More than a dozen Democratic members of Congress plan to skip President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday and instead attend competing events designed to steal the spotlight from the president's first formal address of his second term.
At least a dozen Democrats will boycott the speech at the Capitol and attend a rally on the National Mall organized by progressive groups MoveOn and MeidasTouch, dubbed the "People's State of the Union," scheduled for 8:30 p.m. That's thirty minutes before the president takes the podium.
The event is billed as "counterprogramming" to "President Trump's night full of lies and misplaced priorities for the American people." The language tells you everything about the purpose: this isn't dissent. It's theater.
According to Just the News, The lineup for the National Mall rally reads like a progressive caucus roll call. The confirmed speakers include Senators Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Smith, and Van Hollen, along with Reps. Ansari, Balint, Casar, Jayapal, Ramirez, and Watson Coleman.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, considered a 2028 presidential hopeful, will be among the headliners, as will Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. For Murphy, a potential presidential candidate, the rally doubles as an audition tape.
Former MSNBC anchors Joy Reid and Katie Phang will co-host the event, which will be streamed online shortly before Trump's remarks begin. Nothing says "voice of the people" quite like cable news personalities running the show.
Meanwhile, other Democrats, including Reps. Eric Swalwell, Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, Dan Goldman, and Sen. Ron Wyden, are planning a different counter-event dubbed "State of the Swamp" at the National Press Club that same night. That event, hosted by DEFIANCE.org, the Portland Frog Brigade, and COURIER, runs from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
The "State of the Swamp" speaker list includes Robert De Niro, Stacey Abrams, Mark Ruffalo, Jim Acosta, George Conway, and Marianne Williamson, among others. Attendees are encouraged to wear green or frog attire. Frog costumes at the National Press Club while the president addresses the nation. That's the Democratic opposition in 2026.
Still others are freelancing their boycotts. Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada won't attend but plans to watch from her office. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California will also skip the event. And when asked whether she'd attend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, "Probably not, no."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is giving his members two options: attend President Trump's State of the Union silently or don't attend at all. "The two options that are in front of us, in our house, is either attend with silent defiance, or to not attend, and send a message to Donald Trump in that fashion," Jeffries said.
Credit where it's minimal: at least Jeffries recognizes that boycotting a constitutional address to Congress is a bad look. The problem is that his caucus doesn't care. His "two options" framework is less a leadership directive and more a white flag dressed up as strategy. When your members are attending competing rallies hosted by cable news anchors and featuring Hollywood actors in frog costumes, you've lost the room.
The "silent defiance" instruction comes after the behavior from Democrats during Trump's joint address before Congress last year. Rep. Al Green of Texas stood up and interrupted Trump's speech by yelling at him, which led to the congressman being escorted out and eventually censured by the House. Other Democrats walked out during the middle of Trump's speech, wore intentional colors, or held up signage protesting the president.
Even the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Greg Casar, admitted to Axios that "last year didn't really work as envisioned." Another senior House progressive acknowledged privately that "there's just a feeling that it wasn't real effective last time."
So the Democratic brain trust diagnosed the problem: in-chamber disruptions made them look unserious. Their solution? Leave the chamber entirely and hold rival rallies. The logic here is revealing. Democrats didn't conclude they should act like a responsible minority party. They concluded they needed better production value for their protests.
The "State of the Swamp" event at the National Press Club offers a perfect snapshot of how unserious this all is. While the gathering has been framed as a "boycott" of Trump's speech, some lawmakers are considering attending the event for a brief period and then attending the State of the Union afterwards. Rep. Jason Crow's office indicated the congressman will be attending both events. Rep. Eugene Vindman's office told The Hill that the congressman will be sending in a video for the "State of the Swamp" event but will be attending the State of the Union address.
So Crow plans to pop into the boycott party and then show up for the speech he's supposedly boycotting. Vindman will phone it in, literally. These aren't principled stands. They're photo ops with an escape hatch.
Strip away the rhetoric and the counterprogramming is a fundraising play wrapped in a protest blanket. MoveOn, MeidasTouch, and DEFIANCE.org aren't grassroots operations running on goodwill. They're professional advocacy machines that thrive on spectacle and the donor engagement it generates. The groups said "Democratic lawmakers will be joined on stage by the everyday Americans most impacted by Trump's dangerous agenda." In practice, that means a curated stage show designed to go viral.
Consider what Democrats are choosing to skip. The State of the Union is one of the few remaining civic rituals that the entire government participates in together. It is a constitutional obligation, not a partisan favor. The president reports to Congress, and Congress shows up. That's the deal. When members choose a rally over the address, they aren't sending a message to the president. They're sending a message to the country that institutional norms only matter when their party holds the gavel.
Sen. Markey made his reasoning explicit in a press release:
The State of the Union should be a reckoning with reality, but Donald Trump will use it to spin fiction and normalize the gross abuse of power.
Markey said Trump "will claim everything is fine while families struggle to afford health care and housing" and declared "I will not legitimize those lies." This from a senator whose party held the White House for four years while those same families watched grocery bills climb and housing costs explode. The lack of self-awareness is staggering, but it's also strategic. Markey isn't skipping the speech because he can't bear to hear it. He's skipping it because standing on the National Mall with a camera crew generates more clips than sitting silently in the House chamber.
Here is what Democrats apparently haven't calculated: the optics of empty seats. When President Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, the gaps in the Democratic sections will tell their own story. Not of principled resistance, but of a party so consumed by its own grievance apparatus that it can't bring itself to participate in basic governance.
Rep. Ami Bera of California wrote in MeidasTouch that despite feeling an "obligation" to attend the address as a senior House member, "this year I feel different." Feelings over duty. That's the modern Democratic Party in a sentence.
The State of the Union belongs to the country. Democrats just told the country they'd rather be somewhere else.
