Watching President Trump speak to both Houses of Congress, two colorful Yiddish words kept floating into my mind.

I believe that each captures an aspect of the reality of that unprecedented gathering that the English language fails to convey with the same level of nuance.

As President Trump spoke, I kept thinking that he’s a real shtarker, which is often translated as “tough guy,” but which carries considerable historical context.

At Quora, Wolf Krakowski explains:

“In Europe, studious, myopic Jews who spent their days warming a yeshivah bench were easy pickins for their loutish, violent anti-Semitic neighbors and were often attacked and beaten. Every community had their tough guy (shtarker = strong one) who could be summoned to prevent or mitigate a beating, by showing up….”

In case you have not heard, according to every mainstream media outlet, Donald Trump did NOT give a State of the Union speech Tuesday evening. Once a year, some Leftmedia scribe does a Google search on "state of the union" and then copies and pastes Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 from our Constitution, which defines the information the president is to give Congress. Then, all the other outlets reprint that post.

But according to the American Presidency Project, the fact that it was technically not a State of the Union address makes little difference because the "impact of such a speech on public, media, and congressional perceptions of presidential leadership and power should be the same."

Gosh, I am so glad the MSM spent the 48 hours ahead of Trump's address clearing that up....

The last time Trump did deliver a State of the Union speech was February 4, 2020. It was a remarkable testament to his previous three years, despite being plagued with attacks by deep state conspirators endeavoring to undermine his administration in collaboration with impeachment charades.

Trump began that address by declaring, "I say to the people of our great country and to the members of Congress: The state of our Union is stronger than ever before."

That was all about to change — dramatically.

Is the era of rounding up government or academic “experts” to declare their support or opposition to ongoing controversies over? Public declarations by Anthony Fauci and his associates to follow their “expertise” or “science” did not work out well and persuaded few.

Recall the 1,200 partisan healthcare “professionals” of June 2020 who flipped to assure us that it was mysteriously now medically OK to break quarantines—but only if to publicly protest during the post-George Floyd unrest.

Most recently, five former Secretaries of Defense—William Perry, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, and Lloyd Austin—co-authored a public letter to Congress. They blasted the Trump administration’s dismissals from command of several generals—including the current chairman of the joint chiefs, General C. Q. Brown Jr.

This will not work out well.

Democrats are anxious to rebuild their party on the heels of President Trump’s victory in November. But they have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand: The money isn’t there.

Democrat donors — from bundlers to small dollar donors — say they are still angry about the election results and uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then.

“I’ll be blunt here: The Democrat Party is effing terrible. Plain and simple,” one major Democrat donor said. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”

A second donor was equally as pointed. “They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking. … The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”

Critics view the Department of Government Efficiency’s emails asking federal employees for evidence of productivity as chaotic, arbitrary and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.

But Elon Musk is simply bringing normal private-sector standards to a government that desperately needs them. Since the Pendleton Act of 1883 introduced merit-based selection and civil-service job protections for federal workers, the administrative state has proliferated without sufficient checks and balances from the president or Congress.

The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 450, many of which are “independent” of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done. No president—not Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—has cracked this nut. Most reforms have made the administrative state larger, not smaller. Mr. Trump refuses this deal.