The State of the Union Address (SOTU)

February 24, 2026 President Donald Trump gave the State of the Union (SOTU) address for the first time in his Second Term. It was awful. In Google AI's summary:

This is not to say that Modern SOTUs have been much better. 

From the standpoint of Systems Theory, the state of a system has many meanings depending on the system being studied and can be confusing. In Political Science, the "State" is the geographic area controlled by a central government--a non-variable.  In Systems Theory, I like the following definition:

The State of a system is the collection of independent variables that explain the past and future path of the system.

As a place to start defining the State of a Political System,  I asked chatGPT to describe what topics should be included in the SOTU:

It's certainly too much to expect that any President would reasonably be able to address all the topics and the ones omitted are most likely the ones where the Administration is failing!

My proposal would be for some entity outside of government to take each of the chatGPT topics separately, and focus on defining and reporting on the state of each subsystem (Economic, National Security, Domestic Policy, Democracy-Governance, and Social Issues) and then forecast the state variables for the Future Vision. The graphic above does this for US1, a summary Economic-Environmental state variable from the USL20 Model (see the full description here).  

Notice that there are alternative futures based on alternative Geopolitical Alignments. Business-as-Usual (BAU) with the US continuing as the World Hegemonic leader produce unending exponential growth. Again, using Google AI:

Since the Trump II Administration seems to be stepping away from the Rules-Based World Order (RBO) there should be a democratic debate about the Trump II Administration's unilateral change in US Geopolitical Alignments. Instead, it is presented as a one-line "America First" slogan in the SOTU without prior Congressional debate or public input. 

For example, the forecast above shows that Geopolitical Alignment with the World System (W) would produce a Steady-State Economy in the US after 2050. Given the Environmental consequences (if not complete impossibility) of unending exponential growth,  the more reasonable idea of Limits to Growth should be debated with wide-spread public input. It is a Future Vision for the US and the World System!

I future posts, I will take each of the SOTU topics and develop a Measurement Model for each that allows the state variables to be forecast. The Measurement Model for the USL20 model is presented below and it should be scaled back to provide a reasonable SOTU Economy Index.

Notes

You can run the R-code for the USL20 Model here.

USL20 Measurement Model