I can’t say I’m looking forward to the State of the Union address.
Anyone who follows politics could write President Trump’s script. Lying about winning the 2020 election. Demonizing anyone who disagrees with him. Taking credit for bringing jobs “back” to America. Claiming to have ushered the U.S. into a new “golden age.” All cheered wildly by Republicans who have abandoned their constitutional duty to provide a check on presidential abuses of power.
I’m sure fact-checkers are well-prepared for Trump’s predictable lies. I’m more interested in truths that will go unspoken.
The sad fact is that the state of the union after one year of Trump’s Project 2025 presidency is deeply troubled. Americans’ sense of optimism about the future has just hit a record low. Trust in the federal government is sinking.
There are plenty of reasons that Trump’s approval rating is as low as it’s ever been.
One is the militarized cruelty. Violence by federal agents has shaken many people. It’s hard to watch Trump’s masked domestic military force drag Americans from their cars and gun them down, and just as hard to see White House officials defend the killers and smear the victims. Trump officials have told so many lies about Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations that judges no longer assume the government is telling the truth. The regime is spending billions to turn warehouses into de-facto concentration camps for immigrant detainees — and who knows who else.
Another is the corruption. Trump has trashed the principle that no one is above the law. He has made bribery commonplace. His family has made billions of dollars from self-dealing. To top it all off, Trump is suing the government to put $10 billion directly into his own pocket.
Another is the extreme economic inequality. The concentration of wealth in the hands of the very rich is at a 60-year high, meaning things feel great for those who party with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, but not so much for millions of people trying to provide housing, food and health care for their families. Trump and congressional Republicans made things worse by passing a budget that gutted safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps to pay for huge tax cuts for corporations and the ultrarich.
Trump has corrupted the use of the pardon power to free fraudsters and other white-collar criminals. His pardons have vaporized more than $1 billion in compensation owed to those criminals’ victims. He has shown more interest in protecting friends who appear in the Epstein files than in getting justice for victims of sex trafficking. As Aaron Regunberg recently noted in The New Republic, Republicans’ “primary purpose” is “to shield the wealthy and well-connected from facing justice for their crimes.”
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press help define American democracy. But Trump’s regime has arrested journalists, seized their computers, demanded friendlier news coverage and threatened media outlets. MAGA officials are trying to whitewash American history, censoring museums, libraries and national parks and dictating what can be taught in university classrooms. The administration seems hellbent on defining dissent as “domestic terrorism.”
He has sacrificed science and public health. Our scientific leadership has blessed Americans in untold ways. But Trump’s ideological war against universities is disrupting cancer and other research and encouraging top scientists to take their work overseas. His most recent budget request sought the biggest cut in science spending since World War II. Meanwhile, the administration has “dismantled regulations and policies that protect children from toxic chemicals, pesticides and pollutants,” notes Earth Justice. Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s war on vaccines is making more Americans vulnerable to transmittable diseases.
An increasingly unpopular Trump is also undermining democracy. He set out to rig the 2026 midterms by demanding that Republican state legislators enact abusively partisan redistricting. He is now demanding that Congress make it easier to stop qualified people from voting. He’s even threatening to take the unconstitutional step of taking national control of election administration away from states and imposing policies he can’t get through Congress.
Trump officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are also weaponizing religion, pushing aggressive Christian nationalism and undermining separation of church and state, a core constitutional principle that protects religious freedom and encourages peaceful religious pluralism.
Trump’s nonsensical trade wars against U.S. allies and erratic tariff policies have slammed U.S. consumers and small business owners and contributed to massive layoffs. The Chamber of Commerce has estimated that Trump tariffs could cost small businesses about $200 billion annually. On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump tried to justify under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On the same day, he announced a plan for a new, “temporary” 10 percent global tariff tied to the Trade Act of 1974.
In other words, the state of the union under Trump is in disrepair and disarray. Repairing and renewing the ship of state will require a different kind of leadership.
Getting that leadership is up to us. The future state of the union is up to us. We who can see through Trump’s lies must demand better from our public officials — and work together to elect better ones.
