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.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.