SS: Tonight at 9 p.m. EST Trump will give his state of the union address. Obviously such an event will probably be painful, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. As the Bulwark notes, after Trump's first state of the union address it saw his polls finally dip into the negatives. Similarly polling shows that on average Trump has lost anywhere from 1/6th to 1/4th of his support from last spring.
Let’s be honest: Tonight will be depressing. When the sergeant at arms proclaims in a stentorian voice to the House chamber, “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States,” we will be reminded, vividly and unavoidably, that Donald Trump is the president of the United States.
Which is depressing.
But there is a silver lining to that undeniably dark cloud. When President Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress almost a year ago, on March 4, 2025, he was in decent shape politically. Four months before, he’d won the presidency with 49.8 percent of the vote to Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent. Six weeks into his second term, his support was holding steady: The New York Times polling average had him at 49 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval.
Today, almost a year later, the Times average has Trump at 41 percent approval, 56 percent disapproval. Trump has lost about one sixth of his approval in the last year. A new poll from CNN is even more dramatic, showing Trump at 36 percent approval today, down from 48 percent in that same poll a year ago. That suggests one in four of his original supporters deserting him. And this morning G. Elliott Morris reports on his new poll, which has Trump at 37 percent approval, 59 percent disapproval.
So Trump has lost considerable ground. One of course wishes that even more of the public had changed its mind even more quickly. But as our Declaration of Independence reminds us, the people are often slow to move: “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves.” The people tend to be characterized more by “patient sufferance” than quick rethinking.
But eventually the people can be brought to see what is happening. Eventually they come to notice “a long train of abuses and usurpations” and the “repeated injuries” of their rulers. Eventually they can say, “Enough.” There’s lots of evidence they’re en route to decisively saying “Enough” at the polls this November. (The new G. Elliott Morris poll has the Democrats up ten points on the congressional generic ballot.) And it’s more likely that public opinion will continue to move in the direction it’s been going than that it will reverse course.
Now it’s true that the public might conceivably reverse course if Trump changed course. But he seems to have no interest in doing so. As was the case with his predecessor, Mad King George, when the public has “petitioned for redress in the most humble terms,” those petitions “have been answered only by repeated injury.”
So Trump could announce an end to his cruel and destructive mass-deportation agenda tonight. He could apologize to the people of Minnesota, whom he placed under siege, and to the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed by agents of the Trump administration carrying out his policies. But surely he won’t.
Trump could speak directly to the Epstein survivors who will be in the House gallery. He could acknowledge that his Justice Department hasn’t complied with the law he signed three months ago. He could pledge a full release of all the Epstein documents and a serious effort to secure some measure of justice for the victims. But surely he won’t.
Trump could acknowledge that the Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, and ask Congress to authorize the attack on Iran he seems to be planning. But surely he won’t.
Trump could embrace the constitutional directive that he “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and announce a radical change in course at the Department of Justice. But surely he won’t.
Trump could back away from his obsession with tariffs, which have not produced economic gains and show no prospect of doing so—in fact, quite the opposite. But surely he won’t.
Tonight, we’ll see a president who will speak—at length!—making the case for the path he’s chosen. But this speech is no more likely to help Trump than his address a year ago, which helped him not at all. It was a week after his appearance before Congress that Trump’s approval and disapproval lines crossed for the first time since he returned to the presidency. Since then his approval has steadily continued down, and his disapproval has steadily gone up. Those trends are likely to continue.
It’s worth noting that this public rejection has happened without war and without a recession, two common proximate causes of a decline in presidential popularity—though we may be teetering close to both. On the economy in particular, it turns out not to be always true that it’s the economy, stupid. After all, it doesn’t seem to have mostly been the economy in 1776. Almost none of the charges in the Declaration is about the material well-being of the colonists. The indictment there is that “a prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
That’s surely the case today.
But it’s also worth noting that unfit rulers can sometimes hold on to power. The publication of the Declaration of Independence didn’t achieve independence. That took years of war. And like Mad King George, Trump will not give up easily. He has many levers of power in the executive branch at his disposal. He and his supporters have tons of money to spend on the coming elections. They have the acquiescence of many elites outside of government. They will not go gently into their well-deserved night.
Tonight Trump will, as Steve Bannon memorably put it, “flood the zone with shit.” The good news is that the American people seem increasingly sickened by the odor. But we have a long struggle ahead to get rid of it.
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