President Donald Trump crushed it Tuesday night during the State of the Union, and the liberal media can’t cope. Jake Tapper thought he had Sean Duffy cornered Tuesday night in a post-State of the Address interview on CNN. He didn't.
Tapper went after Duffy over President Trump's line during the speech, in which he called the Democrats "crazy."
🚨 Trump to Democrats: "these people are crazy. I'm telling you. They're crazy."
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 25, 2026
pic.twitter.com/ypXJnow4sL
Tapper tried to frame it as something unprecedented, the kind of thing you'd never hear from Obama or Biden at that podium.
"That's not something we ever heard from Obama or Biden from that stage," Tapper insisted.
Duffy didn't flinch.
“We've never had a speaker rip up a speech either," he shot back — a clean, surgical reference to Nancy Pelosi's now-infamous stunt at the 2020 State of the Union, where she tore Trump's speech in half on national television the moment he finished delivering it.
JAKE TAPPER: "He said, 'these people are crazy I'm telling you, they're crazy.' That's not something we ever heard from Obama or Biden from that that stage."
— Thomas Hern (@ThomasMHern) February 25, 2026
SEAN DUFFY: "We've never had a Speaker rip up a speech either"
This is why Trump likes TV guys in his cabinet. pic.twitter.com/4c2NrUvHGu
Tapper didn’t even try to debate the point and moved on quickly. Who could blame him? Democrats can whine all they want, claiming something was unprecedented or unpresidential, but they know that’s not true.
In fact, many in the liberal media couldn’t deny that Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address in 2024 was an incredibly partisan speech.
"This is the 36th of these for me — State of the Unions or presidential addresses at the beginning—the first one being 1989," CNN's John King said. "Never heard one so political, never heard one that is such a campaign speech."
Biden’s incredibly partisan speech even took Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC aback, particularly when Biden attacked the Supreme Court justices to their faces.
"That’s never been done before. To the extent that a president has a disagreement with the Supreme Court expressed in the State of the Union address, they always try to find the most polite possible language for doing that," he said. "This was not the night for that. So that was just astonishing."
Even former Obama advisor David Axelrod acknowledged the partisan nature of Biden’s speech.
"They may have landed well in that room, for sure, and they landed well with base voters, for sure," Axelrod explained, "I'm not sure [with] those swing voters—that they landed as well. [...] I also, by the way, think that what probably doesn't land well," Axelrod continued, "is his proclamation that our economy is the envy of the world and that, you know, we've, you know, inflation [...] is under control."
Related: This Moment of the State of the Union Just Lost the Democrats the Midterms
The legacy media may want to believe the worst of Trump’s speech, but CNN’s own instant poll showed that roughly two-thirds of viewers had a positive reaction to Trump’s address, with 38% calling it very positive and 25% somewhat positive, while only 36% were negative. Even more telling, those who said Trump’s policies would move the country in the right direction jumped from 54% pre-speech to 64% after — a ten‑point surge that mirrors past Trump State of the Union speeches and bodes well for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms.
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