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Trump's State of the Union Address--He Is Reading the Polls And Seems Scared
Feb. 25th, 2026 11:19 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
phillips_p_obrien_feedHi All,
A quick piece about last night’s relatively subdued State of the Union address. Having promised fireworks a few days ago, we got something very different from President Trump. While the address was very long and in typical Trump fashion all over the place, it was also different than expected and I would say it was extremely illuminating about his state of mind. If I could boil it down to one thing it is this: Donald Trump is reading the polls, realizes that many of his policies are deeply unpopular, and is scared.
Btw you can read a text of the entire address here and if you want to watch the whole speech, here is a video.
To understand how he now accepts that many of his policies are unpopular and how scared he is, its best to look at what he avoided talking about or more accurately what he talked about as little and as carefully/generically as possible. The first was the Supreme Court after the Tariff ruling last week.
If you remember, when the ruling first came out, Trump was incandescent and lashed out in a historically negative fashion about the Court. He called the ruling an “embarassment” a “terrible” decision and even claimed that members of the Supreme Court were traitors, saying they were "swayed by foreign interests".
It should be noted that in the history of the USA, this was an unprecedented attack. Never before has a President accused the Supreme Court of being traitors.
Last night in the State of the Union address, however, he hardly mentioned the court or the ruling. When he did, he even tried very hard to be presidential, describing the ruling which he had earlier blasted as traitorous only as “unfortunate”. Here was the key text.
And then just four days ago an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court, it just came down, came down.
Very unfortunate ruling. But the good news is that almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made, right, Scott? Knowing that the legal power that I as president have to make a new deal could be far worse for them. And therefore they will continue to work along the same successful path that we had negotiated before the Supreme Court’s unfortunate involvement.
Trump even avoided the whole tariff question as much as possible. In the entire 2 hour speech, he used the word Tariff only 5 times, and he rather rushed through those moments, trying more to convince himself of his arguments it seemed than anything else.
So we went from Tariffs being absolutely central to his political positioning and the Supreme Court being an embarrassing disaster, to very little in just a few days.
I suppose, however, that at least he mentioned both the court and tariffs. One thing that he avoided entirely was ICE (US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). He not only never mentioned ICE or immigrants and only used the word “immigration” three times. And it is worth noting that these three mentions were general and not specific. Here was the first time he .
For decades, before I came along, we had the exact opposite. From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive and hard-working people who make our country great, who make our country run.
So the Court was treated with kid gloves, ICE was completely avoided, and tariffs and immigration were small issues. What was mentioned—well “prices” and inflation” (a combined 23 times) and the economy were dominant. However, he also spent a great deal of time on foreign policy in a very particular way.
He was desperate to find foreign policy triumphs and ran away from those foreign policy questions he seems to know are unpopular.
For instance there was a long and very detailed section on his supposed Venezuela triumph of kidnapping the former dictator Nicolas Maduro (much longer in total than the total mentions of the Supreme Court, tariffs, ICE and Immigration). However there was no mention of democracy for the Venezuelan people and Trump confirmed that he wants to keep Maduro’s former VP Delcy Rodrigues in power—so much for freedom.
We’re working closely with the new president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, to unleash extraordinary economic gains for both of our countries…
And there was this mention of Iran—which I am still trying to get my head around.
As president, I will make peace wherever I can, but I will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must. That’s why in a breakthrough operation last June, the United States military obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
By going back and claiming that he had already obliterated the Iranian nuclear program last June, is he walking back any argument that he needs to attack now? Hmmm.
Once again he avoided unpopular foreign policy subjects. He barely mentioned Russia and never talked his good friend Vladimir Putin (interestingly the Anchorage Summit was not put forward as one of his successes for the year). He also avoided China entirely, beyond one strange mention of Chinese military technology in relation to his supposed great triumph in Venezuela.
Add it all up and what do you get—a scared president trying very hard to assure Americans that he is succeeding. He understands that he has major popularity problems with some of his flagship issues and is hunting around for triumphs that he can sell.
It was one of the least Trump-like major addresses, and that alone makes it worthy of note.
Also, a scared Trump is a dangerous Trump.
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