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.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.