Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins appears to be the designated survivor for President Donald Trump‘s State of the Union address.
Collins was not in attendance at Trump’s Tuesday night remarks in the U.S. Capitol. The designated survivor views the president’s speech from a secure location to ensure a clean line of succession in the event of an attack.
The move is a sequel for Collins who served as the designated survivor for Trump’s 2025 address to a joint session of Congress. In 2017, that honor went to former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, while former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, former Energy Secretary Rick Berry, and former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt were the designated survivors for Trump’s first term State of the Union addresses.
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Presidential historian and director of the White House Transition Project Martha Joynt Kumar noted to the Washington Examiner that some within the president’s Cabinet, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler, aren’t technically eligible to be the designated survivor as those positions aren’t in the official presidential line of succession.
“It has to be a Cabinet secretary,” she explained. “Not just a person the president names as part of his Cabinet.”
Toward that end, Democrats in Congress designated Rep. Mike Thompson to serve as their designated survivor for Tuesday’s event.
“I won’t be there in person, but I’ll be watching,” he wrote in a statement on Monday. “Americans deserve accountability for the militarization of ICE, terrorization of our communities and killing of American citizens.”
The tradition was formally adopted during the Cold War, when both former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan feared an attack on Washington, D.C. by Soviet Union submarines in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Associated Press.
In 1980, the Reagan White House formally tasked the Federal Emergency Management Agency with recommending a designated survivor for events where the entire line of succession, including Congressional leadership, was gathered in a single location.
However, prior to the 2002 State of the Union, delivered by former President George W. Bush just months after the September 11 terror attacks, designated survivors were given virtually free reign to spend their time away from the Capitol how, and where, they desired. Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, the designated survivor for 2000’s State of the Union, reportedly moved up a planned vacation to Maryland’s Eastern Shore when alerted of his designation by former President Bill Clinton.
Despite the position’s popularization in the media, including an ABC series starring Keifer Sutherland bearing the same name and the “Ice Cube” movie “XXX: State of the Union,” a designated survivor has never ascended to the position of president. The vice president, Speaker of the House, and president pro tempore of the Senate would all need to be killed or incapacitated before a Cabinet secretary would take up the presidential mantle.
But that hasn’t stopped past survivors from feeling the pressure.
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Former Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson, Bush’s 2006 designated survivor, told the Associated Press that the process “focuses your mind” and “enhances your prayer that it doesn’t happen to you.”
“The enormity of that job. You think about, remote as it is, this is something you might have to do,” he explained.
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