After two days of huge market losses, Donald Trump declared that things have never been better for the United States. In a speech that was functionally a State of the Union address, Trump continued on the theme of his inauguration speech and spoke about how the United States is in a new Golden Age. The speech was the longest presidential address ever given to Congress and yet there was practically no mention of the economy. Indeed, the word “economy” was only used five times in the entire speech — again, the longest ever given — and one of them referred to Democrats’ likely refusal to applaud him if he made “the greatest economy.”
This would be notable at any moment — surely, the economy is a huge focus of the President’s job and, well, the state of the union — but it is particularly significant given that Trump was swept into power in large part as a reaction to economic instability and rising prices under Biden. Trump certainly pointed to that but gave very little in terms of concrete proposals for what he was going to do to improve the economy. He spoke vaguely about tax cuts (for the rich) and decreasing regulations but quickly shifted his focus elsewhere. How to respond to the fallout of his tariffs (which he had to walk back just days later) was not addressed. Indeed, the centrality of tariffs to the Trump economic plan was clear as he spoke at length about how tariffs were going to bring back production, raise funds, and improve the U.S. market. The irony was palpable given the markets’ response to the tariffs last week.
The heart of the speech, however, wasn’t the economy or even foreign policy but, rather, the “culture war.” Trump returned to the declaration he made during his inauguration that he would make a “common sense revolution.” The main target of this (counter) “revolution” is, of course, the spectre of wokeness, which is a dog-whistle for a reactionary attack on the oppressed. A particular focus of the anti-woke rhetoric is against trans people. Trump invited to his address a student athlete supposedly injured by a trans volleyball player and a mother who, as Trump explained “discovered that [her] daughter’s school had secretly socially transitioned [her] 13-year-old little girl…[the mother] is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse.” But, don’t you worry, he added, “we’re getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military, and it’s already out, and it’s out of our society. We don’t want it. Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It’s gone. And we feel so much better for it. Don’t we? Don’t we feel better?”
In this quote we can see the trick that Trump is trying to pull: he is trying to point to advances in his reactionary social program and use that to distract from the lack of progress on improving the economy and paper over the chaos of the first month of his administration. Indeed, Trump is even more limited than usual as the bourgeoisie is largely united against his tariffs (which is why he had to walk them back) and the economic fallout was already being felt. Trump hasn’t lowered prices or raised wages; Trump hasn’t had any real economic successes (or even proposals) from his first month and a half in office to point to; and in many ways the economy is worse. He can’t make people’s material conditions better so, instead, he’s trying to play an ideological game where he substitutes reaction for improving conditions. The entire speech appeared to be saying “Look! I limited other people’s rights, isn’t that making your life better?”
It seems unlikely that this strategy will work. We are already seeing that Trump’s poll numbers are dropping and the proposal of the tariffs is one of the reasons why the market was responding so poorly. Importantly, Trump’s entire economic strategy is based around raising money via tariffs but, as the hosts of Pod Save America recently pointed out, if your goal is to raise money via tariffs then you can’t use them as a negotiating tactic. Once they have been imposed, if you roll them back, you lose the income they were generating. However, to truly implement the tariffs that Trump keeps teasing would mean, as we saw this week, a full-out trade war with some of the United States’ biggest trading partners. It is a reactionary and xenophobic gamble (with odds that aren’t great) that this could actually improve the U.S. economy. So, in many ways, the entire Trump economic plan is based on sand — sand which is quickly being rejected by the bourgeoisie.
This is even more problematic for Trump given that he is trying to raise defense spending while also proposing tax cuts, all while promising to balance the budget. To actually do this will require a huge program of austerity against popular programs such as Medicare/Medicaid and social security — programs that Trump repeatedly promised not to touch during the campaign. Cutting these programs will impact the whole country including red states such as Kentucky where, in one Congressional district, 40 percent of the population relies on Medicaid. This will put pressure on Republicans in Congress — who are already being advised to stop doing town halls with their constituents due to the pushback they are getting — which will threaten the very slim majority Republicans hold in the House.
In the speech, Trump again touted the allegedly historic mandate he has. But the numbers don’t add up. Trump won the popular vote by a lower margin than Biden or Clinton won it. He won the swing states very narrowly. The Republicans just barely control Congress. This isn’t the government with a mandate, and certainly not a mandate to behave as aggressively as they have been. Trump is biting off more than he can chew and is scrambling to distract the public from the fact that he can’t actually provide material relief to his voters. The State of the Union was two hours of bullshit meant to distract the public from the house of cards that Trump sits atop.
