President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was one for the books, but one moment stood out in particular as it highlighted the intense divide between the left and the right when it comes to their understanding of the American people.

During his speech, Trump gave both Democrat and Republican legislators the chance to stand up and show their support for the American people.

“If you agree with this statement,” Trump said, “then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

When Trump said this, the Republican side of the chamber stood, and Democrats stayed seated.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock believes Trump’s powerful performance showed a stark difference between the left and the right, while BlazeTV contributor Pastor Corey Brooks agrees.

“I think the right is going to definitely have a lot of commercials to run the Republican Party when they asked that question about, you know, supporting the American people over illegal immigrants. And no one on that side stood. I think that speaks volumes,” Brooks tells Whitlock.

“That’s exactly what we’re experiencing in the city of Chicago. So I know a lot of people can resonate with that,” he adds.

Whitlock points out that Trump was very “aggressive” and “clever about trying to draw the difference between himself and the Democrats.”

“I thought he drew a pretty good distinct line in the sand and gave people a clear choice,” he tells Brooks.

“People who watch that speech and listen to the words and not so much the rhetoric, but listen to what was being said, I think there’s a direct difference between both parties and everybody can see it,” Brooks responds, adding, “And I think overall, most Americans are probably going to wake up today and be aligned closer with those points of views.”

BlazeTV contributor Virgil Walker is aligned with Whitlock and Brooks, telling Whitlock that what Trump demonstrated was “a brilliant dose of stage craft.”

“There’s no other way around it. I mean to make the statement that he did as it relates to the first duty of government is to protect American citizens and those who agree with that, asking them to stand and then allowing, not for a brief, you know, stand and clap and sit down, but for that statement and the visual from that, to stand for as long as he did,” Walker says.

“For him to kind of point to those people who were sitting, was a brilliant set of stage craft. It allowed the American people to see it in real time that Democrats do not care for the needs of the American people first and that they primarily are thinking about their own political future,” he adds.

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President Donald Trump says that he, along with many Americans, is concerned about the energy demand and strain AI data centers are putting on the electrical grid.

In a brief moment during his 2026 State of the Union speech, the president gave remarks that, while only lasting a minute or so, could, in effect, save the American household hundreds of dollars per year.

‘A single large AI data center consumes as much electricity annually as 2 million homes.’

“We have an old grid. It could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that’s needed,” Trump said. “So I’m telling them, they can build their own plant.”

These simple comments actually have a massive ripple effect when put into practice. When companies like Apple or Meta build sprawling campuses to house their AI and user data, the power has to come from somewhere, and it often comes at the price of the American family.

For example, Pew reported that data centers have accounted for over $9 billion in price increases in capacity markets for 2025-2026; this refers to the amount of electricity a provider says it will provide. This is expected to increase the average monthly residential electrical bill by $16 in Ohio and $18 in Western Maryland.

RELATED: Who makes the Waymos flooding American streets? China.

Photographer: Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Connecticut’s Office of Legislative Research found that residents in Virginia could see an increase between $14 and $37 per month by 2040 due to data centers. At an average increase of $25.50, that’s $306 annually.

Moreover, a Carnegie Mellon University study reported that data center growth could increase electric bills between 8% and 25% nationally.

“A single large AI data center consumes as much electricity annually as 2 million homes,” AI researcher Josh Fonseca Rivera told Return. “In 2024, U.S. data centers collectively drew roughly as much power as all of Pakistan.”

He added, “These costs are already reaching households. In Washington, D.C., residential electricity bills have risen approximately $10 per month due to data center demand. I think we can all agree that trillion-dollar tech companies should pay for their own power instead of pushing costs onto families.”

RELATED: ‘They can build their own’: Trump deals blow to tech companies hoping to tap into the power grid

Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Tech expert Josh Centers said that Trump actually undersold the existing problem.

“The grid has to be balanced down to fractions of a hertz every second, or the whole thing cascades into blackouts. Drop multiple data centers pulling as much power as a small city onto that, and you’ve got a serious infrastructure crisis,” he explained.

“The dirty secret is these AI models are wildly inefficient. We’re still running neural network math from the 1940s, just brute-forced with modern silicon and massive energy budgets,” Centers added. Instead of using AI to write books, “hand kids a real book,” he said, referring to his own work teaching children literacy.

One military tech CEO told Return that a co-existence between communities and Big Tech is possible, one that is mutually beneficial.

“The key will be making sure companies truly carry their share of infrastructure costs and that communities benefit from the added capacity,” said Tyler Saltsman, CEO of EdgeRunner AI. “But if structured properly, this approach could protect ratepayers, encourage modernization, and use private investment to reinforce a grid that badly needs upgrading, which is a major attack vector currently.”

During the State of the Union, the president referred to a new pledge, “Guaranteeing Rate Insulation from Data Centers.”

The new legislation is meant to “guarantee consumers [are] first priority on the grid,” ensure new data centers get their power from separate sources, and establish new transparency measures around data center utility usage.

“They’re going to produce their own electricity. It will ensure the company’s ability to get electricity, while at the same time, lowering prices of electricity for you,” Trump said.

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As conservatives, we should celebrate America’s gold-medal hockey win over Canada. We should also reflect on it.

Why? Because we are a morbid bunch of doomsayers. Inside every silver lining, we see a cloud, and we never miss an opportunity to forecast how everything is about to go horribly wrong.

The God of hockey is also the God of nations. He can do a lot with one good man.

We are morbid because we are so analytical. We break things and situations down into their component parts. We measure. We estimate. We look at the numbers, and from the numbers, we draw our conclusions.

Numbers game?

The problem is that, when it comes to the culture, the numbers are rarely on our side. Let’s be honest, they haven’t been on our side for a while, but that’s why we should reflect on the United States’ victory over Canada.

Statistically, Canada outplayed the United States. Anyone who watched the last two periods could tell you: Man for man, America was getting outplayed.

It really just came down to the fact that we had one player they couldn’t beat: our goalie, Connor Hellebuyck. Canada outshot the United States in the last two periods 33 to 18. The numbers weren’t on our side, but the one man who mattered was.

RELATED: Raucous applause erupts for Olympic men’s hockey team at State of the Union: ‘What special champions you are!’

Photo (left): ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images; Photo (right): Leah Millis-Pool/Getty Images

‘God has a name’

More than 50 years ago, the future Pope Benedict XVI noted modern life’s tendency to reduce men to faceless statistics: “The machines that he himself has constructed now impose their own law on him: He must be made readable for the computer, and this can be achieved only when he is translated into numbers.”

“But,” he continued, “God has a name, and God calls us by our name. … For Him, we are not some function in a ‘world machinery.'”

In life, as in sports, victory does not always yield to the data. It just takes one good man to go into the breach; one man, completely outnumbered, who stands up when all others have fallen and says, “You cannot pass.”

Cultures aren’t defined by numbers. They are defined by people. So be courageous, be hopeful, and take a stand in the breach. The God of hockey is also the God of nations. He can do a lot with one good man.

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If Donald Trump put on a black robe tomorrow and issued an opinion in an intellectual property dispute between two tech companies, no one would treat it as binding law. So why are we expected to treat judicial policymaking on immigration and national security as untouchable — especially when lower courts now openly defy higher courts?

One of the most damaging misconceptions in American government holds that the Supreme Court is “supreme” over the political branches in all things. At most, its supremacy runs within the judicial hierarchy: It can overrule lower federal courts. The same goes for the courts of appeals, which are supposed to bind district courts within their circuits.

If lower courts refuse deference to their judicial bosses, why should the president keep extending deference to either level when the law is on his side?

That system, however, increasingly operates as a one-way ratchet for left-wing political outcomes.

On February 6, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals finally reaffirmed a basic legal principle: Illegal aliens seeking admission are not entitled to enter the country, demand release, and then litigate their way into residency while living freely inside the United States. The court upheld long-standing precedent and the plain text of U.S. immigration law, which requires detention of inadmissible aliens pending disposition of their cases.

Congress enacted that provision in 1996 for an obvious reason: to prevent people from entering illegally, receiving a notice to appear, and then disappearing into the interior.

Unlike American criminals who are entitled to bond hearings, illegal aliens are not being prosecuted for a crime. They can always voluntarily depart and live freely in their home countries. Being detained is a consequence of their initial invasion and their desire to litigate their way into our country.

Then came the district courts.

Just three days after the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, Judge Kathleen Cardone, an El Paso-based George W. Bush appointee, ordered the release of aliens in five cases on the theory that they had “established roots” in the United States. What, then, was the point of the Fifth Circuit ruling? Cardone claimed in one case that it “has no bearing on this Court’s determination of whether [the petitioner] is being detained in violation of his constitutional right to procedural due process.”

Likewise, on February 9, Judge David Briones, an El Paso-based Clinton appointee, reached a similar conclusion. “The Court reiterates its original holding that noncitizens who have ‘established connections’ in the United States by virtue of living in the country for a substantial period acquire a liberty interest in being free from government detention without due process of law,” Briones wrote — about an illegal alien who entered the country in 2024.

Pause there.

The Fifth Circuit had just ruled that detention is mandated by statute even in cases involving aliens who entered long ago (including plaintiffs from 2001 and 2009). Yet a district judge somehow concluded that ruling does not apply to someone who crossed illegally in 2024. Worse, how can a district judge claim the Fifth Circuit did not account for the “constitutional” question when the appeals court’s ruling necessarily presumes ICE’s conduct is constitutional?

RELATED: The Fifth Circuit cracks down on the asylum excuse factory

ozgurdonmaz via iStock/Getty Images

These judges are cherry-picking language from select Supreme Court opinions about aliens with “established ties” while ignoring the far stronger body of law recognizing that illegal entrants have no right to remain in the country against the national will. The idea that someone can break into the country, evade enforcement long enough to create “ties,” and then use that evasion as a legal shield makes a mockery of popular sovereignty and of the Declaration’s first principles.

This also demonstrates, again, why the Trump administration cannot comply its way out of judicial supremacism. Even when it wins in higher courts, lower-court judges can repackage the same result in a new case and keep obstructing enforcement. Why should Trump defer reflexively to congressionally created judges who refuse to defer even to their own superiors within the judiciary?

That point came into focus in Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s dissent from his court’s decision to halt the deportation of a Peruvian family while the appeal proceeds. Referring to the Ninth Circuit as a “wackadoo” court, VanDyke described what he said has become an automatic practice: granting stays of removal even when Supreme Court immigration precedent clearly points the other way.

In effect, he argued, the court uses procedural orders and an ever-expanding shadow docket to nullify precedent without formally issuing rulings that openly defy it.

Because of the circuit’s heavy caseload, VanDyke wrote, judges adopted a “convenient, but unwritten, practice” of granting preliminary relief in the form of administrative stays pending review. Those stays often remain in place until the merits are decided. The result, he said, is a system that “disregard[s] Supreme Court precedent and award[s] automatic, extended stays of removal in utterly meritless immigration appeals.”

Defenders of the Ninth Circuit might say the court is overloaded and must rely on lengthy interim stays. VanDyke’s point, however, is that this indulgence appears uniquely generous in deportation cases. As he put it, the Ninth Circuit’s internal dialogue sounds like “a judicial Oprah Winfrey, confused by her own popularity.”

His satirical version of the court’s approach was devastating:

We are… (“You get a stay!”)… sincerely shocked… (“You get a stay!”)… by the… (“You get a stay!”)… number of… (“You get a stay!”)… utterly… (“You get a stay!”)… meritless… (“You get a stay!”)… immigration petitions… (“You get a stay! And you get a stay! And you get a stay!”)… that are filed… (“You get a stay!”)… in our court. (“Everyone gets a stay!”).

That is the point. When it comes to many liberal judges — who still dominate too many panels — law is often just a vehicle for politics. They will reach the result they want by whatever procedural route is available. You cannot simply “out-appeal” a judiciary willing to ignore controlling law while pretending not to.

RELATED: We escaped King George. Why do we bow to King Judge?

Valerii Evlakhov via iStock/Getty Images

A Politico review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected ICE’s broader detention policies in more than 3,000 cases, while just 27 judges backed those policies in about 130 cases. The overwhelming pattern is plain: Judges are sidelining the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Supreme Court’s plenary power doctrine, which affirms broad executive authority over the detention and removal of illegal aliens.

No Supreme Court ruling, by itself, will stop judges committed to creative procedural sabotage.

Lawlessness begets lawlessness. It is grimly fitting that in an era when invaders are encouraged to dictate terms to citizens, inferior courts now side with them while dictating terms to superior courts.

If lower courts refuse deference to their judicial bosses, why should the president keep extending deference to either level when the law is on his side?

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