We hate to be the ones to have to tell you, but it’s State of the Union day in Washington. Tonight, Donald Trump will head to Congress to spend an hour or two trying to salvage his cratering reputation highlighting his administration’s first-year successes, from an economy-throttling global trade war to his masks-and-jackboots makeover of ICE.
To mark the happy occasion, we’ve got lots of live video coming your way today. Bill and Andrew will be previewing the address on YouTube and Substack in our Morning Chaser at 10 a.m. EST. And tonight, Tim and Sam will anchor our SOTU coverage beginning with a preview at 8:50 p.m. EST, continuing through the president’s address and beyond—with the whole Bulwark crew and a special guest pitching in along the way. Watch your inbox for a location link we’ll send out as we get started. Hey, if you’re gonna watch it—and we guess you probably should—why not come watch it among friends? Happy Tuesday.
The State of the People
by William Kristol
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.
The Revolution was a long war—more than eight years. The fight against Trumpism has already been even longer. What’s your plan for staying vigilant for the long haul? Share your ideas in the comments.
Join us LIVE at 10 a.m. EST today for Morning Chaser with Bill and Andrew.
We’re going live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays. Today, Bill and Andrew will host the second installment of Morning Chaser, which will also live under our Bulwark Takes feed. If you can’t tune in live at 10 a.m. today, we’ll post the replay on the site and on YouTube afterwards.
And remember to tune in tonight for our SOTU coverage!
AROUND THE BULWARK
America’s Deportation Obsession, Caught on Tape… On Bulwark+ Takes, SAM STEIN and DREW HARWELL of the Washington Post discuss a viral stunt in which a comedian set up a fake ICE tip line . . . and Americans seriously called in to report their neighbors for deportation.
SCOTUS Justices Should Skip Trump’s State of the Union… His attacks on the Court, following its rejection of his tariffs, threaten the rule of law, argues ARMIT AGARWAL.
Candace Owens’ “Bride of Charlie” Series Looks Utterly Wacko… On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins TIM MILLER to discuss Candace Owens’s new trailer for her new “Bride of Charlie” series—and it is something else. Full of wild claims, from the “handler” plotline to the Romania detour, it’s fueling a right wing civil war.
Quick Hits
A KINGPIN GOES DOWN: Cities across Mexico are on high alert amid an outburst of cartel violence after the nation’s most wanted drug kingpin was killed in a shootout with the Mexican military Sunday morning.
The U.S. government helped provide intelligence for the raid against Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes aka “El Mencho,” whose organization, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has built a massive global drug-smuggling operation. After his death, the cartel retaliated across Mexico, vandalizing businesses and burning cars. Many tourists were temporarily stranded, while American officials were warned to lay low and work from home. All in all, authorities said that at least 73 people, including 25 members of the Mexican National Guard, have died between the initial operation and the subsequent unrest. The AP has more:
There were early signs that Mexico’s efforts were well received by the United States.
U.S. Ambassador Ron Johnson recognized the success of the Mexican armed forces and their sacrifice in a statement late Sunday. Under the leadership of Trump and Sheinbaum, he said, “bilateral cooperation has reached unprecedented levels.”
But the operation may also pave the way for more violence as rival criminal groups take advantage of the blow dealt to El Mencho’s organization, said David Mora, Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“This might be a moment in which those other groups see that the cartel is weakened and want to seize the opportunity for them to expand control and to gain control over Cartel Jalisco in those states,” he said.
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT: While the Supreme Court was pondering the legality of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, Donald Trump was plainly worried that any ruling against him might empower other countries to renege on trade deals struck under threat of those tariffs. Now that that duress has disappeared, Trump has a message for any nation eyeing the exits: Don’t even think about it.
“Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have “Ripped Off” the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to,” Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday morning. “BUYER BEWARE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
There hasn’t been a mass rush for the exits, but other countries are plainly weighing their options, as the Council on Foreign Relations notes:
An Indian trade delegation postponed planned travel to the United States to review the implications of the new tariffs. Over the weekend, Malaysian and Indonesian officials noted they had not yet ratified their recent trade deals with Washington, both of which included mass investment pledges. Trump’s newly announced 15 percent tariff is higher than what some countries negotiated and lower than others. In Japan, which secured a 15 percent base tariff rate through a deal that included a $550 billion investment commitment, the tax chief of the ruling party called the tariff situation “a real mess.”
THE “WOKE RIGHT” PERFORMS RACIAL OUTRAGE: The latest far-right outrage-fest is over the claim that California governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom told “a black crowd” in Atlanta on his book tour, “I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.” In fact, the line was out of context (Newsom was talking about his struggle with dyslexia), and the crowd seemed mostly white. No matter: Everyone from “LibsofTikTok” to Sen. Ted Cruz to radio host Mark Levin ran with the “liberal bigots think blacks are stupid” angle. The New York Post and others hyped the “backlash” and the fact that Newsom was talking to Atlanta’s black mayor, Andre Dickens. (Nope: He looked mostly at the crowd and was talking about his message to readers of his book.)
The controversy is too fake to damage Newsom, but it’s a good Who’s Who of right-wing hypocrisy: It’s an exact mirror image of the “woke” outrage, often based on garbled reporting, that the right once ridiculed. In a doubly ironic twist, the Newsom racism “scandal” was started by the X account “End Wokeness”—a major spreader of the “Haitians eating pets” hoax in 2024. At least the racial outrage peddlers of the “woke left” were sincere.
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
I am going to skip the airing of the grievances tonight. I would prefer to light my hair on fire and put it out with a baseball bat.
I won't be watching. Being lied to for two hours is not how I choose to spend an evening. Plus, if viewership is low it will drive trump crazy!