Donald Trump wants us to believe he can go on for ever, in almost every sense. His White House team briefed the media ahead of this year’s State of the Union that his speech might last two hours or more – though in the end he managed a mere hour and 47 minutes, still the longest address in USA’s history.

But the President would also like us to believe that he’s eyeing up staying in office for a third or even fourth term, even though doing so is barred by the Constitution and rendered unlikely by his advanced years. Trump, at 79, is already the oldest man to be elected president, and despite his protestations otherwise, is clearly showing his age.

That didn’t stop Trump quipping during his speech on Tuesday night that this should already be his third term – a typical bit of goading that neatly manages to imply, falsely, that Trump “really” won the 2020 election, and that he should be capable of ignoring or rewriting the Constitution to stay in office, because he’s just so great.

Trump is trying to show us that he still has the juice. The problem for the President was that the more of his speech that you watched, the less that this seemed to be the case. By this point, the fact that Trump’s speech was riddled with falsehoods almost goes without saying. It’s just what we’ve come to expect at this point.

Trump told Americans that petrol prices were sometimes lower than $2 a gallon, when they’re typically just under $3. He claimed all sorts of household items – beef, eggs, other groceries – were much cheaper, while they’re getting more expensive. He made outlandish claims about wars he’d stopped, and how many millions of lives he’d already saved by doing so.

This is all the kind of stuff that Trump likes to call “fake news” when it comes from his opponents, but it’s old news, too – and it’s not clear that any Americans believe him any more. Trump’s approval ratings are at their lowest level in his second term, and his approval is negative on most issues (even immigration, long his best issue, has now turned negative according to some polling). He can tell America that the cost of living crisis is solved all he likes, but they know it isn’t.

That left Donald Trump looking for another story to grab the nation’s attention. He certainly doesn’t want America to be talking about the Epstein files, especially why documents relating to his own conduct mysteriously seem to be missing from the disclosures. He doesn’t want to talk too much about his recent loss, over tariffs, at the Supreme Court. His deployments of ICE agents to cities across America – most recently Minneapolis – had dominated the narrative, but he has been forced to walk these back amid a huge public backlash. Trump needed a new narrative.

The President threw all sorts of things at the wall, but it’s not clear any of them stuck. Trump spent six minutes talking about the US men’s hockey team’s gold medal, bringing out much of the team. He boasted about cutting immigration. He brought in various war heroes and singled them out for applause.

Most bizarrely, Trump often included the families of murder victims in his speech, including Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika. With those relatives present in the room, he recounted lurid details of their killing, dwelling on particularities about flowing blood, turning the President’s set piece to Congress into a bizarre horror scene.

Inevitably, Trump also aimed for outrage, baiting and provoking Democrats, claiming they “cheated” to get elected and making gratuitously offensive comments about Somali-Americans. While this shouldn’t be allowed to become normal, though, it is certainly familiar. No one heard Trump say something they hadn’t before, unless they’ve never heard him before.

America is realising that Trump is failing – just look at the polls

The UK’s plan for civilians in a war is terrifying – you’re on your own

Trump has turned the US into a laughing stock

I interviewed Andrew. He ‘prince-splained’ amid his absurd teddies

Like him or loathe him, Donald Trump’s gift is usually that he soaks up all of the oxygen in the room. He pulls the focus and gains all of our attention. We might not like the news stories he creates, but they are generally impossible to ignore.

This speech was different. Those watching it live must surely have started to find themselves… bored. Few of us listen to a speech and find ourselves wishing it could have been longer, and with more digressions, but this was a long grab bag of comments that never really found a point.

Trump wanted to outrage us, to rally his own side, and to show he’s only just getting started – to threaten a third term. Instead, he just looked like he was running out of steam.

© iNews