President Donald Trump stood before a joint session of Congress Tuesday night and delivered the longest State of the Union address in modern American history, an hour and 48 minutes of self-congratulation, Democratic taunting, and a parade of false claims that would make even the most seasoned fact-checkers dizzy. He proclaimed a “golden age of America.” The American people, by every credible measure available, disagree.
The disconnect between what Trump said inside the House chamber and what Americans are actually experiencing has never been wider. And the polling data released in the days before his speech tells a devastating story that no amount of podium pounding can rewrite.
The Numbers Trump Doesn’t Want You To See
Let’s start with what Americans actually think, because it contradicts virtually everything the president said Tuesday night.
A New York Times/Siena poll released in January found that 60% of American voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with more than half saying his policies have made life less affordable. Nearly half of voters, 49%, believe the country is worse off than it was a year ago. His overall approval sits underwater at 40-56%. A full 55% say his first year has been unsuccessful.
Those numbers got worse as February rolled in. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released just days before the State of the Union found 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs. His approval on inflation is even bleaker, with 65% disapproving and just 32% approving. A plurality of Americans, 48%, say the economy has gotten worse since Trump took office, compared to just 29% who say it improved.
Perhaps most telling: two in three Americans, 64%, say Trump is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the United States. A CNN poll found his approval sinking to 36%. The NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that most Americans believe the state of the union is simply not strong.
Trump’s response to this avalanche of bad data? He threatened to sue The New York Times for publishing the Siena poll results, called the numbers “fake,” and insisted he has “silent support” that surveys are missing. At a White House event Monday, he let the mask slip briefly, admitting, “It just amazes me that there is not more support out there.”
It shouldn’t amaze him at all. The numbers explain exactly why.
An Economy That Isn’t What He Says It Is
Trump opened his address by claiming he inherited a “stagnant economy” with “inflation at record levels” and has since turned it into something “roaring like never before.” The facts tell a completely different story.
The U.S. economy grew 2.2% in 2025, lower than in any year of the Biden presidency. GDP growth was 2.8% in Biden’s final year. Unemployment has risen from 4.0% when Trump took office to 4.3% in January 2026, hitting a four-year high of 4.5% last November. The employment-population ratio has slipped from 60.1% to 59.8%.
Trump did not inherit record inflation. The year-over-year rate was 3.0% when he took office, already falling sharply from its 2022 peak of 9.1% (itself a 40-year high, not a record, since the actual all-time high was 23.7% in 1920). Inflation has continued declining to 2.4%, a trend that predates Trump’s policies.
Then there are the costs Americans actually feel. Ground beef hit a record $6.75 per pound last month, up nearly 22% year-over-year. Ground coffee prices surged 34% in the past year. Energy costs climbed 6.3% from January 2025 to January 2026, driven partly by AI-related data center demand. These are the price tags people see at the grocery store, and no amount of cherry-picked stock market numbers changes what’s in their shopping carts.
Trump’s repeated claim that tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries” remains flatly false. Tariff payments are made by U.S. importers, who routinely pass those costs along to consumers. Multiple analyses have confirmed that Americans bear the overwhelming majority of tariff costs. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs just four days before his speech, a reality he called “unfortunate” and “disappointing” multiple times during the address.
The Fact-Check Avalanche
The economy wasn’t the only subject where Trump departed from reality. Across CNN, NBC, ABC, NPR, and FactCheck.org, the president’s address was met with wall-to-wall corrections.
Trump claimed $18 trillion in investment commitments have poured into the country under his watch. The White House’s own website lists $9.6 trillion, and even that figure appears inflated by questionable accounting. He said his tax law represents the largest tax cuts in American history. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation says it’s actually the sixth largest. He claimed 70,000 new construction jobs were created. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the real number at 44,000.
He claimed zero illegal aliens have been admitted in the past nine months. That’s false, according to Customs and Border Protection data showing 237,538 crossings in 2025 alone, though crossings have dropped to their lowest levels in over 50 years. He repeated debunked claims about ending wars that never ended or weren’t actually wars. He falsely claimed a murder victim’s killer was an immigrant, when the man charged was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, a fact his own local newspaper had already reported.
Former Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who documented Trump’s claims across both terms, noted beforehand that many of the president’s favorite falsehoods are habitual at this point. He was right. Trump claimed he reduced prescription drug prices by up to 1,000%, a mathematical impossibility since a 100% cut would bring prices to zero. He said gasoline is $1.99 a gallon. The national average is $2.93, according to AAA.
A Chamber Divided, A Country Watching
The scene inside the Capitol told its own story. Republicans offered raucous applause throughout the nearly two-hour marathon. Democrats mostly sat in silence. Rep. Al Green of Texas was escorted from the chamber near the beginning of the speech after holding up a sign reading “Black People Aren’t Apes,” a direct reference to a video Trump had reposted on Truth Social depicting the Obamas as primates.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, delivering the Democratic response, went directly at the affordability gap. She said Americans “did not hear the truth from our president” and focused her remarks on the economic squeeze families are feeling under Trump’s policies, particularly the Medicaid cuts enacted through his One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer, which slashed more than $900 billion in federal funding over 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Trump promised during his address to “always protect Medicaid.” He signed the law that gutted it.
The Midterm Shadow
Here’s the part that should worry every Republican running in November: Trump’s economic approval rating is now underwater by nearly every major survey, something that almost never happened during his first term. Even during the COVID downturn, Trump largely broke even or maintained broad approval on the economy, according to AP-NORC tracking. That political asset, the perception that Trump is good for the economy, was arguably his single most important electoral strength. It’s gone.
A Fox News poll in January found 68% of voters said Trump wasn’t spending enough time on the economy. The Nate Silver Bulletin average has Trump’s net approval at -14.9, near his second-term low. The share of Americans who strongly approve has dropped from 34% at inauguration to just 24% today, while strong disapproval has surged from 31% to 45%.
These aren’t numbers that get better with a long speech. They reflect lived experience, the price of groceries, the cost of housing, the reality of a paycheck that doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. No president has ever successfully argued voters out of their own financial reality. Trump tried for an hour and 48 minutes on Tuesday night. The polls suggest it won’t work.
The “Golden Age” Gap
The most revealing moment of the entire evening might have been the framing itself. Trump declared that “the golden age of America is now upon us.” He said these first 250 years “were just the beginning.” He painted a picture of a nation reborn, a “turnaround for the ages.”
But 70% of Americans rate the economy as no better than fair or poor, according to the latest NYT/Siena survey on affordability. Half of Americans say they cannot afford the life they feel they should be able to live. Majorities oppose Trump’s tariffs (54-38%), his Medicaid cuts (56-29%), and U.S. involvement in running Venezuela (64-33%).
When 42% of voters think history will remember you as one of the worst presidents and your approval is at 39% heading into a midterm year, calling it a golden age isn’t optimism. It’s delusion.
The state of the union, according to the Americans who actually live in it, is not strong. And no speech, however long, changes what people feel when they open their wallets.