（President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026.）
Tonight’s State of the Union address was not the speech President Trump wanted to give.
Dogged by a record-low approval rating among independents, weighed down by an economy where only the rich are recovering and still fuming after the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling left his signature economic policies in tatters, Trump for once appeared unable to bend events to his own brand of unreality. His speech offered nothing of consequence to the majority of Americans who now say they are worse off today than they were a year ago.
And so, Trump did the only thing he knows how to do. He talked — and talked, and talked.
Clocking in at just over 2 hours, the annual address set the record for the longest self-soothing therapy session in American history. It hardly mattered to Trump that his speech offered no solutions for the growing problems facing millions of Americans; his speech was, as always, an overstuffed tribute to himself.
Trump claimed plenty of victories, even if he had to make them up. He repeated his frequent claim that inflation is “plummeting,” even though most consumer prices are still rising. He took credit for the “biggest decline in crime in recorded history,” even though most of that decline came between 2023 and 2024, during President Joe Biden’s term. He claimed mortgage rates were at their “lowest point in over four years,” despite the fact that 30-year rates were 2 percentage points lower at this time in Biden’s presidency.
With his presidency on the ropes, it seemed no lie was too big or too desperate for Trump.
“Our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” Trump boasted. Few Americans today would recognize the country he’s talking about. Fewer still would say they’ve felt its supposed prosperity. Broad swaths of voters who backed Trump in 2024 now question whether he even understands the economic harm his policies have caused — or if he cares at all.
Polls show that a growing number of voters are no longer buying Trump’s unreality, which might explain why he seemed so desperate to make the sale on Tuesday night. Sixty-eight percent of respondents now say Trump is “focused on the wrong problems” according to a new CNN poll. Meanwhile, a Council on Foreign Relations survey found that Americans across party lines blame Trump’s tariffs for the nation’s affordability crisis.
Trump and his Republican enablers lack even the concepts of a plan to solve the problems facing the American people, so they’ve decided to pretend the problems don’t exist. The GOP should ask the Biden administration how well that scheme works.
With no meaningful domestic policy victories to crow about, Trump instead ramped up his rhetoric against legal immigrants, the transgender community, and Democrats in general. In one particularly disgraceful moment, Trump made the baseless claim that legal immigration made America weaker and lobbed a plainly bigoted jab at Minnesota’s Somali community.
“Somali pirates ransacked Minnesota through bribery, corruption and lawlessness. We are gonna take care of this problem. We are not playing games,” Trump said. “Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the USA.”
Most of Trump’s venom against immigrants was simply reheated rhetoric from the 2024 campaign, including a promise to mandate a nationwide voter identification law and new laws banning undocumented migrants from voting and operating commercial vehicles — even though current laws already ban them from doing both. But warmed-over hatred is hatred just the same, and Trump seemed to relish the opportunity to portray America’s immigrant community as a problem to be solved.
Trump dedicated nearly the entire final hour of his speech to divisive social issues and attacks on immigrants, which should offer Democrats a clear view of how Republicans plan to mount their midterm campaign later this year. Yet multiple polls show voters are panicking about the economy and the skyrocketing cost of health care.
The latest data suggests more than 22 million people saw their insurance premiums spike after Republicans allowed the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies to expire at the end of last year. Those voters are less interested in transgender athletes and more concerned about affording their daily medication, as Virginia’s gubernatorial election last year made stunningly clear to GOP strategists. In that kind of national climate, Trump’s attempts to stoke social division simply fall flat.
Trump had a chance to recast his bumbling second term with a series of bold new proposals and Trumpian flash. Instead, he offered a divisive and delusional rallying cry for an America that exists only in his head. That may make Trump feel better in the short term, but he’ll be in for a rude awakening when struggling Americans turn their discontent into votes later this year.
