The Founders Show kicks off with an interview with Congresswoman Julia Letlow, candidate for the United States Senate in the May 16 Republican primary.  We talk about why flood insurance for Louisiana is more important than a perfect American Conservative Union rating, her endorsement from President Trump, and why she decided to challenge Bill Cassidy.

At the end of the show, we talked to another candidate, former Jefferson Parish President John Young, who is running in the May 16 Republican primary for the LA Public Service Commission to succeed the term limited Eric Skrmetta. President Trump cited the need for data centers to install their own power plants, an idea that began at the behest of the LA PSC with Meta.  Young talks about how Louisiana is setting the trends on data centers nationally, and why who holds this office is extremely important.  He repeats the often given quit in the tech industry that the Interstate 20 corridor is starting to be called “AI-20”.

In between, Hy and Christopher argue about the meaning of the State of the Union address— and whether we should go back to the tradition of our Founders and abolish the verbal speech.

As Christopher writes: End the SOTU Addresses

At February 24th State of the Union address, the New Orleans-born, Houston-area Congressman Al Green defied the ‘polite silence’ instructions of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with a protest sign, “Black people aren’t apes.”  Before he was escorted out of the chamber, he answered—before the national cameras—a tweet that Donald Trump forwarded on his TruthSocial account depicting Michelle and Barack Obama  as apes in a jungle.  Green set the tone of the evening with Trump respondingly calling Democrats “crazy”, “evil”, and “ what’s wrong with you?”  Prominent Democrats responded with heckles of their own. 

Very little of the 2026 State of the Union address talked about policy, or even provided any facts about the State of the Union of any particular relevance to the national conversation other than the price of gasoline at the pump. The utter farce staged last Tuesday may signal that time has come to finally get rid the body politic of this horrible Stentorian tradition begun by another racist president, Woodrow Wilson, and return to the practice which stretched from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt of simply the White House sending to Congress a written report on the State of the Union.  Few read those presidential missives today, but they actually provide quite informative historical snapshots on a year-by-year basis on the conditions within the United States. They also show a remarkable insight into the thinking of government leaders at the time. The written SOTUs are serious documents for serious men; in other words, the opposite of what the verbal SOTUs have been for decades. 

Not all the evening was nonsensical.   Trump provided a few heartfelt moments in his address, but these moments had little to do with the current State of the Union. No matter what one’s political persuasion, only the heartless refused to cheer as the US Men’s Hockey Team marched in donning their newly-won gold medals. A tear came in the eyes of most Americans as the Purple Heart was pinned on the lapel of the hero National Guardsman or when the Congressional Medal of Honor was hung on the neck on the 100-year-old veteran Korean War-era Navy pilot. Without those moments, the insults, and the theatrical procession of the Olympic team into the US House gallery with the promise of a Presidential Medal of Freedom to be awarded to Connor Hellebuyck (the goalie for the Winnipeg Jets), Trump’s actual SOTU Address comprised an actually rather short speech bared of much policy content, only approximately a half hour of the actual 1 hour and 48 minutes address. The President did speak of items of legislation already passed from taxes cuts to regulatory relief, as well as referencing the pending SAVE Act to require photo ID to vote (although his dig at his friend “the communist” Mayor Mandami requiring a photo ID and a Social Security card to get a job to shovel snow but not go to the ballot box did draw a laugh).  The President also referenced his Trump RX program claiming that he had lowered prices by 100% (though one doubts drugs are now free), and Trump emphasized his support of the medical transparency bill (with a flash at his bette noir Sen. Bill Cassidy, who has championed and authored this legislation for more than a decade).   In fact, the President’s only statutory request of Congress was to provide more government funds to a retirement subsidy program for those without a 401(k) or pension, originally passed by DEMOCRATS!

Other than to condemn the Supreme Court and defend his love tariffs, Trump really did not introduce any NEW big ideas in his speech, which continues an unfortunately common bipartisan trend for State of the Union addresses, especially when one considers that a competitive midterm election will occur in only eight months.  Nevertheless, Trump‘s theatrical gestures—full of sound and fury signifying little—actually worked.   Like his recent predecessors, many of whom also spent an hour and a half essentially speaking meaningless drivel (yet with considerably more respect for the nation’s governing institutions and its leaders than he), a CNN Poll revealed that 2/3 of those who heard the speech had a positive reaction, with just 1/3 garnering a negative reaction. With a little less policy content, and a little bit more visual histrionics of American heroism, Trump achieved basically the same as almost every state of the union address for the last half century… on steroids.  That is to say, the speech was essentially an evening of meaningless mutterings of partisan posturing. When Trump says that the American people were “winning too much… and were gonna win even more”, the showman elucidated what has been true since Woodrow Wilson began this ridiculous tendency to speak yearly before Congress. The last thing ever explained in the State of the Union address is the ‘state of the union’.   Of course, words uttered to truly discuss the current situation of the United States of America and how to solve it, that might cost votes.

While Trump ups the showmanship factor to an evermore ridiculous degree, every president since the advent of televised SOTUs— and pretty much since they returned to the floor of the House of Representatives since Woodrow Wilson— has employed the addresses as simple partisan theatre. When the annual verbal torture finally concludes, the public divides according to their prejudices in their reactions, watching from whatever choir to which they are preached, unwilling to question the two hours wasted. It’s just eight months until the midterm elections, and President Trump enjoyed the largest audience that any politician, much less he, will have before the election – all at the public expense.  It’s time for Congress to revoke the invitation for president to address them and simply say “put it in writing”.