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.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.