The United States, you may have heard, is the “hottest” country in the world. It’s a phrase that President Trump often deploys to sell his presidency, and he did so again in Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address. “What a difference a president makes. A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. The hottest.” We’re “winning again,” experiencing “a turnaround for the ages.” If his meandering, nearly two-hour speech had a theme, this was it: America is back, baby—thanks to Trump.
That’s certainly true if you are a corporate executive or a substantial shareholder at a company that raked in massive benefits from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It’s even truer if you’re a businessperson with strong ties with the administration. Just look at David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, who attended last night’s State of the Union address and whose effort to build a massive Trump-friendly media empire is still alive—thanks, of course, to his connections to Trump.
Things are also going quite well for you if you’re a member of what Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff recently termed “the Epstein class.” This is a banner moment for the rich and powerful who behave as though the rules—financial, legal, moral—do not apply to them. Corruption is basically legal. If you’re close with the president, or even just a major donor or a high-profile fan, he will ensure that prosecutors look the other way. Even if you’re not a member of the Epstein class, but are merely one of the foot soldiers of this fascist regime, then you can behave with impunity—like the federal agents who murdered two American citizens last month but are not even being investigated for a crime.
Speaking of the Epstein class, things really aren’t that bad even if you are named in the Epstein files. Some have had to step back from public life and apologize, like Bill Gates, or retire early, like Harvard professor Larry Summers, but there are few signs that any prosecutions are in the offing. This isn’t England, after all. In the hottest country in the world, we don’t hold powerful people accountable.
Of course, the one person for whom all of this is true is Trump himself. He has used the presidency to make hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, peddling scammy crypto tokens, accepting foreign “investment” and “gifts,” and even hawking products like $100,000 “Trump Watches” on (where else?) Fox News. The president is, of course, not just a card-carrying member of the Epstein class, but is mentioned over a thousand times in the files released by the Department of Justice late last month. The DOJ, it seems, is also withholding files that are particularly damaging to Trump from the public, including those related to a woman who claims that Trump and Epstein sexually assaulted her decades ago.
But what about everyone else—those of us who aren’t the president or the head of a multinational corporation? Trump claimed in the State of the Union that things were actually great. “Inflation is plummeting,” he said, and touted a website—TrumpRx.gov—that has cut prescription drug prices by up to “600 percent.” Gas prices, meanwhile, have plummeted as well, falling below $2 a gallon in some areas.
None of that is true. Inflation is roughly where it was at the end of Biden’s presidency—which means that prices are still rising. Thanks to Trump’s tariffs, grocery prices are still climbing and many household goods remain stubbornly expensive. If prescription drug prices had fallen more than 100 percent—let alone 600 percent—drug companies would be paying consumers to use their products; that’s just basic math. Yes, gas prices have fallen somewhat—they’re down about 18 cents a gallon, according to AAA, since the start of his second term—but not in a way that makes a huge difference when compared to other soaring costs. (When gas prices tick back up this summer, will he still claim such omnipotence?)
That’s really the story of the state of the union during Trump’s second presidency: He was elected because Americans were fed up with post-pandemic inflation under Biden—and he’s spent most of his term lining his own pockets and siccing federal stormtroopers on American communities. Meanwhile, the price of consumer goods is still soaring, health care costs are even worse, wages are stagnating, and job growth is anemic—and nothing Trump outlined in the State of the Union will do anything to reverse these trends. War with Iran certainly isn’t the solution that working people are looking for.
Democrats recognize this. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s State of the Union response was almost entirely about rising costs—with a few pointed mentions of Trump’s thuggish immigration crackdown, as well. “Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings,” Spanberger said. “Our president told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children. Think about that.”
That’s the Democratic message heading into the midterms: The president is focused on enriching himself and terrorizing—rather than helping—ordinary people. Spanberger only needed 12 minutes to make that case persuasively.
