President Biden gave Ukraine top billing and said fighting inflation is the “top priority” during his State of the Union address Tuesday. But he also spoke at length about building a unity agenda and — very briefly — called for passage of election reform legislation.
Three years ago, House Democrats first introduced the For the People Act, giving the sweeping election overhaul legislation the symbolic designation “HR 1” — the first bill offered by the newly empowered Democratic majority. Three years and multiple versions later, the legislation remains mired in a partisan dispute, with Republicans in near unanimous opposition to one of the Democrats’ lead issues.
Biden called for passage of the latest version of the bill, as well as other election reforms, during his speech, but spent just 35 seconds discussing those priorities.
“The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote — and to have it counted. And, look, it’s under assault,” he said, about 45 minutes into his hour-long address. “In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote — we’ve been there before — but to subvert the entire election. We cannot let this happen.”
“Tonight I call on the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans know who is funding our elections.”
The Freedom to Vote Act is the successor to the For the People Act. It was negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, in hopes of winning enough Republican backers to overcome a filibuster. But that bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore elements of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court, remain blocked.
The other bill Biden mentioned is a favorite of those who want more transparency in campaign financing. If enacted, it would require groups like super PACs and “ dark money ” organizations to disclose many of their donors.
Biden spent far more time talking about opportunities for bipartisanship. (The words “bipartisan” and “unity” appear a combined seven times in the official transcript.)
Shortly after concluding his section on Ukraine and fighting authoritarianism, Biden thanked members of both parties for their work to pass the massive bipartisan infrastructure bill last year, and asked Congress to follow it up by enacting what he called the Bipartisan Innovation Act. He was likely referring to the America COMPETES Act, a measure designed to make the United States more competitive with China. While 19 Republicans voted for the Senate version of the bill, only one backed the House version. Lawmakers must work out differences between the chambers.
The president returned to the theme later, noting he signed 80 bipartisan bills into law in 2021 and calling for “a unity agenda for the nation” with four primary themes:
- Ending the opioid epidemic.
- Tackling mental health, particularly among children.
- Supporting veterans.
- Bringing an end to cancer.
At one point, while speaking about the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden noted that Americans have been deeply divided on the issue, generally along party lines, and called for a moment “to reset.”
“Let’s stop looking at Covid-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: a God-awful disease. Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: fellow Americans,” he said. “We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward — on Covid-19 and other issues we must face together.”
There were even moments when Biden appeared to be directly appealing to Republicans and moderate Democrats at the expense of his party’s base, such as when he spoke against progressives’ “defund the police” movement.
"We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police,” he said. “Fund them with the resources and training they need to protect our communities."
Throughout the speech, Republicans seemed willing to join Biden’s call for unity. Traditionally, there’s a clear line between the parties, as the president’s party stands and applauds throughout while the opposing party sits on their collective hands. But this year, both parties appeared to offer enthusiastic support far more than in the recent past.
As he neared the final lines of his first State of the Union address, Biden spoke optimistically of Americans’ ability to defend the nation’s shared values:
“We will meet the test. To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity. We will save democracy.”
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.