Trump hides in plain sight at the State of the Union

After a year of Donald Trump being restored to the White House, Americans are increasingly sick of the president. In the 2024 presidential election, he clearly benefited from having been out of office — and from the short attention span of swing voters, who clearly forgot the chaos and incompetence that defined the former reality TV host’s first term. Now that he’s in everyone’s faces again, his polls are rapidly sinking. But Trump, ever the narcissist, apparently thought he knew a way to win back the hearts and minds of the American people: by droning at them for nearly two hours in a State of the Union address that was as dishonest as it was tedious. While it’s unlikely he won people over, Trump did showcase his ability to manipulate viewers, largely by saving the worst parts of his speech until most of them had long gone to bed.

Tuesday’s address was boring, but at least it was mildly entertaining to watch Republicans in the House of Representatives chamber compete with each other to give standing ovations that made the performances in “The Death of Stalin” look understated. Of course there is always performative applause at the annual speech, regardless of party. But the GOP’s eagerness to show the narcissist-in-chief how they love him the most got out of control. Republicans seemed to hop out of their seats every five seconds as Trump lied about how he turned a “dead” country into the “hottest.” It was enough to wish a charley horse on them, as the theatrics were meant to prove the president’s lies about the country experiencing “a turnaround for the ages.”

Going into the speech, Trump’s polls had fallen to five-alarm levels for Republicans in the midterms, ranging from 37% to 39% approval for his performance in office. In a recent poll, CNN found that only 32% of Americans think Trump has the right priorities. Even Republican voters — who tend to read every question as “Are you willing to admit liberals were right yet?” — are showing some signs of growing wobbly. Increasingly, GOP voters are avoiding answering YouGov poll questions like “Is Donald Trump racist?” In response to the 41% of Republicans who replied “not sure,” popular liberal commentator Adam Bonin argued that this is the “safe harbor” answer for party members who know Trump is in the wrong but can’t bring themselves to admit it out loud.

Trump’s levels of denial about his unpopularity have grown so comically whiny that it would be easy to wonder if he’s truly deluded, instead of just lying as usual. “It’s just amazing to me that there’s not more support out there,” Trump complained in remarks on Monday, before reassuring himself: “We actually have a silent support.” He then proceeded to lie about the 2024 election, claiming to have gotten millions more votes than he actually did — even though he won more votes than Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Someone on Trump’s team understood that it would backfire if casual viewers were subject to his usual whining and crying, so the first part of Tuesday night’s speech wisely took a bland, positive tone. He celebrated the U.S. men’s hockey team, though he still had to take a swipe at the equally successful women’s team that skipped the speech. He gave out some medals and bragged about his alleged accomplishments, aware that most people tuning in would not read the dutiful fact-checkers online, who pointed out that the president’s claims were exaggerated at best, and were often outright lies. Trump rolled out a bunch of false promises about lowering housing and health care prices, hoping to seed good vibes while obviously having no intention of following up with real help.

But sure enough, as the speech dragged into the first hour — after non-political junkies have grown bored and turned it off — the real Trump came out. He complained about the ingratitude of those who don’t understand his singular economic genius in pushing tariffs. He griped about the word “affordability,” implying Democrats made that concern up, while also blaming them for prices. He groused repeatedly that the party was not giving him the same phony love bombing that Republicans offered. Some Democrats did angrily shout back, but I wouldn’t make too much of it. Most Democrats did not give Trump the angry reaction he wanted. A few were caught sleeping on camera, the only response this speech deserved.

Once he could be certain that most sane people had shut the TV off, out came the unvarnished racism. He attributed crime and fraud explicitly to non-white immigrants. Crime, he argued, is mainly, if not solely, the result of “importing these cultures,” an especially rich claim from someone who, by all appearances, spent over a decade as the best friend of the American-born Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender whose records are being covered up by the Trump administration in the most ham-fisted way. The president even pretended that the budget will be balanced simply by ending immigrant fraud, a laughable claim that even his most racist fans will have a hard time buying.

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None of this is surprising, coming from the same man who campaigned on false accusations that Haitian immigrants kidnap and cook people’s pets. And it was no shock either when, well over an hour into the speech, the same man who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election started raving about how Democrats supposedly “cheat” in elections.

Trump also turned his attention to his truest love: weird, misleading and titillating stories pretending that right-wing America is under threat from “sick people” — liberals — who are “destroying” the country for no other reason, in his telling, than their relentless need to do evil. He claimed that schools are trying to force kids to change genders. And, of course, he shouted out Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who he claimed was a “martyr” to these shadowy forces of woke.

“These people are crazy, I’m telling ya, they’re crazy,” he said, and rolled out a laundry list of supposed victims of the “terrorists” and “murderers” who were supposedly unleashed by the cackling cabal of progressive baddies. Some of the stories, such as the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, did happen. But the conclusion, especially from someone who knew Epstein as well as Trump did, is an outright lie: that violence is caused by outsiders, and all we need to be safe is to expel anyone who doesn’t look like him or his old friend.

Listening to Trump’s nonsense was very much like being buttonholed by an addled old man who spends his days reading nothing but white supremacist forums and conspiracy theorist newsletters. Or really, it’s exactly like that — except he has a microphone, a sea of sycophants and power granted to him by a nation that has gone very wrong. But as the president’s team no doubt was aware, most people didn’t stick around long enough to see the real Trump.

It’s the trick they have mastered, keeping his lunacy where plugged-in liberals see it but others, who pay little attention, cannot believe it is really that bad. Thankfully, it won’t ultimately matter. His polls are collapsing because the real world effects of Trump’s incompetence are sinking in with voters. And no amount of manipulation at the State of the Union can change that.