February 25, 2026 | Listen Online | Read Online

The Bloody Show

In an unhinged State of the Union, Trump brought necropolitics to primetime

(Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)

“In his first State of the Union address of his second term, President Trump offered a rosy portrait of a United States that has lost confidence in his leadership,” the New York Times wrote today.¹ And I suppose that is technically accurate. Rosy is one way to describe the color of a torrent of blood.

It is difficult to convey the sheer luridity of what the president unleashed last night. But I’ll try. Trump described no fewer than 17 separate instances of severe injury, violent death, or graphic bodily harm in his joint address, often in vivid detail. At least ten stories involved people whose loved ones were seated in the chamber. In several of those cases, the grievously wounded themselves were present. Conservatively, I’d estimate a quarter of Trump’s record-smashing 1 hour and 47 minute harangue, not including pauses for camera close-ups and extended applause, was devoted to staging scenes of death and dismemberment. Because much of this material was concentrated in the speech’s latter half, the cumulative psychological effect on those who watched to the end was likely more pronounced.

This might feel like a curiosity — another strange tic of a deeply weird politician who has, for the last decade and change, dominated American public life (and/or a tic of his speechwriters).² But it is much more than that. The constant invocations of people “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely,” “viciously slash[ed] ... through her neck and body,” of “blood all over,” of legs shredded “into numerous pieces,” of “gushing blood ... flowing back down the aisle,” all direct quotations from different passages of the speech, are part of a specific kind of politics. They were meant to do very specific political work: organizing power through the spectacle of injury and the promise and celebration of state-sanctioned violence.

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There is a name for this. The political theorist Achille Mbembe called it necropolitics. His argument, laid out first in a 2003 article and more recently in a 2019 book, is that state power ultimately reveals itself not in how it fosters life but in how it organizes death — that, as the Cameroonian scholar writes, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” Who is protected and who is abandoned? Who can be confined, deported, or exposed to violence? Those political decisions are made easier when the public is trained to see the world as a battlefield of butchered innocents and lurking monsters.

Mbembe wrote years ago of the endpoint of that argument in the early 21st century, speaking in the guise of a government:

We must close the borders. Filter those who make it across them. Process them. Choose who we want to remain. Deport the rest. Sign contracts with corrupt elites from the countries of origin, third world countries, transition countries. They must be turned into the prison guards of the West, to whom the lucrative business of administering brutality can be subcontracted.

Mbembe was thinking about Europe. But as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a rapt Munich Security Conference last week, the “old world and the new” — by which he meant those who long for a return to unapologetic white Christian imperialism in the U.S. and Europe — “are part of one civilization.” So it wasn’t hard for Mbembe’s words to presage Trump’s second-term immigration policy almost exactly.

Nearly all of Trump’s victim Lenny Skutniks last night fit a pattern: they were either U.S. citizens injured or killed by immigrants, white people injured or killed by nonwhite people, members of the armed forces harmed by foreign militants, or Erika Kirk. In other words, members of the in-group, at least for the purposes of a televised speech, harmed by Others. Trump performed the same discomfiting ritual for each: they stood, the cameras zoomed in on their reddened, often sobbing faces, as the president described in gory detail the worst moments of their or their loved one’s lives.

These moments were interwoven with invocations of enemies abroad: Iran, Hamas, Venezuela. And of course, the “foreigners” at home, as Trump demonized Somali-Americans in Minnesota — calling a population that is predominantly U.S. citizens, many of whom were born in America, "Somali pirates." He went further, claiming absurdly that Somali-Americans and others in similar communities had stolen enough national wealth that its reclamation would result in a “balanced budget overnight.” This is all to sell the overarching mythos: We are Great, yet we are Under Siege, and only Trump can save us.

It is equally notable who did not get moments like those. Renee Nicole Good and Alexi Pretti were not praised as martyrs killed in the exercise of their constitutional rights, as Charlie Kirk was. The relatives of Ruben Ray Martinez, the 23-year-old U.S. citizen whose killing by federal immigration agents was covered up for months by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, were not honored with tearful close-ups; nor standing ovations for the families of the at least 39 people who have died in immigration detention during the second term — the most in over 20 years. And that’s to say nothing of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and several powerful people in that room, whose presence went unremarked upon by the man on the dais.

Trump underscored his visceral anecdotes with a bigger lie. He repeated his claim that the Biden administration had allowed “millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions” into the country. “There were murderers, 11,888 murders,” he claimed, apparently making a hash of the even more overtly neo-Nazi dogwhistle he debuted in October.³ The one partially accurate murder statistic he referenced, with no apparent awareness of the irony, was the fact that, rather than becoming more dangerous, America’s murder rates are going down — a trend that preceded Trump’s return to office by two years, though one he gleefully took credit for.

Perhaps the most disturbing moment of the night was Trump's interaction with Anya Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee whose daughter, Iryna, was killed by a fellow passenger on the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system last year. Surveillance footage of the grisly murder went viral on the right. The Trump team made sure to position her right next to Erika Kirk, who amped up the pathos. As Zarutska openly wept, Trump dug in the rhetorical knife:

Last summer, 23-year-old Iryna was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no-cash bail stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. No one will ever forget — there were people on that train — no one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life. She died instantly. She had escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America. Came in through open borders.

Mrs. Zarutska, tonight I promise you we will ensure justice for your magnificent daughter Iryna.

Did you catch it? In the middle of a John Carpenter-esque scene-setting, Trump dropped an out-and-out lie. The man arrested for Zarutska’s murder, Decarlos Brown, did not come “in through open borders” — or any borders at all. He was born in Charlotte to what, by all appearances, is an African-American family with deep roots in the South. The immigrant in the case is the victim, Iryna, who fled Ukraine amid the invasion ordered by Trump's ally, Vladimir Putin. But the victim is white, and the American-born accused killer is Black — an internal Other. That’s all necropolitics needs to work.

As Mbembe had written, borders in the modern era are “no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities” but “the name used to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general.” "In fact, everything leads back to borders,” he writes. “These dead spaces of nonconnection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet ... that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.”

Trump’s other register — really his only other register besides victimhood, ever — was triumphal. Each of the victim-Skutnik moments ended with a promise of restoration: a law to be passed, a border sealed, a criminal punished, a budget balanced. A nation purified.

This triumphalism did not stop at promises of policy. Trump used the address to bestow or announce top-tier decorations, including two Medals of Honor, transforming the chamber into something closer to a battlefield awards ceremony than a legislative forum. The first MOH was given to Chief Warrant Officer Eric Slover, the helicopter gunship pilot who managed to land the first MH-47 Chinook in the assault on Caracas earlier this year, thus saving the mission to kidnap Venezuela’s leader and his own president a great deal of embarrassment.⁴

Trump could not stop describing the injuries Slover sustained, saying twice how his blood came “pouring down the aisle.” “The success of the entire mission and the lives of his fellow warriors hinge on Eric’s ability to take searing pain,” he said, wrapping national greatness in the form of the strapping but wounded frame before him.⁵

No matter though, Trump was giving out medals like the former game show host he is — another MOH to 100-year-old Capt. Royce Williams, whose 1952 solo dogfight in Korea was kept secret so as not to inflame the Cold War. (Trump, ironically, or maybe not, also failed to mention the reason it was kept secret: the dogfight was with Soviet aircraft that were not officially supposed to be in Korea, and thus suppressed to avoid escalating the Cold War.) He gave a Purple Heart, an Air Force Legion of Merit, and — why the hell not! — a Presidential Medal of Freedom to the goalie of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey team.

These decorated bodies — wounded pilots, fallen soldiers, heroic rescuers — formed the positive mirror image of the butchered civilian victims. Together, they mapped the full spectrum: those whose deaths sanctify the nation, those whose injuries justify its retaliatory force, and those whose destruction is implied as necessary to secure both.

The speech functioned less as governance than as a sorting ritual. And the sorting did not stop at migrants or foreign enemies. Democrats, “pro-crime” liberals, sanctuary-city officials, “open borders politicians,” the parents of transgender children, even judges and legislators who declined to stand were rhetorically folded into the same zone of threat as cartel leaders and alleged killers. “How do you not stand?” Trump demanded of the Democrats, after recounting yet another killing. The question was not rhetorical. It was disciplinary.

It hardly mattered that many Democrats stood to applaud his threats of another imminent war in Iran, and his grisly recounting of the return of the bodies of Israeli hostages. They remained, in his formulation, a threat. “These people are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy ... Boy, oh boy. 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, huh?”

When that logic is territorialized — when the line between protected life and disposable life is mapped onto detention centers, mass deportation infrastructure, and militarized borders — necropolitics converges with what Giorgio Agamben called the camp: the space where law is suspended and human beings are reduced to “bare life,” alive but politically null. The United States has built such spaces before. It is expanding immigration detention now — some 73,000 people are already reported to be in inside, with billions more dollars worth of warehouse detention centers on the way.

Trump did not have to utter the phrase for what these are: concentration camps. Last night, he attempted something more foundational. He tried to condition an audience to accept the architecture that makes them possible. We’ll see how it plays.

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1 The joint address to Congress that newly elected presidents have given in the first year of their term is not technically a SOTU. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

2 Stephen Miller’s my guess.

3 In October, at that strange summit of all the generals in Quantico, Trump claimed, “You know, we had 11,488 murderers allowed into our country by this guy who had no clue." As Zach Roberts reported, the number he had used up until that point, “13,099” was also fake, drawn from a letter released by ICE that included all non-detained individuals who had entered the country with homicide convictions since at least 1984. Absent any source for the statistic, it seems clear that the new number was simply a neo-Nazi code: 14 stands for the “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan. 88 means “Heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. There is no evidence that immigrants of any kind commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the U.S. Indeed, both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population.

4 Watching that section, I couldn't help but think of Smedley Butler, who, as readers of Gangsters of Capitalism know, tried to refuse his first of two Medals of Honor. That’s because he got it for the invasion of Veracruz, Mexico, an atrocity in which the U.S. Marines and Navy Bluejackets fought women, children, and elderly men left to defend the port city after the withdrawal of President Victoriano Huerta’s federales. It was the most awarded episode in American history — 56 Medals of Honor alone were given for the occupation of Veracruz — not in spite of its embarrassing nature but to distract from it. As Butler wrote his mother: “I, even in my most puffed up moments, can not remember a single action ... that in the slightest degree warranted such a decoration ... I did my duty as best I could in Vera Cruz but there was absolutely nothing heroic in it.”

5 In addition to Mbembe, Trump’s speechwriters would do well to read his source texts in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, not to mention some other theorists of fascism.

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