Overview
Skyler Fusaro is a fictional historian and activist from the 2060s. She reflects on Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address in her letter. She critiques its promotion of authority and fear, emphasizing how it redefined civic virtue through ceremony rather than policy. The unexpected highlight was Trump awarding a hockey goalie a medal, symbolizing the shift from achievement to loyalty. Fusaro warns that this speech was a precursor to authoritarianism. It marks a troubling trajectory in American governance. Here, dominance is mistaken for stability.
This morning I received a letter from Skyler Fusaro. She is a fictional character who plays a role in my project writing about the Trump regime. Skyler’s thinking reflects on current events. She does so from her perspective as a historian, educator, and environmental activist living in Atlanta in the 2060s. You can read some of her letters here.
She mentioned that I thought we’d be interested in her comments about Trump’s 2026 State of the Union.
Skyler Fusaro’s Letter
Atlanta, 2064
Dear Fellow Citizens,
I thought I would write to you about our impressions of Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union. You know from reading my letters that I send them to Jack Hassard, my ideas are meant to be reflective. I hope the letters help you think deeply about what is happening in your time. It’s part of his project of documenting. You might read his review of his documentation of the Erosion of Democracy in 2025 on his blog.
When historians teach the 2026 State of the Union, they often start with the obvious. They focus on its length. They discuss its bravado. And they comment on its theatrical cruelty. I start elsewhere. There was a tone of inevitability that ran beneath it. It was like a drumbeat you only recognize once the troops are already moving.
The speech insisted, again and again, that disorder was everywhere and authority the only cure. It celebrated force as clarity. Opposition as treachery. Dissent as danger. At the time, many listeners heard exaggeration. I hear rehearsal.
History trains you to listen for patterns rather than promises. And the pattern was old.
Trump framed the nation as besieged. Migrants, cities, and political enemies within were the threats. He cast himself as the singular figure capable of restoring order. This was not new language, nor uniquely American. It belongs to a lineage of leaders who discovered that fear, once ritualized, becomes permission.¹
What struck me most, rereading the transcript decades later, is how little policy mattered. The speech was not an argument for governance; it was a justification for escalation. By the end, the audience was not being informed—it was being conditioned.
There was one moment, though, that even I did not expect.
Pucks get an award
Midway through the speech, Trump summoned the U.S. national hockey team onto the House floor. The chamber applauded reflexively. Sport still carried an aura of innocence then. I remember feeling, for just a second, the old civic warmth. The idea that excellence can unite us. That some achievements were still held in common.
Then he singled out the goalie.
He praised him not for skill alone, but for “strength,” for “fighting spirit,” for “standing his ground while others folded.” Then, with a flourish, he awarded him the highest honor an American can receive. It is called The Presidential Medal of Freedom. I wonder if knows that the goalie plays professional hockey for a Canadian NHL team?
That was when I felt it—the sudden, vertiginous shift historians recognize too late. A bodily reaction before an intellectual one. The sense that something had been crossed.
The medal itself mattered less than the message. The honor was not bestowed by Congress. It was not grounded in service to the republic. It was not tied to sacrifice on behalf of others. And it was conferred by the President alone, for traits he admired, in a venue designed to sanctify authority. Achievement had been converted into loyalty. Symbol into signal.
Civic Virtue
I remember thinking: This is how civic virtue gets rewritten. Not through argument, but through ceremony. Not by abolishing honors, but by reassigning their meaning. But then, I know from history that Trump thrived on ceremony and performance.
I had studied this before. And I knew how regimes borrow the language of national pride—athletics, uniforms, heroes—when political legitimacy begins to thin. But I knew the pattern. But it did not soften the shock of seeing it happen live. This was beneath the marble dome and to applause.
The goalie, Connor Hellebuyck, stood stiffly, smiling, unsure where to look. I do not blame him. History rarely asks its symbols for consent.
What unsettled me most was how easily the room accepted the substitution. No vote. No objection. Just the quiet recalibration of what “the highest award” now meant.
Looking back, that was the moment I stopped believing the State of the Union was merely rhetorical. If honors are reassigned so casually, then laws would follow. They always do.
I had studied this move before. Napoleon’s Year X speeches to the Tribunate.² Nixon’s 1968 invocation of “law and order” as urban unrest became racial shorthand.³ Even the Roman Senate’s repeated granting of emergency powers—just this once—until the exception became the state. Each time, the leader claimed reluctance. Each time, history recorded eagerness.
History Stopped being Theoretical
And then came the moment when history stopped being theoretical.
Trump invoked the Insurrection Act months later. He sent federal forces into American cities against the will of their governors. I remember thinking—not with shock, but with a terrible clarity—of course. The speech had already done the work. The law merely followed the narrative.
He claimed necessity. He always did. Historians were quick to remind us that Lincoln had claimed necessity too. Nevertheless, Lincoln expanded the franchise. He ended a rebellion aimed at preserving human bondage. Trump expanded executive force and aimed it inward, at cities whose primary crime was voting differently. The distinction matters.
I watched archival footage of armored vehicles rolling past courthouses and libraries. It made me think of 1877. That year, federal troops withdrew from the South, leading to the collapse of democracy for a century.? I thought of Kent State. Of Little Rock. I thought of how “order” is often enforced unevenly. The same bodies have borne its costs repeatedly.
What I had underestimated—what many of us did—was how thoroughly the ground had been prepared. The State of the Union was not a warning. It was a bridge. By the time the troops arrived, half the country believed they were already late.
This is the historian’s grief: to recognize the moment when contingency hardens into trajectory. When a choice becomes a chapter heading.
Americanized Authoritarianism
Trump did not invent authoritarianism. He Americanized it—wrapped it in constitutional language, televised ritual, and applause lines. He taught millions to mistake dominance for stability and repression for patriotism.
But history also teaches something else. Every expansion of coercive power produces its counter-archive: letters, marches, court filings, whispered refusals. The Insurrection Act did not end the story. It clarified it.
Hundreds of people congregated on the National Mall for a counter-event dubbed the “People’s State of the Union.”
That is why I still write. Not to warn—warnings are always ignored—but to record. Democracies do not usually fall in a single night. They erode during standing ovations.
Yours, in the long aftermath,
Skyler Fusaro
Atlanta, Georgia
Notes (for the record)
- The classic formulation appears in interwar European emergency-state rhetoric, particularly 1920s Italy and 1930s Germany.
- Napoleon Bonaparte, speeches to the Tribunate, 1801–1804.
- Richard Nixon campaign and early presidency, 1968–1970.
- Roman senatus consultum ultimum, repeatedly normalized during the late Republic.
- Compare Lincoln’s use of emergency powers (1861–1865) with post-Reconstruction federal deployments.
- The Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction.
- Little Rock (1957), Kent State (1970), and later domestic troop deployments.