MEMO: The Elephant in the Chamber: Trump Took a Victory Lap While Americans Pay the Price for His Failed Agenda

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Reproductive Freedom for All

RE: MEMO: The Elephant in the Chamber: Trump Took a Victory Lap While Americans Pay the Price for His Failed Agenda

DATE: February 26, 2026

MEMO: The Elephant in the Chamber: Trump Took a Victory Lap While Americans Pay the Price for His Failed Agenda

If you had the misfortune of watching Trump’s nearly two-hour rambling, unhinged State of the Union on Tuesday night—the longest in history, and we felt every aching minute of it—you already know he spouted nothing but lies…just as we expected.

“Our nation is BACK,” Trump declared.

Indeed—back in time. Back to fewer freedoms. Back to a time with one set of rules for the powerful and another for everyone else. And make no mistake: Trump and his allies don’t just want to rewind four years. They want to take us back decades, to a time when women were property, pregnant people were vessels, equality was conditional, and autonomy was negotiable.

But what you didn’t hear on Tuesday was a word about abortion or reproductive freedom—because it’s hard to brag about taking away rights the overwhelming majority of Americans support. It’s hard to defend a record where people are forced to flee their states for health care, where pregnant women are bleeding out in parking lots, and where politicians get to decide what happens to their bodies.

We’re not going to dignify his avalanche of lies with a line-by-line rebuttal—fact-checkers will be busy for days. Instead, we’re going to focus on what he left out: the real consequences of his agenda and what it actually means for our freedoms, our health care, and our democracy.

The Crushing Costs of the GOP’s Health Care Crisis

• Trump’s big ugly budget bill gutted Medicaid and other essential programs, ripping health coverage from an estimated 15 million people by 2034 and forcing impossible choices on families across the country.
  • This crisis is already hitting families across the nation—which is why we launched ads this week in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District and Arizona’s 6th Congressional District to remind voters who’s actually responsible for their rising costs: the Republican Congressmen (in this case, Rep. Tom Barrett and Rep. Juan Ciscomani) who rubber-stamped Trump’s deadly agenda.
• Meanwhile, ACA premiums have skyrocketed for the more than 20 million Americans who depend on marketplace coverage after Republicans let enhanced tax credits expire—driving down enrollment and pushing coverage out of reach for millions.
  • Eva Wood, a mother of seven from Rochester and one of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s State of the Union guests, relied on those ACA credits to afford her family’s health insurance. When they expired, her family was hit with thousands of dollars in new annual costs. Her story is one of millions playing out across America right now.
• On Tuesday, Trump touted his administration’s actions on IVF while delivering no meaningful policy  to make it more accessible—despite campaign promises from the self-proclaimed “father of IVF.” In fact, his right-hand man, sitting smugly just feet behind him, House Speaker Mike Johnson, personally ensured expanded IVF coverage for all active duty military families was stripped from the final National Defense Authorization Act in December.
  • Anti-abortion extremists like Johnson and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) oppose IVF and other forms of assisted reproductive care—a radical position so politically toxic that even Trump tries to distance himself. Yet as he attempts to straddle that growing divide, Trump and his allies in Congress are still allowing these extremists to hold affordable care hostage for millions by acquiescing to SBA’s demands and refusing to extend ACA credits without a federal coverage abortion ban.

Federal Immigration Brutality and State-Sanctioned Reproductive Violence

• As Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in the Democratic response to the State of the Union, the Trump administration has “ripped nursing mothers away from their babies, they have sent children—a little boy in a blue bunny hat—to far-off detention centers, and they have killed American citizens on our streets.”
• Federal agents have shot 13 people—killing four—during violent immigration enforcement operations since September. As this state-sanctioned brutality drives fear deep into communities, pregnant immigrants are skipping critical prenatal care, experiencing stress-induced complications, and changing their birth plans out of fear of being detained.
• Mothers have been separated from their breastfeeding infants and denied medical care while they suffer in ICE detention.
  • Last month, a federal judge in Minnesota ordered the immediate release of a legally admitted refugee who was separated from her breastfeeding five-month-old infant, illegally detained, and abruptly whisked to Texas. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis wrote, “There is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state,” noting that the woman “lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby.”
• Pregnant migrant children—some as young as 13, many survivors of sexual assault—have been deliberately sent to a medically inadequate detention facility in Texas to deny them abortion care. A former Trump official confirmed that “This is 100% and exclusively about abortion.”

Coordinated Attacks on Voting Rights and Democracy

• The House recently passed the so-called SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that would block an estimated 21 million eligible Americans from the ballot box by requiring a passport or birth certificate matching their birth name to register to vote and again when they cast their ballot—documents that are out of reach for millions of Americans.
  • Republicans are targeting Americans who have long faced systemic obstacles to voting—including Black and Indigenous people of color, young people, people with disabilities, people in rural and low-income areas, military families, and women. The tactics have changed, but the outcome is the same: prevent anyone who will not fall in line with Trump’s agenda from exercising their right to vote.
• Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is weighing Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and effectively greenlight racial gerrymandering across the country. If the Court sides with Louisiana, its decision would mean states can redraw their maps to disenfranchise millions of voters, especially people of color.
  • The outcome of this case extends far beyond maps—it could clear the path for extremists who are working to gut voting rights, ban abortion, and attack our fundamental freedoms to entrench their control. Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of democracy.
• Trump and the GOP know they can’t win your vote, so they’re trying to stop you from casting it. But voters have rejected their extremist agenda at every turn and will fight to do so again this November.

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For over 55 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.