I watched Trump gloat about his ‘bigger, better, richer and stronger’ America as Democrats fled the room. We needed them to stay

President Donald Trump essentially turned his State of the Union address into a daytime game show replete with surprise guests including the U.S. Men’s National Hockey team. The boisterous Republican crowd that shouted “U.S.A.” at any given moment further buoyed the upbeat feeling that Trump sought to portray.

And look, the State of the Union is the starting gun of the 2026 midterm elections, and typically, the president punches against the wind to make the case to Americans that their party deserves to keep, or gain, majorities in Congress.

“Our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” Trump said, tying his fate to that of the nation’s 250th anniversary. “And you’ve seen nothing yet. We are going to do better and better and better. This is the golden age of America.”

But polling shows that many Americans are not buying what the president is selling. Despite Trump lambasting the Supreme Court for striking down his tariff policy, a YouGov survey showed that 60 percent of Americans approve of the court’s decision.

Voters do not believe that Trump’s policies are helping. A CNN poll showed that 61 percent of voters think that Trump’s policies will move the country in the wrong direction. And 68 percent of Americans reportedly said that Trump has not paid enough attention to the most important problems facing the country.

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And an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of how Trump handled inflation, 64 percent disapproved of how Trump handled tariffs on imported good and 57 percent of how he’s handled the economy.

When asked about the bad polling numbers, U.S. Trade Representative Jameison Greer dismissed the data.

“I mean, some of them are like, opt-in polls where people who hate the president anyway want to go and make their point,” he told The Independent. “Union members voted for him. These are his people, and he’s delivering for them again. GDP was up last year. Wages are outpacing inflation.”

All of this sounded eerily similar to how Joe Biden and the Democrats attempted to depict the economy in rosy terms while Americans felt the pinch of groceries and gas. The result was Trump returning to the White House and Republicans winning the Senate.

Clearly Trumpworld has not absorbed that lesson about inflation. Even if unemployment is down and voters have jobs, if they see their costs tick slightly up, they will revolt.

Perhaps even more alarmingly for Trump and Republicans, the same survey showed Trump underwater on immigration at 58 percent and border security at 50 percent. This is a stunning turnaround. Aside from inflation, many voters — including many Hispanic voters in Southwestern states — voted for Trump because they believed that the Biden administration had completely lost control of the border.

But now voters no longer believe that Trump’s draconian measures are about keeping Americans safe and ensuring the country knows who is crossing the border. Instead, they associate it with Immigration and Customs Enforcement killing Renee Good and Customs and Border Protection killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

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Trump attempted to shift the narrative by calling Somali-Americans “pirates who ransacked Minnesota” in a display of rank racism and in a line certainly inspired by Stephen Miller “importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here to the U.S.A.”

Americans aren’t buying it. It’s why Democrats like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), members of the Squad, felt embolded to publicly call out Trump for “killing Americans.”

But much of the rest of the party wound up boycotting the State of the Union. They likely felt the desire not to give Trump’s words legitimacy. Instead, it allowed Trump’s lies and untruths to go unabated and it confirmed what many voters think about the Democrats: they don’t have any solutions other than opposing Trump or that they are weak.

By contrast, the ones who did show up could create a worthwhile contrast with Trump. Indeed, that was how Democrats won the majority in 2018 in a Blue wave. And the Democrats who won that year are now coming into their own. And not just Tlaib and Omar, who won that same year.

Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois flipped a Trump district in her first race. For much of the address, she chose to stay, until she couldn’t stand anymore.

“I had kind of envisioned I’d give it like three ‘USA, USA chants’ and a handful of lies, and I’d be out,” she told The Independent. But when Trump lied about health care, that proved to be too much and she left.

By contrast, Abigail Spanberger, who first won a congressional seat in the suburbs of Richmond 2018, offered a sharp contrast after she won the governorship in Virginia in her rebuttal.

The State of the Union rebuttal is a thankless job that often relegates a politician to political purgatory (just ask Marco Rubio and his water bottle). But Spanberger earned high marks.

The same can be said for the Spanish rebuttal from Sen. Alex Padilla, who offered the first real resistance to Trump’s immigration regime when he protested Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s crackdown in Los Angeles by ICE and was forcibly removed by security.

Still, by boycotting the speech, Democrats might have helped themselves, because Trump wound up hearing more cheers than jeers. That might further insulate him in his coccoon and prevent him from seeing the dissatisfaction Americans feel toward him.

The eager-to-please Speaker Mike Johnson’s unwillingness to oppose him might hurt him even more. When Trump said “congressional action will not be necessary” to continue his tariffs, Johnson told The Independent “it’s in the statute.”

All of that has put Trump into a lull and prevented him from seeing the actual threats to his political project. And he will be the last to know it.

-John Bowden contributed reporting