Glory to Ukraine!
Glory to the defenders of Ukraine and all modern civilization!
Today in the issue:
- The speech of Democratic Senator Adam Schiff in the Senate on February 24, 2026.
I promised to translate this speech as soon as Senator Schiff spoke a few hours before the 47th president’s address to Congress. But then we had to discuss what Trump said, and then the war with Iran began. However, Senator Schiff’s speech has not aged at all. It is very relevant. And it is about the real state of affairs in the country and the state of the Union.
▶ Senator Adam Schiff:
“Mr. Chairman,
tonight, just a few steps from here, the president will address Congress and the American people. He will depict a picture of strength, prosperity, and national revival. He will credit himself for successes he did not achieve and reject responsibility for crises he created.
And he will tell us that America has never been greater than now. But the American people deserve the truth. And the truth is, over the past year, we have not moved closer to creating a more perfect union.
Tragically, the opposite has occurred. Our division has only intensified. Our founders understood something important when they chose the words “a more perfect union.”
They did not envisage achieving perfection. They envisioned something more realistic, more attainable — a striving for a more perfect union, a constant effort to move the country forward, a hard, slow, and sometimes painful process. They understood that America is not a finished product, but a beautiful ongoing experiment in self-government requiring hard work and constant perseverance.
For 250 years — through wars and depressions, through slavery and the Jim Crow era, through periods of bitter division and difficult reconciliation — Americans honored our founders’ intent and moved the nation forward. We stumbled, we fell short of our own promises, and at times we failed to live up to our ideals. But ultimately, we always bent the arc of our national history toward justice, honesty, and a more perfect union.
And yet, from the very moment he imposed himself on our public life, Donald Trump did everything possible to reverse this progress. Perhaps intentionally. Perhaps due to some character flaw. But by all possible means and at every opportunity, he sought to divide us.
Today, using fewer words than the president will use tonight, I want to talk about some of the instances where President Trump not only failed to advance our union but did a great deal to divide us further.
I have served in the Capitol for over two decades and have visited the capitals of our friends and some of our adversaries around the world. I have seen firsthand that despite having the most powerful and boldest military in the world, America’s primary strategic advantage is not the might of our weapons nor the size of our aircraft carriers.
It’s the strength of our alliances around the world.
The network of partnerships we built after World War II—NATO, our Pacific alliances, our relationships in the Western Hemisphere—acts as a force multiplier. They help maintain peace. It is thanks to them that a nation of 340 million people can project power and values on a planet of over eight billion.
And how tragically President Trump systematically dismantles the advantage these allies provide us. He insulted the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—our closest democratic allies—not to mention countries like Denmark.
He questioned whether America would defend NATO members under Article V—the collective defense clause that has maintained peace in much of Europe for 75 years.
He treated long-standing security commitments as racketeering, demanding payment as if our allies were vassal states, not partners.
And he did all this while praising Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators.
The result? Our allies do not trust us, and our most powerful adversaries do not fear us.
And this makes America less safe.
When the next crisis comes—and it will come—perhaps even provoked by this president, we will find ourselves in isolation that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago.
This weakens and endangers our union.
But the strength of our union is not only in our military might or our connections abroad. It also lies in the strength of our intellect here at home.
I recall a dialogue from a television series about Chernobyl.
A scientist tells a Soviet bureaucrat: every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
This administration has accumulated a debt to the truth that will take generations to pay off.
In recent years, the President of the United States has claimed that people should inject disinfectant to cure COVID; that wind turbines cause cancer; that climate change is a hoax invented by China; that using Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism—this list can go on endlessly.
And over the past year, we have witnessed systematic attacks on scientists at the CDC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institutes of Health—career professionals pushed out of public service for the apparent sole “crime” of publishing research results that displease the president; persecuted for speaking truth to power, for respecting facts and science; or, in what seems particularly perverse and cruel in this administration, simply fired seemingly for amusement.
We have seen university researchers lose federal funding not because their work lacks scientific value, but because their findings contradict preferred political narratives.
We have seen attacks on vaccines and changes in our public health system that have led to unnecessary disease outbreaks. This president certainly has not made America great again, but he has managed to make measles great again.
And when experts cautiously try to correct these false claims, they are attacked, have their personal information exposed, and are threatened.
This is part of a conscious cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy. When you undermine the authority of experts, when you treat all opinions as equal regardless of evidence, when you replace scientists with sycophants, you make people vulnerable to charlatans and demagogues. You make democracy itself impossible because democracy requires an informed civic society capable of distinguishing truth from lies.
The debt to truth will inevitably have to be paid, and when that happens, our country will pay a huge price.
A little over a year ago, Los Angeles County faced one of the most devastating disasters in our country’s history. Entire neighborhoods were burned and destroyed by wildfires—fires of a scale we have never seen before on the suburban streets of Southern California.
The loss of loved ones, homes, businesses, precious historical items—all gone in an instant and still weighing heavily on us.
Since then, I have spoken with people who survived these fires and began to rebuild their lives—or tried to do so—only to see their insurance companies refuse to renew coverage.
Due to intensifying drought and longer dry seasons, insurance companies are refusing to insure the same homes and businesses they covered just a few years ago.
They see the same thing we do: that this might not be the last tragedy of its kind in our hills within our lifetime.
This is the climate crisis in human terms, and this administration’s response has been to make the situation catastrophically worse. President Trump repealed fuel efficiency standards, withdrew the country from international climate agreements, opened untouched federal lands for additional drilling, and, as we saw last week with the repeal of the so-called “endangerment finding,” effectively stripped the EPA of the authority to regulate carbon emissions.
A headline in the New York Times last month literally stated: “EPA Will No Longer Consider Saved Lives in Setting Air Pollution Rules.”
This sounds like a parody, but unfortunately, these destructive efforts are real.
And all of this is happening at a time when summers are getting hotter every year, some winters colder, wildfires rage, hurricanes intensify, and insurance markets collapse.
The president calls it energy dominance. But dominance over what? The laws of physics? The carbon cycle?
Here’s what’s really happening: we’re sacrificing long-term prosperity for short-term profit.
We’re increasing costs for American families through higher insurance premiums, higher food prices, and higher recovery expenses after disasters.
We’re ceding global leadership in clean energy and technology—the defining economic opportunity of the 21st century—to China and Europe.
And we’re doing all this while pretending the house isn’t on fire.
Residents of Los Angeles know this better than anyone.
As do millions of Americans experiencing droughts, floods, and heatwaves that a generation ago would have seemed impossible.
The climate doesn’t care about your politics. The debt will have to be paid—whether you believe it or not.
Changing climate is not the only threat facing our communities in Donald Trump’s America.
After January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when Americans of different political beliefs condemned political violence. The attack on the Capitol was so brazen and so shocking that even some of the president’s allies momentarily found moral bearings and said: “I’m not part of this.”
But that moment has clearly passed.
Now we have a president who pardoned the January 6 rioters, calling them patriots, and brought some of them into his administration—including a person caught that day yelling at a police officer: “kill him.”
We have an administration that sees white nationalist extremism as some sort of core competency in their hiring process (into this administration).
And an administration that directs federal law enforcement resources not at combating criminals committing violent crimes but at persecuting political opponents, deploying massive forces of immigration police against innocent people and deporting children and grandmothers.
At the same time, we witness the dismantling of the public health infrastructure built over decades to protect Americans from pandemics.
We’ve seen emergency budgets shrink and the people leading these programs pushed out of government.
The message is clear.
If you’re a violent extremist supporting the president—you get a pardon.
But if you’re a public health official who takes their job seriously—you receive a layoff notice.
This makes Americans less protected from terrorism, diseases, and internal threats indifferent to party affiliation.
Security and attacks on police officers are not partisan issues. At least, they shouldn’t be.
But when a president values loyalty over competence, when he considers protection as something selectively granted to supporters rather than a universal obligation to the people, he fundamentally misunderstands the government’s primary duty.
And the necessity to protect society is far from the only thing he misunderstands.
From the birth of our nation, our founders were obsessed with preventing tyranny and the emergence of a new king, a new despot.
They created a system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary.
They understood that the greatest threat to freedom is not an external invasion.
It’s the concentration of power in the hands of one person or one faction.
This president systematically dismantled these safeguards during his second term.
The Department of Justice should be independent, fighting for justice without fear or favor.
But under this administration, it has become a tool of presidential vengeance—a sword and shield for the president, initiating investigations against critics and halting cases against allies.
His Department of Justice—and I say “his” because it no longer represents the public or justice and is run by his former lawyers on his criminal cases—represents only his personal interests.
It attempted to charge two of my Senate colleagues for stating the obvious truth: that military personnel can refuse to follow illegal orders.
Moreover, they are obliged to do just that.
Their oath, after all, is to the Constitution, not to the person of the president.
It’s hard to overstate what an abuse of power it is to attempt to bring such a charge.
Attempting to imprison your political opponents is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.
Career civil servants across the federal government—people who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations with professionalism and integrity—are being purged for insufficient loyalty to the person of the president.
Inspectors General who uncover wrongdoing and corruption are being fired.
Whistleblowers are intimidated.
We are witnessing the transformation of the federal government from a public trust to a personal possession.
And there is one thing that should frighten me and should frighten every American, regardless of party affiliation.
Once these norms are broken, they are extraordinarily difficult to restore.
Once you establish that a president can use the Department of Justice to punish enemies, every future president may succumb to this temptation.
Once you establish that civil servants must demonstrate personal loyalty rather than professional competence, you replace the rule of law with the rule of one man.
Our founders warned us about this.
Their aspiration for a more perfect union depended on a conscious renunciation of the concentration of power.
Now we live in our founders’ fears and see this threat rapidly growing.
And yet the destruction of these institutions is not the only cost.
When the government becomes an instrument of personal power rather than public service, it affects everything—economy, innovation, the country’s ability to attract talent.
For generations, the United States has been a magnet for the world’s most talented people. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists – people came here because they believed in the American idea: that hard work, talent, and imagination can lead to success.
But when the government starts treating science as a political enemy, when universities are attacked for academic freedom, when foreign students and researchers face suspicion and bureaucratic hurdles, this magnet begins to lose its strength.
Talent has a choice.
And increasingly that choice is not America.
This has real economic consequences.
Countries that attract the best researchers and engineers are creating the technologies of the future.
They are creating the companies of the future.
And they are creating the jobs of the future.
By repelling talent and undermining trust in science, this administration is literally ceding economic leadership of the 21st century to other countries.
But perhaps nowhere is the misunderstanding of economics more evident than in the trade policy of this administration.
Tariffs are not some abstract penalty paid by foreign states.
They are a tax on American consumers.
When the administration imposes tariffs on imported goods, it is American businesses that pay more for raw materials and components.
And it is American families that pay more at stores.
This is not a theory.
This is basic economics.
Yet the administration continues to impose tariffs as a one-size-fits-all policy tool, ignoring lessons from history and economists’ warnings.
The result is retaliatory measures from our trading partners, hitting American farmers, manufacturers, and workers.
We have seen this before.
Farmers in the Midwest have lost markets built over decades.
Businesses face uncertainty, causing them to delay investments and hiring.
And ultimately it is American families who pay the price.
And here is the heart of the matter – the main way President Trump has worsened the state of our union.
He took a diverse, complex, and sometimes conflicted country – as it has always been – and instead of trying to unite it, he did more than anyone in our history to tear it apart.
He governs through fear and scapegoating.
Immigrants are enemies.
Vulnerable children are frauds.
Political opponents are domestic enemies.
The media is “fake news.”
Anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor.
Think about what that means for all of us.
Families have stopped communicating.
Friendships have been destroyed.
Communities have shut themselves off or turned against each other.
The basic trust that allows democracy to function – the assumption that even amid disagreements, we share common values and commitments – is breaking down.
I have been in public service long enough to remember a time when Democrats and Republicans could work together without political assaults.
When you could disagree without questioning each other’s patriotism or humanity.
When progress could be made on big and small issues.
That world has shrunk significantly, largely because of this president.
The great tragedy, of course, is that America is facing real problems that require real solutions.
The cost of everyday life, housing, healthcare, education, energy, infrastructure, and the inevitable challenges of the climate crisis.
These are complex issues, and reasonable people can disagree on how to address them.
But we will not be able to solve them and prepare for the future if we cannot talk to each other.
We will not be able to solve them if we view politics as war, not negotiation.
We will not be able to solve them if the president claims to love America while constantly attacking Americans.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said.
It was true then, it is true now.
So, tonight, President Trump will deliver the State of the Union address.
He will claim that America is strong, thriving, and united, but unfortunately, he has made us weaker abroad, more divided at home, less trustworthy, less prosperous, less safe, and less free than when he took office.
The state of our Union is not strong because of him.
It is fragile. Deeply, deeply fragile.
But we must not forget that fragility is not the same as weakness.
We have been broken before and found ways to recover.
We have lost our way and found the courage to chart a new course.
We have forgotten our higher ideals, yet always ultimately remembered who we are.
We cannot view a more perfect Union as a final destination.
A more perfect Union is a direction.
It is a choice we make, generation after generation: to see each other not as enemies, but as friends, as partners in the boldest experiment in democracy the world has ever seen.
It’s the work of building longer bridges instead of taller walls between parties, between communities, between the America we are and the America we could be.
It’s acknowledging that the diversity of our nation is not our weakness.
It is the source of our strength, our creativity, our resilience.
A more perfect Union means families not going broke because of illness.
It means children who can breathe clean air and inherit a habitable planet.
It means immigrants welcomed for their contributions, not condemned for their origins.
It means learning from history and forging a fairer path for the future.
It means justice that works equally for the strong and the weak.
It means scientists free to seek truth without fear.
It means alliances that amplify our influence, not isolation that diminishes it.
It means an America where disagreement does not mean demonization, where debate does not mean destruction, where we can stand firm in our beliefs while recognizing the humanity of those who disagree with us.
None of this is easy.
And if the last decade of American life has proven anything, none of this is guaranteed.
The Constitution gives us the tools, but we must do the work.
The founders lit the flame, but we must keep it burning.
They started the work, and we must continue it.
Tonight, the president will try to convince you that all is well.
I ask you to trust your eyes, trust your experience, trust the evidence.
And then I ask you to trust in another thing – your own power: the power to organize, vote, speak the truth, run for elected office, demand accountability from leaders, the power to see what we have lost and decide to fight with all our might to get it back.
Because a more perfect Union does not depend on one person or president, no matter how much they want it to.
It depends on teachers who refuse to teach lies.
It depends on students who do not abandon their dreams.
It depends on journalists who keep asking questions, scientists who uphold facts, neighbors who do not betray each other, Americans who do not accept that this is all we are capable of.
It depends on you, on me, on every one of us.
The work is hard. Progress is slow. Disappointment is real.
But possibilities are also real.
Hopes are also real.
This extraordinary, incredible, beautiful experiment called America is also real.
If we have the courage to believe in it again and the determination to make it real, the pursuit of a more perfect Union must continue.
It must. And it continues with us.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”
There are 1,047 days left until the end of the story entitled “Fear: Trump in the White House” © (Bob Woodward’s book published in 2018).
Thank you to everyone who read. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones. Take care of each other, help each other. Wishing everyone good health.
Ultimately, what happens in the world depends on us. On whether we fight against evil, do good, remain mere observers, passively wait and believe that someone somewhere will decide something for us, or fight against evil and do everything possible for Good to prevail.
We must not allow evil to triumph. The victory of evil would mean the end of the world we live in. We cannot allow that. Especially now.
Ukrainian friends, I embrace and love you all. Take care of each other, I urge you very much.
Ukraine is and will always be.
And evil will be defeated and punished. It will certainly happen.
