President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was his best chance to capture a national audience and sell Americans on the strength of his administration’s accomplishments so far.
But those accomplishments that Trump did highlight were largely lost in a sea of boasting about America’s might and prestige, and his heavy-handed and often very graphic attempts to pull on viewers’ heartstrings with shoutouts to guests including the mother of a woman slain on a bus in Charlotte, North Carolina, the victorious U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, and members of the U.S. military to whom he gave out Medals of Honor on the spot.
Members of both parties came out of Tuesday evening’s address wondering whether the president had found his focus for the midterm elections or whether the night’s event was more of a last hurrah for a presidency that most experts in Washington now agree will likely be hampered by one or more Democratic congressional majorities after the year concludes.
“You’ve seen nothing yet,” Trump promised. “We’re going to do better, and better, and better. This is the golden age of America.”
Light on specifics detailing how he was easing the financial burdens on American families, the president’s address will likely do little to quiet his critics on the right, such as the likes of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have yearned for Trump to refocus his agenda on economic policy and bringing down costs over attempts to reach a double-digit number of “wars ended.”
Overall, the president’s address focused heavily on the American military and repeated beratings of Democrats, while domestic policy specifics were isolated to the few topics where the White House gained ground in 2025, thanks to an inability to pass legislation despite twin GOP majorities in Congress. Those few specifics centered around drug pricing and the president’s efforts to lower prescription costs through his “most favored nations” program.
“Doubtless tens of millions of Americans hope that that is true,” Curt Mills, of the American Conservative magazine, told The Independent via text, after Trump’s opening declaration. Mills argued that it seemed the president suffered from an “extreme lack of conviction” around the declaration that America was re-entering an age of prosperity.
A longtime skeptic of Trump’s military interventions in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere, Mills panned the president’s reverent boastings of American military might, including the in-depth description of the raid to capture Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, as an embrace of “Hegsethism,” a might-makes-right ideology he sees embodied by the president’s neoconservative defense secretary.
“The fetishization of the military is more pernicious, pointless (so what is this for?) and low IQ than in term 1,” Mills said.
“It venerated and exalted the military with no clear rationale why. Pure Hegsethism. We got no answer on Iran.”
Democrats, meanwhile, remained laser-focused through the evening attacking the White House for the president’s few words on the topic of making life more affordable for Americans. The DNC blasted out a press release faulting the president for spending a mere five of his more than 100 minutes on the issue of healthcare despite costs surging for millions in this area thanks to the end of federal subsidies for some Obamacare health insurance plans in January.
During those five minutes, the president spent part of it pushing his own health care plan — the “Great Health Care Plan” — that has little to no chance of making it through Congress.
“The problems haven’t changed, no matter what he wants us to believe,” Kelly Dietrich, founder of the National Democratic Training Commitee, told The Independent of Trump’s remarks.
He derided the pageantry Trump forced into the evening’s events with the awarding of Medals of Honor to two military pilots, which the president followed up by quipping that he’d like one himself (despite having never served a day in the military).
“The man is not in touch with what it means to be a normal [person],” Dietrich said. “He’s in his billionaire bubble.”
Abigail Spanberger, newly-elected Virginia governor and a rising start in the Democratic middle, delivered her own response to the president’s remarks in an address Tuesday evening, as did Sen. Alex Padilla of California.
The governor’s remarks were surgical in their precision, focused entirely on making the case that the president’s actions were making life more difficult for everyday Americans around the country.
“Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?” she asked. “Is the president working to keep Americans safe both at home and abroad? We all know the answer is no."
Even Mills, who has been a backer of Trump’s efforts to reshape the U.S. trade landscape through the levying of tariffs, admitted on Tuesday that the president has a lot more to do if he wants to sell Americans on his economic agenda’s efficacy going forward.
“I don’t think this was much of a game changer,” said Mills.
The president’s poll ratings show him at some of his lowest levels ever on issues like inflation, the economy and immigration. In a new Washington Post/Ipsos poll published over the weekend, more than six in ten Americans said the president was not doing enough to bring down prices.
Once one of his greatest polling strengths during the 2024 election, Trump’s current numbers on immigration are at their lowest popularity levels since September 2017, days after he rescinded the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).
As his party lurches towards the 2026 midterms, members of both parties are sure that Trump will need to do a lot more to keep his name from being a weight dragging down Republicans in the fall.
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