Donald Trump gave a failed "State of Delusion" speech polluted by lies but Republicans applauded anyway

Echo opinion published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer.

Donald Trump failed to deliver anything to the American people in his "State of Delusion" speech to Congress on February 24 #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

There’s an old expression in sports that always applies to the losers: “playing out the string.” A team playing out the string has been eliminated from the playoffs but keeps on going simply because there are games on the schedule. A baseball team well under .500 plays out a lazy September series on the road and fulfills its obligations to the fans — and collects paychecks — even though the games no longer have any meaning.

It’s too soon to say if Donald Trump is playing out the string, but there was a whiff of that sort of inevitable failure in his State of the Union address last night (February 24, 2026). 

Most Americans didn’t pay attention at all, and if they did, they’d find the usual Trump — the inanities, the absurdities, the wild boasts, and the outright lies that have come to define his decade of lording over the American political scene. “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” bragged Trump, very much the insult comic running through his tired material. “People are asking me, ‘Please, please, please, Donald Trump, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore, we’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we’re winning too much.’ And I say, ‘No, no, no. You’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re gonna win bigger than ever.’”

Trump is a president with an approval rating below 40 percent. 

There is little evidence to suggest his rating will ever rebound much. There may now be a lower floor than in the first term. The Trump administration’s savagery in Minneapolis destroyed the popularity he had enjoyed on the issue of immigration. 

His advantages on the economy are gone, too, as Americans confront a K-shaped recovery that has thrilled the rich and left much of the rest of the country with higher costs and a meager job market. 

Of course, since 2015, just about any pundit who underestimates Trump is bound, eventually, to face humiliation. It’s easy to suggest that this time will be like all the others. Trump has certainly been unpopular before. He was ostracized after January 6 and counted out during the brat summer of 2024. Many politicians and commentators believed he would destroy the Republican Party instead of refashioning it in his own image. And betting against Trump has typically been a fool’s game.

What’s different now is the passage of time. This year, Trump will turn 80. He is a second-term president — he is in his final term, no matter how much he indulges in the idea of illegally seeking a third term. The Constitution won’t stop Trump — he has little regard for the rule of law — but political gravity probably will. 

If Trump can’t improve his standing in the next few months, Republicans are going to be swamped in the midterms. 

Democrats are very likely to flip the House and could make a serious run at the Senate. This will make Trump’s 2027, even more perilous. Trump's goodwill with the American people is gone, and there are signs that the grip he maintains over his own party could start to slip. Indiana Republicans bucked him on his redistricting scheme, and other rank-and-file Republicans, staring up at the final Trump years, could start to cast about elsewhere for leaders — or find that it’s in their interests to finally defy the president.

Of course, liberals have hoped many times in the past that the GOP would “wake up” to Trump and toss him aside only to find he is unmovable. But, as his rambling State of the (Delusion) Union speech demonstrated, Trump’s great enemy is time. In 2019 or 2022, there was so much potential for the future of Trump. He was a first-term president or a former president gearing up for another run at the White House. A Republican thinking two, three, four, or even five years ahead had to consider Trump and calculate whether any opposition to him was worth it politically. The answer was always “no.” The political graveyard was stacked high with anti-Trump Republicans or Republicans who dared, in particular instances, to face off against him. Mike Pence was the vice-president of the United States, and now he’s a ghost within his own party.

Those days seem to be coming to an end. Republicans are beginning to understand that the second term of Trump has offered almost nothing to campaign on this fall. Inflation hasn’t eased up enough. The tariffs are messy and expensive. The immigration regime is violent and alienating. The safety-net cuts punish the working class and poor. In his first term, Americans were largely optimistic about the economy. That world is gone. In defense of Trump, there are macroeconomic factors that he alone cannot fix, beginning with the stubbornly high prices of housing and groceries. But he’s given no indication he’d care to fix them. Solutions are absent. Instead, in his State of the Union, he pretended the problems didn’t exist or blamed the Democrats.

A (visibly) weakened Trump, of course, is still a dangerous Trump. We do not know what he and J.D. Vance might be plotting for 2028. Perhaps they’ll rerun the 2020, playbook and hope for a more successful outcome. 

All scenarios have to be considered. As Trump’s hand weakens on domestic affairs, he’s increasingly turned to sowing chaos abroad. 

Trump flirted with the full-scale occupation of Venezuela.🤪🙄He’s threatening war with Iran. (Wait! Whatever happened to the targeted bombing of the Iran nuclear site?  Obviously, it failed to completely destroy Iran's nuclear program.)

Trump can (illegally) light the world on fire without congressional authorization.

That, ultimately, may be his legacy, unless he somehow decides to restrain himself. An American president playing out the string is a little different from a baseball team. He can still kill a whole lot of people. (Maine Writer- when will media start to seriously report about the actual numbers of deaths tied to Donald Trump's name❓

Shame on Republicans like Maine's Senator Susan Collins for putting up with and applauding Trump's delusions.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have spent down their political capitol and now desperate to fix what is broken

"Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites."

Trump Took Office With a Lot of Political Capital. In 6 Months, He’s Squandered It, by Ross Barkan published in New York Magazine Intelligencer.

For a brief, shimmering moment in the aftermath of the 2024 election, almost everything seemed possible for Donald Trump.

Maine Writer premonition.....IMO, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde set the tone for the over inflated election euphoria. 

 "From the pulpit, Bishop Mariann Budde spoke directly to Trump, who was seated in the front row. 'I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said, invoking gay, lesbian, and transgender children, as well as undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Her plea for mercy caused an international firestorm; critics condemned her politicization of the church, and admirers praised her courage'." Washingtonian

Unlike 2016, Trump had won the popular vote, and Americans, against all odds, 😒 had developed a warmer view of him. 🙄

MAGA was ascendant. It was plausible to perceive Trump’s victory as a harbinger of a broader realignment: Among Black, Latino, and Asian voters, Trump had made tangible gains, and those under 30 moved decisively toward the former and future president relative to 2020. The social-justice or woke era was in eclipse, and there was no shortage of ruminations on the rightward shift of the youth and the inability of liberals to matter to this new counterculture.

Conservative intellectuals like Oren Cass and a number of right-populist politicians, including Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, heralded a new Republican Party that could, if savvy and disciplined enough, triangulate or even break the American left. 

These MAGA leaders expressed support for organized labor and offered stinging critiques of laissez-faire capitalism — it’s easy to forget that portions of Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention sounded like they were cribbed from Bernie Sanders — while maintaining a sense of cultural conservatism. They were anti-immigrant, staunchly patriotic, and skeptical of the Reaganite wing of the GOP that had, over the decades, alienated the working class. Trump appeared to intuitively grasp this, beating the Biden administration to the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio and later, upon winning again, nominating a Labor secretary who genuinely embraced labor rights.

If Trump had rhetorically wrenched his party left on economics, his actual presidency has proved that the realignment chatter was at best premature and at worst foolhardy. Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites. Trump’s overall approval rating has plunged, and unlike even Biden’s decline — driven by his advanced age and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan — it has been almost entirely self-inflicted and within his control.

Consider the state of the nation on the day Trump took office: Inflation was beginning to cool, the economy was expanding, and even border crossings were falling. 

Americans were largely supportive of Trump’s call to tighten the borders further and were open to how he might combat inflation. 

The tariff regime of his first term was popular enough, and some of it, like the taxes slapped on China, were embraced by the Biden administration. 

Trump had promised, as a candidate, to not blast apart the social safety net, and Americans believed him. He had political capital to spend down — far more, certainly, than he did at the start of 2017.

Trump has had a consequential presidency, thrilling enough if you are a particular kind of person — one who is not actually well-represented in the American electorate. Nativists and outright racists have much to delight over, and followers of Stephen Miller are reaching their own dark nirvana. Trump has dramatically increased the reach of (evil❗) ICE, attempted to revoke birthright citizenship, and made immigration to the United States inordinately more challenging. Little of this is broadly celebrated, and the most American voters, independents especially, desired out of a second Trump term was a curtailment of mass illegal immigration. 

Legal immigration is plenty popular, and there’s enough fresh polling to suggest that Trump’s hypermilitarized ICE is not fulfilling any broader mandates. Thanks to Trump, Americans are becoming gradually more pro-immigrant again, perhaps recalling what nativist cruelty looks like in practice.

Trump’s economic agenda is another deep, lasting strike against the realignment. Tariffs, in theory, belong to the protectionist, populist cause Trump championed, but they mean little if they aren’t paired with any greater federally funded industrial policy. Unlike Biden, Trump has not attempted to directly boost domestic manufacturing or America’s withering supply chains, especially as China looms as the world’s greatest 21st-century industrial superpower. 

In April, Trump temporarily tanked the stock market, and while markets have recovered and are now at new highs, Americans are much more wary of Trump’s stewardship of the economy. Trade wars aren’t especially exciting to voters.

More crucial, though, is the One Big Beautiful Act (aka, "the big bad, ugly bill) and the enormous social safety-net cuts, particularly to Medicaid, 

 that will be felt in the coming years. Beyond tax cuts, there’s little for Republicans to easily campaign on, and the reduced funding to rural hospitals and clinics will make for great Democratic campaign fodder next year. The reconciliation package, largely, was a hodgepodge of orthodox Republican fiscal policy that never found much support from voters after the 1990s. This was Trump’s great insight, after all — he’d run against pure supply-side economics in 2016, swerving away from Mitt Romney–style conservatism. 

But, campaigning and governing are entirely different matters, and Trump has shown he’s willing to bow to the traditionalists in his party when it comes to bills that arrive on his desk for a signature.
The other populist Republicans wilted, too. 

Senator Josh Hawley "run Josh run", cowardly escape during the January 6th insurrection at the capitol 

Hawley vowed to not vote for a package that slashed Medicaid and then did it anyway. Now he meekly wants to reverse those cuts, but the damage has been done. Vance, as Trump’s vice-president, must cheerlead whatever his boss does, especially with a fight for the 2028 nomination on the horizon. The Jeffrey Epstein saga, meanwhile, threatens to overshadow the lawmaking and cause great anguish for MAGA, who are caught between obeying their beloved leader (who wants all Epstein discourse to cease) and chasing Epstein threads in perpetuity. Epstein, the late sex criminal, bedevils them because Trump is no less implicated than any Democrats, and answers will prove elusive for all time.

The more banal fallout of this all is that America remains a nation split between red and blue, with neither party gaining a decisive advantage. Republicans cannot triangulate or realign the electorate in such a manner to doom the Democrats to irrelevancy. Democrats can’t seem to excite voters enough to revive the promise of an Obama-esque landslide. Democrats have the edge to flip the House next year, while Republicans should be the favorites to retain Senate control. The 2028 race is probably going to be a closely divided slog, no matter whom the major parties nominate. This is what we are, and what we are going to be.