Rachel Maddow ripped into Donald Trump‘s State of the Union address Tuesday evening, blasting it as one of the “goriest” in history.
The MS NOW anchor weighed in on the president’s speech to the nation shortly after it concluded, and made it clear that she was not impressed by Trump’s remarks. Specifically, Maddow called out the gory imagery Trump invoked throughout his speech, which she compared to “violence porn.”
“He talked about people being covered in blood, gushing blood, blood pouring out of things,” Maddow said. “He talked about people being on the edge of death. He went into graphic detail on a number of different people’s injuries of various kind. And in those moments, he slowed down, ad-libbed a lot and tried to give seemingly as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes. “
She continued: “He also, as I said, mentioned in very stark detail about a terrible attack on a Ukrainian woman in North Carolina, ad-libbed that the person who had attacked her had gotten into this country because of open borders, which was not at all true. That woman was not attacked by somebody who had come from outside this country. But that was the sort of violently pornographic riffing that the president did very slowly throughout the back half of his speech, which made it go on for the longest period any State of the Union address has ever gone on before.”
In fact, Maddow noted that her two main takeaways from the speech were the length and the goriness of it, adding, “The president luxuriated in the descriptions of the goriest things that have ever been mentioned in any State of the Union speech.”
Maddow’s commentary followed Trump’s long-winded address to the nation, a roughly hour and 48 minute speech that broke his own 2025 record for joint addresses to Congress. Trump covered a range of issues, from immigration to the economy to military action abroad, while also introducing special guests, including the gold-winning U.S. men’s hockey team and Erika Kirk, the widow of late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
Watch Maddow’s full reaction to Trump’s State of the Union address above.
