When the President of the United States gives a primetime televised address to the nation, it’s generally expected that he’s going to say something significant. To cut in and speak live from the White House at 9pm, as Donald Trump did on Wednesday night, usually signifies something momentous is coming – if for no other reason than you’ve disrupted American families’ key TV time. If nothing else, Survivor is supposed to be on at that time, after all.
For weeks, Trump had been making threats against Venezuela – he has been bombing its fishing boats, threatening a naval blockade, saying it was involved in producing WMD (a real callback to the Bush era) and even “stealing” US land and oil. This led to fears the President was about to announce an escalation here, perhaps even a full-scale war from the man who has tried to style himself as the “President of peace”.
Instead, the speech was something of a nothingburger. The White House, evidently worried about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and popularity, thought that Trump needed to say something about America’s affordability crisis and the cost of living. Trump has typically not given end-of-year addresses, and doesn’t tend to perform well when reading from a script, and this speech proved no exception.
A visibly peevish Trump dealt with Americans’ concerns over the cost of groceries, the sluggish state of the economy, and inflation more broadly by repeatedly telling them that everything was great, actually.
“Inflation has stopped”, he told the nation, even though it’s at 3 per cent, no better than when he took office in January. He told Americans their gas prices were below $2.50 (£1.90) a gallon across much of the country, whereas almost everywhere it costs markedly more. He insisted he’d actually brought down the cost of food, which isn’t true.
Trump lying to the public stopped qualifying as news a long time ago, but what was striking about these false statements is their pointlessness. It is one thing for a politician to lie about crime, or immigration, where most of us rely on statistics or second hand information.
Joe Biden also struggled to convince Americans inflation was falling and economic growth was decent (Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters).It is quite another to do it on the prices of things everyone buys all the time. People know if they’re struggling to afford their groceries, and it’s very hard to tell them otherwise. President Biden struggled to convince Americans inflation was falling and economic growth was decent – in this address Trump looked unusually like his predecessor, desperately trying to tell America things are fine, actually.
Affordability is a difficult crisis for a President who was born a millionaire and has lived most of his life as a multi-millionaire. Trump has tried claiming it’s a “new” word – hardly a way to sound in touch with regular Americans – and even a “hoax”.
Now he’s tried telling Americans that actually they’re just fine – even as he obsessively covers the White House in gold leaf, and spends a great chunk of his time personally supervising a project to build a lavish ballroom. Trump risks looking less like the strongman leader he aspires to be, and more like a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
Still, it wouldn’t be a Trump speech without a certain degree of madness and an egotistical giveaway or two, and these were present. Millions of Americans are about to see the cost of their health insurance soar – sometimes by hundreds of dollars a month – due to Trump’s “big beautiful bill”. He promised them that they will soon be able to order cheaper prescription drugs through “TrumpRX”.
America’s troops were promised a bonus payment of $1,776 (£1,328) – a reference to the declaration of independence – in a pledge that served as a callback to Covid stimulus cheques, which Trump seemed to enjoy as a popular policy, especially since he printed his signature on them. The danger is that as Trump increasingly calls out the military on his own citizens that it looks more like the kind of action to buy off the army usually resorted to by dictators.
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Things aren’t going well in the Trump administration. Trump himself seems increasingly volatile and unfiltered, with efforts to manage his behaviour obviously failing. Those around him seem to be engaging in something like civil war as they jostle for position and line themselves up for 2028. Some, like deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, are already eyeing the exit.
If Trump’s televised address was supposed to change the narrative, it’s surely failed. Donald Trump, the TV star president, delivered an address that was mostly boring, and he’ll surely know it.
Donald Trump doesn’t mind being controversial, shocking, or many other things, provided he’s in the limelight. But this address was something else: just when the president needed to show real Americans that he understood them, he just looked peevish, aloof, and like he’s losing touch. That has got to sting.
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