Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Denial is a river in Egypt, as the saying goes. Well, it’s also making itself quite at home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
President Biden is trailing former President Donald Trump in five swing states, all of which Biden won in 2020, according to a new set of polls.
While these polls are but a snapshot, they aren’t the only ones indicating Biden is struggling. They’re just the latest ones.
There was the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll in April showing Biden trailing Trump in six of seven swing states.
And an Emerson College Polling/The Hill poll in April showing Trump was ahead in all seven swing states.
And a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll in April showing Trump ahead nationally by four points.
Naturally, this should be worrisome to Biden.
And yet…
“While the press doesn’t write about it, the momentum is clearly in our favor,” he told donors during a West Coast trip last week, “with the polls moving towards us and away from Trump.”
Seemingly undercutting that argument, and again slamming the media, he also told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week, “The polling data has been wrong all along. How many of you guys do a poll at CNN? How many folks do you have to call to get one response?”
As CNN’s data guru Harry Enten pointed out, “[Biden] loved the polls four years ago, when they showed him ahead. These are the same polls now.”
Blaming the media for underreporting his achievements, trashing the polls as wrong when they’re bad for him and lauding them when they’re good, and refusing to accept where he is in the race doesn’t bode well.
It may feel counterintuitive that Trump could be ahead. As Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live” put it at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month, “The Republican candidate for president owes half a billion in fines for bank fraud and is currently spending his days farting himself awake during a porn star hush money trial, and the race is tied? The race is tied! Nothing makes sense anymore.”
I agree that in a just world, Trump would be in prison and not on the ballot again. But all of this does actually make sense if you leave the Acela-corridor bubble and realize most voters don’t care about Trump’s trials. They care about themselves.
Unemployment, grocery prices, gas prices, home affordability, crime, the migrant crisis — all of this is directly impacting voters. However unseemly, Trump’s salacious rendez-vous with Stormy Daniels is not.
Biden doesn’t seem to realize that voters aren’t looking for more politics — they want better policies.
And his friends on the left — and, ironically, in the media — are trying to impress this upon him.
“As someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term, I think it’s best to be honest about reality,” said CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “He needs to do something bold and dramatic to seize the initiative on asylum policy, for example, and reverse these numbers.”
Former Clinton adviser Mark Penn wrote in the New York Times that Biden “appears all too focused on firming up his political base on the left with his new shift on Israel…and is failing to connect on the basic issues of inflation, immigration and energy.”
“Unfortunately,” he warns, “Mr. Biden is not reaching out to moderate voters with policy ideas or a strong campaign message.”
Another former Clinton adviser, James Carville also called for better policy arguments that embrace reality. “We’re not going to convince under-30, under-35 [voters], ‘Oh, we really built a great country for you.’ You’re looking at this job market…I don’t think you’re going to buy that. We need strong advocacy explaining to these youngsters what exactly they have at stake here,” and went on to name reproductive rights and environmental protections.
Swinging to the far left on Israel to appease pro-Palestinian young voters — who themselves only rank the issue 15th out of 16 in terms of top priorities — makes little sense. “Finding a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians” also only ranked 14th in a Pew poll of top foreign policy priorities among all Americans. It may be an issue around which there’s a lot of passion, but it’s not a kitchen table issue driving most voters.
Likewise, simply hoping the seediness of the Trump trials will turn voters off isn’t effective either. Hope isn’t a strategy, and it’s no match for fear.
Americans are afraid, and those fears should be met with real policy solutions that honestly address crime, the economy, immigration and other top concerns.
The polls may not be a prediction, but they should be a prescription. And if Biden wants to turn these numbers around, he first needs to stop denying them.
2024 S.E. Cupp. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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.