Trump's State of the Union address merely for partisan showmanship
National Post, 24 February 2026
Low expectations reign, no matter the party in power
President Donald Trump will deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan didn’t — and delivered instead one of the most memorable and moving speeches of his long career.
In 1986, State of the Union day — in late January that year — began normally enough. The drafting of the speech was complete and a luncheon was held at the White House to brief journalists — to “spin” them ahead of time, though the word was not then in wide use. A quarter of an hour before lunch though, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after lift-off. When Reagan dropped by the press luncheon, all questions were about the shuttle and the space program, not the State of the Union.
The address was postponed. Instead, just five hours later, Reagan spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. In little more than four minutes, he expressed griefover the loss of the seven astronauts — including a civilian schoolteacher — comforted their families and the nation, whilst recommitting to the spirit of adventure and discovery that animated the lost astronauts and the space program as a whole.
“The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” he told the schoolchildren directly. “It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”
The peroration of the speech invoked a previous generation of explorers, when the high seas were the horizon that beckoned the bold.
“There’s a coincidence today,” Reagan observed. “On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, ‘He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.’ Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.”
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning,” Reagan concluded, “as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.”
Those were lines from John Gillespie Magee’s sonnet High Flight, the anthem-prayer of aviation. Reagan mentioned neither the poet nor the poem by name. The lines were assumed to be part of the common literary patrimony of Americans.
Magee had been born in Shanghai to an American father and British mother, both Anglican missionaries in China. Born in 1922, he was the eldest of four brothers. He began writing poems as a schoolboy and won his school’s poetry prize at age 16.
In 1940, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force — the United States had still not entered the war — desiring to join the fight overseas. He arrived in the United Kingdom in August 1941 and flew his first sortie over occupied France in November. He died in December not over France, but Lincolnshire, colliding midair with fellow airmen on a training flight.
He had written High Flight after a Spitfire training mission that went to 33,000 feet and mailed it to his parents in early September. His father published it posthumously and it began to circulate first in the church press and then more widely. Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress, put it in the company of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, and drew attention to it.
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