Trump’s speech broke the record for the longest State of the Union address ever
Much like the US men’s hockey team as they walked into the House Chamber during President Trump’s address, there would have been plenty of “mention” traders celebrating at least a few of the president’s ~10,600 words on Tuesday evening, including “hottest,” “egg,” and “alien.”
Lasting almost 108 minutes, Trump’s speech yesterday officially became the longest State of the Union address of the television age, per Bloomberg, surpassing the previous record of 89 minutes set by President Bill Clinton in 2000.
According to data compiled by The American Presidency Project, Trump’s address was almost double the average length of all recorded SOTU speeches since 1964, which works out as 55 minutes.
The speech also marked what could be a new personal best in terms of length for Trump, beating his remarks to Congress in March 2025 by 8 minutes, though this was not included in the average as, according to the APP, it was not an official “State of the Union” speech.
The APP also calculated a preliminary figure for 2026 in terms of word count, and the current president trumped all other spoken-word SOTU addresses. Some SOTUs, however, haven’t been verbally delivered, and a couple of the written versions have racked up considerably greater tallies — most notably Jimmy Carter’s 1981 written address, which came in at 33,667 words in total.
