Memos & Media Guidance National
Memos & Media Guidance
MEMO: Who Trump Is Really Governing For
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Reproductive Freedom for All
RE: What Trump Won’t Tell You in His State of the Union Address
DATE: February 24, 2026
MEMO: Who Trump Is Really Governing For
Tonight, Trump will stand before Congress and tout the first year of his second presidency as a success—but he has not delivered the “golden age” he promised to the Americans watching from home. In reality, Trump has spent the last year governing for his shadow cabinet: a network of right-wing megadonors and anti-abortion extremists who hold unprecedented power over this country while everyday Americans pay the price.
The throughline of Trump’s second term is control: control over your health care, your family, your vote, and your future.
In just one year of this administration, premiums have skyrocketed for millions of Americans who depend on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), ICE has terrorized our communities with impunity, and newly appointed federal judges have reshaped the courts for decades to come, dismantling reproductive freedom and eroding democratic institutions. Tonight, Trump will paint a picture of a country that bears no resemblance to the one most Americans are actually living in.
The America We The People Are Actually Living In
Since Trump took office, his allies in Congress let enhanced ACA premium tax credits expire after a 43-day government shutdown—causing premiums to skyrocket for 20 million Americans and forcing impossible choices on families across the country. That includes people like Eva Wood, a mother of seven and State of the Union guest of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tonight, who relied on ACA credits to afford care and now faces increased health care costs of more than $3,600 a year. Similarly, a small business owner who previously paid $94 a month for health insurance is now paying $592. Republicans have the power to restore affordable coverage, but they are holding it hostage to satisfy anti-abortion demands that the vast majority of Americans never asked for and do not support.
American communities are also under siege by violent immigration enforcement operations. Federal agents have shot 13 people—killing four—during raids 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. 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.”
Preventable deaths continue to rise in states with abortion bans, and mifepristone—which has been FDA-approved for over 25 years and used in the majority of abortion care—remains under coordinated attack as Republicans work toward a national abortion ban. Meanwhile, abortion is banned or severely restricted in 20 states and thousands of Americans must now travel hours for care that used to be available in their own communities. A pregnant person in a state with an abortion ban who began driving at the beginning of Trump’s speech tonight would still be a full shift of work—8 hours—away from the nearest clinic by the end of the program.
Trump’s deadly budget bill that slashed Medicaid and “defunded” Planned Parenthood is already decimating access to essential health care: 51 Planned Parenthood health centers were forced to close in 2025, leaving patients with fewer options for abortion care, birth control, lifesaving cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more. Nearly three-quarters of these closures were in medically underserved or rural areas, deepening existing inequities.
Who’s Really Running This Country: Meet Trump’s Shadow Cabinet
Trump has further lined the pockets of the ultrawealthy while working families lose ground. The 30 billionaire families who bankrolled his 2024 campaign grew their collective wealth by $408 billion in his first year in office. His tax package handed the top 1% of households $1 trillion in benefits, while families making under $24,000 a year are projected to lose $1,200 annually to Medicaid and food assistance cuts. For all its talk of family values, this administration has spent a year gutting the very programs families depend on. Having a child is the single biggest economic decision most people will ever make—and a government that slashes health care, cuts food assistance, and hands trillions to the ultrawealthy is not governing for families.
The Heritage Foundation wrote the blueprint for Trump’s actions in Project 2025, the 900-page plan to dismantle democratic institutions, gut reproductive freedom, and consolidate executive power. Less than two years after its publication, more than half has already been implemented. The Heritage Foundation’s reach extends into every branch of government—but it has proven most consequential in the federal judiciary by laying infrastructure to outlast election cycles. To date in his second term, Trump has secured the confirmation of 15 judges hostile to reproductive freedom to lifetime appointments on the federal bench. Meanwhile, Trump appointees including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi, Martin Makary, and other anti-abortion cabinet officials are working to bring Project 2025 to life by weaponizing their agencies against reproductive freedom.
Eight in ten Americans support legal abortion, yet fringe anti-abortion groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) are dictating the terms of national health care policy by hijacking ACA negotiations to push for a backdoor abortion ban. The Hyde Amendment already prohibits federal funds, including ACA tax credits, from covering most abortion care—but that’s not enough for anti-abortion extremists like SBA, who want to prevent any coverage of abortion care, no matter how it’s paid for. SBA has threatened to withhold portions of its $80 million midterm spend from any Republican who doesn’t comply. So far, these threats have worked on Senate Republicans, who will have to answer to the constituents they’re betraying in November.
Voters Have Already Rejected This Agenda
The architects of this administration’s agenda have been explicit about what they would like to see next—and dismissing their ambitions as “too extreme to be real” is what they want. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to overturn Roe v. Wade—six years later, his hand-picked Supreme Court justices did exactly that. In 2024, Trump said he had “nothing to do with Project 2025”—less than two years later, more than half of it has been implemented.
For generations, Americans have understood that freedom means the right to make decisions about their own lives and futures. Since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Americans have repeatedly shown that when abortion is on the ballot, they vote to protect it.
In 2025, from coast to coast, every Reproductive Freedom for All-endorsed candidate won, defeating opponents voters viewed as extreme on abortion. Tonight, one of those candidates—Abigail Spanberger, who won her Virginia gubernatorial race decisively after making reproductive freedom a pillar of her campaign—is delivering the Democratic response to Trump’s address. In Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, exit polling confirmed that abortion was a decisive factor in voters’ decision-making across all three states.
Voters remain engaged, motivated, and unwilling to accept attacks on their fundamental rights and freedoms. The reality is that abortion is more popular than Trump—his approval ratings continue to steadily decline, and have now fallen below where they stood at the same point in his first term.
Trump and his allies know they can’t earn your vote, so they’re trying to prevent you from casting it. The House just passed the so-called SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that would block an estimated 21 million eligible Americans from the ballot box. Trump’s FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub in Georgia while he openly called for Republicans to take over election administration in cities across the country. In America’s 250th year, we should be celebrating the freedoms generations fought for—instead, we’re watching them be stripped away by Trump and his cronies in the chamber tonight.
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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.