theory of mutual toleration. Mutual toleration is an unwritten democratic norm according to which politicians must accept their opposition as legitimate. This means recognizing rivals as decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens, and believing that they also respect the Constitution (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Instead, authoritarian leaders will describe their opponents as subversive, existential threats, criminals or foreign agents (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). An extreme case is Russia’s foreign agent laws, which require non-governmental organizations that receive foreign aid and engage in political activity to be labeled as “foreign agents.”

Mutual toleration is essential to democracy’s survival. Its weakening is often a first indicator of democratic backsliding. In the words of S. Levitsky and D. Ziblatt, “When norms of mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them-and therein lies a justification for authoritarian measures” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018: 104). As the 2026 Freedom House and V-Dem reports noted, the US democracy is showing concerning signs of erosion. The fading of mutual toleration has been a key factor in this process. It is therefore concerning when the language that Trump uses to talk about his opposition is not mutual toleration—instead casting blame on them and describing them as enemies to the American people. “In just about every case of democratic breakdown we have studied, would-be authoritarians- from Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in interwar Europe to Marcos, Castro and Pinochet during the Cold War to Putin, Chávez, and Erdoğan most recently- have justified their consolidation of power by labeling their opponents as an existential threat” (Levisky and Ziblatt 2018: 106).

Works Cited:

Associated Press. “Read Trump’s Full 2026 State of the Union Address.” PBS, February 25, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-trumps-full-2026-state-of-the-union-address.

Horton, Jake, Lucy Glider, and Tom Edgington. “Fact-Checking Trump’s Longest Ever State of the Union.” BBC News, February 25, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmlzg0p8k2o.

Koroteev, Kirrill. Russian-style “foreign agents” laws signal a rejection of … Accessed March 29, 2026. https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/NED_Foreign-Agent-Laws-in-Russia.pdf

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. Harlow, England: Penguin Books.

Office of the Press Secretary. “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address | January 20, 2015.” National Archives and Records Administration, January 20, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/20/remarks-president-stat e-union-address-January-20-2015.

The White House. “Democrats Showed Whose Side They’re on – and It’s Not the American People.” The White House, February 25, 2026. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/02/democrats-showed-whose-side-theyre-on-a nd-its-not-the-american-people-249d/.