“We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before.” — Donald J. Trump, July 16, 2026

Look, I’m not a presidential speechwriter. But I think I could give these bozos some advice.

There were a ton of things wrong with last night’s speech, including that it was an emergency speech that interrupted Thursday Prime Time television to talk about election fraud, a thing that doesn’t matter and isn’t real. 

But then this: he began a speech about election fraud with a claim that, during the Biden administration, “We had transgender for everybody.”

Parse that for a second. What does it mean? “We had transgender for everybody”? “We had transgender”? How does one have transgender? And it was “for everybody”? Like, “Pizza for everybody!”

I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, I literally have no idea what that claim is supposed to mean. Everybody was transgender? Everybody had a transgender friend or acquaintance? Everybody could obtain transgender health care if they wished? Transgender people felt confident enough to be themselves? I honestly don’t know. It was important enough for the president to lead with in a prime-time address, so it would be nice to have some idea what it means. 

Then this: in the middle of a brutal heat wave, amid air poisoned by Canadian wildfire smoke, caused by his own administration gutting of Green Energy policies, he boasted, “Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

I know he wasn’t talking about the heat wave. I know he meant something else. I’m just not sure exactly what he meant.

Describing America as “hot” or “the hottest” means a lot to him, because he does it over and over again. 

“Hot” can mean really popular, the way the No. 1 single on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 was the hottest song in the land. Or a sexy woman. A sexy man, I guess. A country could be a hot vacation destination or culturally popular, but Trump hardly presents America as a welcoming place for foreigners, and he would rather be feared than loved, so neither of those meanings really explains it.

He hasn’t really defined the term directly. The closest he has come, as far as I can tell, occurred a year ago, on July 31, 2025, when he said, 

“We have made a few deals today that are excellent deals for the country. We’re taking in literally trillions of dollars for the country. This is making our country very rich and respected again.… Now we’re the hottest country in the world.”

He made this statement in the Oval Office when he signed an executive order that restored the Presidential Fitness Test. He didn’t actually make any deals that day, unless he considers that executive order a “deal,” which I know he doesn’t, and we (whoever he meant by “we,” presumably his administration) didn’t take in “literally trillions of dollars.” 

He was presumably referring to various haphazard trade arrangements that he’d made over the prior months, lifting some of the tariffs that he’d imposed at the start of his term and restoring some trade arrangements that he had terminated. 

Still, when he describes America as not merely “hot” but “the hottest,” I don’t think he really means that he created a tariff crisis, partially backed away from it, and now we’re sort of back where we were before. 

He means that there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about America these days, a certain something that attracts and appeals and even intimidates a little bit, a certain “It,” the way Elinor Glyn described Clara Bow in the movie of the same name. “She had IT in her eyes,” she once said.

In other words, if America were a broad, all women would want to be her, and all men would want to be with her. (Or anyway, ninety percent of the men.)

I think he means something like that. He cannot really quantify it except by using phrases such as “literally trillions of dollars,” so usually he doesn’t even try.

We know it when we see it. Think Lisa Bonet in May 1988 or her daughter Zoë Kravitz in October 2018. Think Beanie Babies in 1994. Cute, smart, compelling, sought after. 

When someone or something is “hot,” everyone knows it. America is not. 

Politically and geopolitically, we are reviled, pitied and also feared, the way a cornered and injured rat is feared, or the way today Iran and Russia are feared. International tourists are staying away, even as global tourism expands. The preferred and approved American MAGA culture” — Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, Stephen Baldwin, Dean Cain, the Trump-Kennedy Center 2026 Season — are barrel bottom and unpopular, embraced, if at all, only by Trump supporters and onlyfor political reasons.

So America is not figuratively “hot,” by any metric. 

But America is literally “hot”;  we are in the middle of a horrible heat wave, a heat wave like no one has ever seen. We’re saying, Sir, I’ve never seen such a heat wave.

So, again, it’s maybe a bad idea to call America “the hottest country anywhere in the world.” Just a bit of free advice to the speechwriters. 

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is a writer. His new book is An Apology for My Life, which he thinks will probably be published somewhere.

Photo by Vitaly Gorbachev.