The Fifth Column · Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch

State of the Union Post-Mortem with Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) - #546

February 26, 2026·1 hr 54 min·10 clips

Senator Slotkin walked out after Lindsey Graham insulted Denmark's prime minister over defense spending.

Good morning, everyone looks shady. The opening banter turns a routine video check into a roast, with the guest poking at the hosts for being too dark to see. The State of the Union does not land much better. One host says the union is strong, then sounds like he would rather talk about anything else. So, of course, they talk about it. The panel works through the moment, the chamber optics, and how one interruption can swallow the whole story. Pelosi says Democrats did not give Trump a moment. The host reads that as plainly wrong, comparing it to earlier controversies that hung around far longer than anyone wanted. Then comes the outside counterprogramming: cold, barely covered, and not especially coordinated. Van Hollen drifts through the haze. The remembered energy is outside, not in the official response, which one host can barely place anymore. A Spanish-language response becomes a joke. So does the old Tea Party response era, because the show is not going to pass up political nostalgia when it wanders by. Then they play the clip. What follows is less clean analysis than a pile-on over whether someone means Al Green the singer or Al Green the congressman. The sign confuses things further. The hosts pick through whether it said Black people are not gorillas or not apes, then note that the congressman was removed from the session. By the end, politics has melted into movies. Nuclear energy, Oppenheimer spectacle, IMAX logic, and the awkward desire for great camera work around terrible things all get shoved into one final riff. They still liked the movie. The goodbye lands with the usual Fifth Column warning about smoke screens, dividing forces, and whatever new method of attack just happened in the mess before it.

As heard by us

A fast, skeptical State of the Union post-mortem on Democratic messaging, protest theater, and the moments that outlive the speech.

The Fifth Column turns the State of the Union aftermath into a sharp, shaggy argument about political stagecraft: who got a moment, who denied it, and why the sideshow can swallow the speech itself.

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Why you'd press play

You want the post-SOTU mess, minus cable-news polish.

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