Reviewing the February 2026 State of the Union address, John Kiriakou reached back to the addresses he had watched as an undergraduate for a standard of comparison.
What he remembers
When he was in college, he said, Ronald Reagan was president and the country was divided — Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other. He enjoyed those speeches. They were substantive, and substantive on both sides. “You could agree to disagree. You could stand up for what you believed in, but there was still decorum.”[1]
His verdict on the present was flat: “there’s no decorum on either side.”[1]
The symmetry of the complaint
The framing matters because the surrounding conversation was overwhelmingly critical of one side. Kiriakou had opened the segment by saying that the Democrats had walked into a trap laid for them, and he went on to fault the party for having no ideas and no willingness to act as a bloc. He was equally critical of the president, whose conduct he described as angry, ugly and mean-spirited by nature and on purpose.
The decorum point sits between the two. He does not attribute the collapse to a single presidency or a single party; he dates the loss generally, against a memory from his own student years, and assigns it to both sides at once. Ted Rall’s summary — “It’s a clown show” — is the co-host’s phrase, but Kiriakou’s “I hated it” immediately precedes it.[1]
Placing the memory
Kiriakou has elsewhere described his undergraduate politics as those of a social democrat who was liberal on social questions and hawkish on defence, active in the College Democrats at George Washington University while occasionally siding with Reagan on foreign policy. The nostalgia here is not for Reagan’s positions, which he has repudiated, but for the format: a divided chamber in which the division was argued rather than performed.