Source: Fox News
by Lee Hartley Carter
“If you tuned in last night hoping for a softer, more conciliatory Donald Trump, a president shaped by polls, eager to reach across the aisle, you were watching the wrong show. The 2026 State of the Union wasn’t a pivot. It was a power move. A flex. A signal that the old rules: measured rhetoric, polite bipartisanship — are dead. Trump continues to write new rules in real time, as audaciously as he’s writing everything else. From the opening line, ‘a speech to set the record straight,’ Trump made it clear: he wasn’t there to negotiate facts. He was there to define them. He understands something that confounds his opponents: in contemporary American politics, a good story doesn’t just compete with statistics, it obliterates them. While critics were fact-checking, Trump was storytelling. And in today’s politics, a story like his can outweigh nuance or evidence.” (02/25/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/lee-carter-trumps-state-union-wasnt-pivot-power-play