Alternative States of the Union

På dagen hvor den amerikanske præsident afholder den traditionelle State of the Union tale for kongressen i Washington, har pro-democracy organisationer rundt omkring i landet arrangeret alternative begivenheder. Nedenfor har jeg valgt at gengive en del af historiker Heather Cox Richardsons tale. Teksten er en let redigeret transkription fra YouTube.

“And yet, having put together that sign of all the things that are wrong with America right now, with the United States of America’s government, the American people have over the course of the last year found their agency and are starting to push back. And with them are institutions, institutions that are finding their feet after the initial onslaught of the Trump administration.

So for example, the juggernaut of the Department of Government Efficiency operated primarily in secret. If you remember, there was even somebody on social media who made her whole handle about who actually runs the Department of Government Efficiency because the administration kept refusing to let anyone know that. In part because they were quite demonstrably operating outside American law. They refused to be answerable to American law by doing things like letting anyone know who could be sued. One of the reasons that ICE agents cover their faces is that when they commit violence, I whom do you charge? Because their faces are covered.

Similarly, the Department of Justice tried to make it very, very hard for anyone to know who was doing what and what those people were doing. The American courts have in fact continued to hold the Department of Justice accountable for what it did and just recently have uncovered more and more of those records and are requiring um Elon Musk to testify in some of the cases against the Department of Government Efficiency. The courts are standing behind the law and are really trying to make the law hold. the lower courts primarily.

Breaking Authoritarianism

And the American people are forcing that through lawsuits and through um through in the journalists are forcing it through their required release of information under um the under FOYA under the release of information act. So the American people are doing that. At the same time, the courts are requiring the administration again and again to say who did things like sign deportation orders, who ordered planes to take off when the courts had told them not to. The courts really are um forcing the administration to answer to the rule of law. That is not something that’s necessarily getting a lot of attention, but they really are holding at the lower levels. And that is not just justices who have been appointed by Democratic presidents, but also by Republicans and even those appointed by Trump have often stood against the administration’s extra constitutional behavior. But the American people have also stood up to federal agents from ICE and the Border Patrol and they’ve done so very dramatically in Minneapolis.

But don’t forget Portland and don’t forget LA and don’t forget Chicago and don’t forget New York and don’t forget Maine and Nashville and all the many places where Americans stood up against the federal agents and stood up for their neighbors.

And they did so across gender lines and they did so across race lines and they did so across class lines and they did so across religious lines and they did so across age lines. This has really, really, really mattered for the health of our democracy.

And this comes from two places. It comes from the extraordinary push back to Tesla. It comes from and Target. It comes from the extraordinary push back to Trump’s attempt to tell you – remember the hands-off rally of last April – his attempt to attack our agencies that the United States wanted. In April we organized to say take your hands off the National Weather Service, you know, US aid and so on.

But by June 14th, when Trump made a march in favor of the US Army appear to be his own a military parade for himself, you got the birth of No Kings and the idea of No Kings rallies. Those No Kings rallies and the push back that you’ve seen across the country. The visibility brigades for example, who are standing on overpasses.

The everyday push back that people have organized around the country really mattered going into the push back of each state doing their push back in very specific ways. You see, you got the frogs in Florida. You got Pritsker and the Chicagoans standing up on a neighborhood basis. And then in and in other places as well. I’m trying to stay under my two hours here. You also had in Minneapolis very poignantly, I think, the networks that were put in place during the um Black Lives Matter rally of summer 2020 being reactivated in order to stand against the federal agents who were coming in to that city. And it’s pretty clear, I think, that Donald Trump has been trying to force Minneapolis and Minnesota to its knees because Minnesota is the one Midwestern state that it continues to vote Democratic. He has gone out of his way to say that in fact Minnesota has voted for him in the last three presidential elections. That is a lie. It has voted for the Democrat in the last three presidential elections. And as such, Trump is really, really working to hurt Minnesota through the Boundary Waters, through his attacks on farming in the state, […] and with his attacks on Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the areas around it.

By standing up to him as neighbors, what the people in Minneapolis did was give a lesson for the rest of the country of how you break authoritarianism. And it was a really, really effective lesson because so many people kept thinking it didn’t matter if you stood on the streets. It didn’t matter if you went to the rallies.

And what the people in Minneapolis have done by withstanding ICE and by driving the popularity of those federal agents through the floor, what they have done is they have given the world a model for resisting authoritarianism. So the American people have stood back on that even when it cost the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti – two heartbreaking deaths along with so many others, but ones that illustrated to the administration that they had lost the support of white suburbanites. And that was a huge moment for the administration and led to the plummeting of Trump’s popularity.

Democracy Begins at Home

The other thing that the American people pushing back has shown to the world and to American democracy is that democracy begins at home.

It begins in your towns.

It begins in your neighborhood.

It even begins in your house.

And it grows from there to your state.

And it grows from there to the national level.

As Americans have organized to push back against the Doge cuts, to push back against Donald Trump, to push back against ICE, they have forced their elected officials to listen and to do what the American people wanted. People tend to think that this is not happening, but it is. in terms of the cuts that Doge made and that Donald Trump insisted on putting in his 2026 budget. In fact, the budget that has almost entirely pushed through Congress at this point has rejected almost all those cuts. There are still cuts to it. It’s not the budget that that Americans wanted, but it’s certainly not the budget that Musk or Trump wanted.

The one exception of course to the passage of that budget is the budget for the Department of Homeland Security that did not pass because Democrats who were going to let it go through looked at the opposition to the passage of that budget and they said not on our watch. You cannot put more money behind the Department of Homeland Security which is not just ICE and Border Patrol or Customs and Border Protection. It’s also FEMA. It’s also Transportation Security Administration. It’s also our Coast Guard. Shout out to the Coasties as always. But before we fund that, we are going to insist that you reform um ICE, that you reform the procedures there. And in the hearings that have been happening on the Hill, you’ve been hearing just how bad that system is.

What that reformation is going to look like at this point probably is not going to be defunding it alto together because under the one big beautiful bill act the Republicans did in fact fund it through September 30th 2029, but they will be able to demand at the very least that the administration adhere to the constitution which by the way is primarily what the Democrats are demanding.

 You also can see that Christy Noem and Corey Lewandowski announced after the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t funded that they would stop um TSA from using TSA PreCheck. And that looked like it was going to snarl airports all over the country because so many people now use PreCheck. and and the administration instantly walked that back and said, “No, no, no. We’re not actually going to do that.” That’s because they knew how unpopular that would be. That’s because of you all.  

You’re seeing it not only in that budget, but you’re also seeing it in the push back against ICE and in increasingly vocal opposition to Donald Trump, not only among the Democrats, although they are very much more out there than they have been, but also among Republicans who previously would not have done that because as Trump’s popularity is tanking, they are feeling more and more able to speak out in a way that they weren’t able to do that before.

You’re also seeing popular opposition in the increased popular push back on Trump that you’re seeing in art, you’re seeing it among artists, you’re seeing it among actors, you’re certainly now seeing it among musicians like U2, like Bruce Springsteen who is now going on a tour, an anti-ICE tour, and has just published um The Streets of Minneapolis, a song about what happened in in Minneapolis. A lot of people are um are issuing new songs about what is happening.

There is just this sort of general sense that momentum has shifted. And as that momentum has shifted, you’re seeing things like you’re going to see tonight with a number of Democrats not going to the State of the Union, but instead going to alternatives, including the State of the Swamp, which is being held at the National Press conference.

So, Americans are starting to find their agency and they as they do so, the American electeds are listening. So, where does that leave us for this year’s State of the Union? Our democracy is absolutely in peril, but the American people have rediscovered their agency. They have rediscovered what the Constitution means. They have rediscovered what it means to live in a democracy and they are insisting on having their voices heard. This seems to me on February 24th, 2026, the night of the alternative state of the union, the official state of the union and Heather Cox Richardson’s state of the union. not at all a bad place to be because the American people are rediscovering the true meaning of what it means to live in a democracy, the responsibility of living in a democracy and what it what American democracy really stands for.

With that, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it strikes me that the state of the American Union is

improving.

And there you go. Keep the faith everybody. Thank you for being here.”