[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 36 (Tuesday, February 24, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S638-S639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, tonight, just down the hall, the President
will stand before Congress and the American people. He will paint a
picture of strength, prosperity, and national renewal. He will claim
credit for successes he did not achieve and deny responsibility for
crises that he created. He will tell us that America has never been
greater, but the American people deserve the truth. And the truth is
that over the past year, we have not moved closer to forming a more
perfect Union. Tragically, it is quite the opposite. Our disunion has
only grown.
Our Founders understood something when they chose the words ``a more
perfect Union.'' They didn't contemplate achieving perfection. They
envisioned something more realistic, more achievable--the pursuit of a
more perfect Union, a constant effort to push the country forward, a
grinding, slow and sometimes painful process. They recognized that
America is not a finished product but a beautiful, ongoing experiment
in self-governance that requires hard work and constant perseverance.
For 250 years, through wars and depressions, through slavery and Jim
Crow, through periods of bitter division and hard-won reconciliation,
Americans have honored our Founders' intention and moved the Nation
forward. We have stumbled; we have fallen short; and at times, we have
failed to live up to our promise. But we have always eventually bent
the arc of our own national story towards justice, towards fairness,
and towards a more perfect Union.
And yet from the moment he inflicted himself on our public life,
Donald Trump has done everything possible to reverse that progress. By
design, it appears, by virtue of the product of some defect of
character perhaps, but in every way he can and every moment he can, he
has sought to divide us. Today, in fewer words than the President will
use tonight, I want to talk about some of the ways that President Trump
has not only failed to advance our Union, but done so much to bring
about our disunion.
Now, I have served in the Capitol for over two decades, and I have
visited the capitols of our friends and some of our adversaries across
the world. I have seen firsthand that, notwithstanding our possession
of the strongest and most courageous military in the world, America's
greatest strategic asset is not the might of our arms or size of our
aircraft carriers; it is the strength of the alliances we have around
the world.
The web of partnerships we built after World War II, NATO, our
Pacific alliances, our hemispheric relationships, they are force
multipliers. They help us keep the peace. They are the reason that a
nation of 340 million people can project power and values across a
globe of more than 8 billion. Yet, tragically, President Trump has
systematically taken apart the advantage these allies give us. He has
insulted the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, and the United
Kingdom--our closest democratic allies--not to mention countries like
Denmark.
He has questioned whether America would defend NATO members under
article V, the collective defense provision that has kept most of
Europe peaceful for 75 years. He has treated longstanding security
commitments as protection rackets, demanding payment as if our allies
were vassal states rather than partners. And he has done all this while
praising Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators.
The result? Our allies don't trust us, and our most powerful
adversaries don't fear us, and that makes America less safe.
When the next crisis comes--and it will come, and it may even be
precipitated by this President--we will find ourselves isolated in ways
that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. This weakens and
endangers our Union. But the power of our Union isn't just about the
strength of our military or our ties abroad. It is also
about the strength of our intellect here at home.
I find myself thinking about an exchange from the television series
on 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 run up a debt to the truth that will take
generations to repay.
Over the last several years, the President of the United States
suggested people inject bleach to cure COVID, that windmills cause
cancer, that climate change is a hoax invented by China, that Tylenol
use in pregnancy causes autism--the list goes on and on. And over this
past year, we have seen systematic attacks on scientists at CDC, at
NOAA, the EPA, and the NIH--career professionals driven from public
service for the crime of publishing findings the President doesn't
like, DOGE'd for speaking truth to power, for respecting facts and
science, or simply--seemingly and perversely in this cruelest of
administrations--fired for the apparent fun of it.
We have seen university researchers lose Federal funding, not because
their work lacks merit, but because their conclusions contradict
preferred political narratives.
We have seen attacks on vaccines and changes to our public health
system that have caused needless outbreaks of disease. This President
has most assuredly not made America great again, but he has managed to
make measles great again. And when experts gently try to correct these
falsehoods, they are attacked, doxed, and threatened. This is part of a
deliberate cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy.
When you undermine expertise, when you treat all opinions as equally
valid regardless of evidence, when you replace scientists with
sycophants, you make people vulnerable to con artists and demagogues.
You make democracy itself impossible because democracy requires an
informed citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from lies.
[[Page S639]]
The debt to the truth will come due. And when it does, our country
will pay an enormous price.
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