​Demagogue salesman: On Donald Trump and 2026 State of the Union address

In his 2026 State of the Union address, U.S. President Donald Trumpchose to double down on the politics of his conservative support base by touting his second administration’s achievements with regard to divisive, if not polarising issues relating to immigration, the cost of living, and foreign policy concerns including tariffs and the prospect of war in the context of Iran. The speech itself comes at a fraught moment for the Trump White House, days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to slam a broad swathe of trading partners, including India, with punitive tariffs. An apparently undaunted Mr. Trump repeated his earlier remarks on social media hinting at disdain for the ruling, when he described it during the speech as “unfortunate” and argued, against evidence to the contrary regarding the burgeoning public debt, that the tariff revenues received by his government were “saving” the U.S. Similarly, he neatly avoided alluding to the two Americans killed in ICE raids in Minneapolis or the agency’s other heavy-handed actions targeting “criminal aliens” and “drug lords”. With regard to Iran, even though Washington has rapidly built up its force posture across West Asia following Teheran’s crackdown on protesters, Mr. Trump appeared to be holding out hope for a modus vivendi when he said, “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But… I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon.”

If Mr. Trump’s remarks in Congress sounded self-congratulatory, that might have been because they echoed a well-rehearsed campaign speech ahead of the critical mid-term elections. While it is true that inflation has gradually come down during Mr. Trump’s second term, his description of the price trend as “plummeting” might have appeared to some to be an exaggeration, especially given that it was under his predecessor Joe Biden that prices came off their nearly 9% peak in mid-2022 to 2.9% by the time Mr. Trump entered the White House, leading to the current rate of nearly 2.4%. More concerningly for the White House and Republican lawmakers, opinion polls suggest that most Americans are disenchanted with the tariff policy and its cost-escalating pressure on the economy, with the design and implementation of the current immigration policy, and with the perceived involvement of Mr. Trump in the Epstein scandal. While an upbeat address to a joint session of Congress might galvanise the faithful, it will take more than words to alter the bitter ground realities faced by the common people and they tend to express their frustrations in this context at the ballot box.