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President Donald Trump did not beat the record for the longest State of the Union speech tonight, as many thought he would try to do. Instead, his speech was one of his shorter speeches so far. The longest speech record still belong to Bill Clinton.
Typically, most State of the Union speeches last about an hour or just a few minutes over an hour. Trump’s speeches always go longer than that, but it’s not typical for Presidents’ speeches to go quite that long.
In the speech below, Trump’s talk begins at 23:05 and ends at 1:41:10. It’s roughly 78 minutes long.
So it looks like his speech tonight was actually shorter than his 2019 SOTU speech, and shorter than most of his rally speeches that run about 90 minutes in length.
Trump’s 2019 SOTU speech tonight was 82 minutes long, NBC News reported. That means his speech in 2019 was the third-longest in State of the Union history, but still not as long as Bill Clinton’s.
Trump’s speech in 2018 clocked in at 80 minutes long, which might actually be longer than his speech tonight.
But Bill Clinton still gets top honors for the longest speech. The longest State of the Union address on record goes to Clinton, whose 2000 address was one hour and 28 minutes long. Yes, that’s 88 minutes long, which might even be up to 10 minutes longer than Trump’s speech tonight, depending on the exact time stamp on Trump’s speech.
The second-longest in history, also by Clinton, was in 1995 and lasted one hour and 24 minutes. That’s still longer than Trump’s SOTU speech tonight or his previous SOTU speeches.
The shortest address was Washington’s in 1790, just 833 words and about 10 minutes. We’ll like never see a speech that short again.
Here’s a video of Trump’s speech in 2018:
And his speech in 2019, which was two minutes longer:
But you’ll likely want to see the longest speech in history, which belongs to Clinton. Here it is:
So no, it doesn’t appear that Trump broke any SOTU speech records this year. If he’s re-elected, maybe next year. And if he’s not, maybe the next President will break those records.
Some people boycotted the State of the Union tonight. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter: “After much deliberation, I have decided that I will not use my presence at a state ceremony to normalize Trump’s lawless conduct & subversion of the Constitution. None of this is normal, and I will not legitimize it. Consequently, I will not be attending the State of the Union.”
Bernie Sanders also boycotted the State of the Union, deciding instead to watch the speech with his supporters in New Hampshire. He then delivered a SOTU response after the speech was over, responding to some of Trump’s key points. The Democrats also had an official SOTU response before Sanders’.