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Yes, it's me! Mark Steyn of that ilk - back in the saddle for another hour of questions from Steyn Clubbers around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Time or 9pm in western and central Europe.
It's the morning after the Joint Address the night before. If you were in Montenegro or Bhutan and sound asleep, well, you missed a corker. As longtime readers will recall, I am no fan of the State of the Union. But, if we have to have them, this is the way to play it. It was a brilliantly executed Trump triumph. As zillions have noted, this was the best line of the night:
It turned out that all we really needed was a new president.
The Democrats' best moment? Oh, take your pick: sitting on their hands for the nursing student murdered by an illegal alien, sitting on their hands for the black kid with cancer, sitting on their hands for the young girl brain-damaged in a volleyball game against a biological male...
From trannies to borders, the Dems are on the losing side of all the eighty-twenty issues. And Trump did a great job of showing that to the American people: Anticipation of your opponent's next move is the key to these kinds of nights - and he knew exactly how the tribunes of the Loyal Opposition would react.
But credit where it's due: the Dems did a fabulous job of doubling down on the loser stuff. Having their female attendees wear pink in conscious evocation of last decade's Ashley Judd "pussy hats" was a masterstroke. Especially a day after you've just voted to keep the old meat-and-two-veg swinging around the ladies' changing rooms. The bepenised woman was, as recently as the turn of the century, a fairly rarefied and esoteric fetish, but here we are in 2025 and one of America's only two political parties has decided to make it the hill to die on.
Is Nancy Pelosi a bepenised woman? She had the cojones to take out the hitherto fighting-fit Joe Biden, so it makes as much sense as any other explanation. If so, she and the rest of the girls should maybe see if their Obamacare plans cover testosterone supplements: the flaccid message of last night was "If you liked November's losing platform, we've got more of it." Trump asked the crowd if they wanted another five more years of the Ukraine war - and got Nancy's fellow bepenised woman Elizabeth Warren to applaud:
Trump calls Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" while discussing Ukraine pic.twitter.com/QH3JBv5f8H
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 5, 2025
That ad-lib was brilliant, and expertly delivered.
So how did cheers for war and silence for cancer kids work out for the Dems? Well...
CBS News poll: Large majority of viewers approve of Donald Trump's speech (among speech watchers)
🟢 Approve: 76% (+53)
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) March 5, 2025
🔴 Disapprove: 23%https://t.co/qb27ivfUTD pic.twitter.com/TuXQxakFxI
~As our Australian readers may know, I have some big-pictures thoughts of my own in the new issue of Quadrant:
How the West Was Lost
Happy to take your thoughts on that, Trump, Europe and anything else today. Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to our show live as it happens wherever you chance to be on this turbulent earth: Club membership is required only to ask a question. We love to hear from brand new members, and especially appreciate those who are having such a great time round these parts that they've signed up a chum for a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Among the additions to our ranks in recent days are newbies from around the globe - from Surrey to Surrey Hills, Vancouver to Virginia, Auckland to Anaheim. If you've joined this week either for a full year or a see-how-it-goes experimental quarter, do shoot me a head-scratcher for today's show.
But, if you're not interested in joining, no worries, as they say in Oz: We seek no unwilling members - and as always the show is free to listen to, so we hope you'll want to tune in. So see you back here at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm in London, 9pm in Paris, 10pm in Jerusalem,11pm in Moscow; half-past-eleven in Teheran; one-forty-five in Kathmandu; 4am in Singapore and Honkers (sorry about that); 7am in Sydney and Melbourne; 9am in Auckland, and an even more civilised hour for the kippers and kedgeree in His Majesty's Dominions eastward across the Pacific, where you're so far ahead Michael E Mann's probably lost his appeal by now...
