State of the Union speeches haven’t mattered in a while. Even in their heyday, they were only bringing in 60-plus million viewers, and that’s been declining substantially for decades. They rarely result in a post-speech bump for any president, and according to Gallup polling data since 1978, the average change in a president’s approval rating has been less than one percentage point in either direction.
To be sure, this is good news for President Trump. He should hope and pray this State of the Union was lightly watched.
His speech was a chaotic cacophony of lies, bigotry, gaslighting, and willful ignorance, painting the portrait of a man who has lost the country, and he knows it.
If Trump is confident about the state of the union, the health of the Republican Party, and keeping the majority come November, his unhinged and delusional address belied that confidence. Instead, his cartoonish overcompensating for a disastrous first year only drove home the point that his administration is spiraling out of control and has no plans to change course.
Sounding very much like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who, I’ll remind you, lost all seven swing states in 2024 — Trump bragged about a country and economy that most Americans don’t recognize.
“Our nation is back: bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” he declared. “This is the golden age of America.”
Few Americans feel that way, however. Polls show Trump’s job approval is at an all-time low. Most Americans think Trump is moving the country in the wrong direction, and a plurality believes Trump is doing a worse job than Biden. Most think he’s focused on issues that aren’t very important to them, and a majority say they are very concerned about the cost of health care, food, consumer goods, and housing. Less than a third of Americans believe the economy will be better in a year.
This anxiety over the economy and health of the country could not match Trump’s bombastic gloating any less. Americans are worried and frustrated, and are in no mood for Trump’s delusional victory laps.
He didn’t fare much better on immigration, another one of Trump’s signature issues. In April of 2025, 48% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. In the months following, which saw ICE surges in major cities, ugly confrontations with citizens, the unlawful detainment of several illegal immigrants, and the shocking deaths of two protesters, his approval has dipped to a low of 41%, with his disapproval skyrocketing to 55%.
There was no acknowledgment of this or attempt at a course-correction in his speech, though. Instead, he played to the cheapest of seats with gory tales of violence by illegal drug lords, murderers and rapists — criminals no one has an issue with removing.
Finally, on tariffs, Trump told voters the sky was green. “Everything was working well,” before the Supreme Court shot them down, he insisted, and said that “factories, jobs, investment and trillions and trillions of dollars will continue pouring into America” because of those tariffs.
But according to independent estimates, his tariffs have cost U.S. households as much as $2,600 per year and polls show a majority of Americans oppose them.
Now, if he doesn’t want to listen to voters, that’s certainly his prerogative and I imagine Democrats won’t get in his way. Republican lawmakers who are up in November, though, probably wish he’d start sounding different when he talked about the economic pain most Americans were feeling.
But they’d need a different president, one who isn’t delusional and totally unwilling to admit what most people can see and feel: the state of the union is bad, and Trump is to blame.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.