CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump’s 2026 SOTU Speech: Economic Obfuscation and Political Theater

Trump’s 2026 State of the Union speech was historic—but only in the sense of the longest ever at 1 hour and 47 minutes. Apart from that, the speech was one third misrepresentations about the state of the American economy followed by more than an hour of pure political theater which has come to increasingly presidential SOTU addresses in recent years.

The misrepresentations of the state of the economy covered topics like inflation and cost of living, record stock market prices and asset wealth creation, his $5 trillion tax cuts almost all of which have accrued to corporations, businesses and investors, and his tariffs which have little to do with trade or economics and everything to do with raising revenue for defense spending and political intimidation of other countries.

Treated very briefly in passing was the topic of jobs. Trump’s avoidance of the topic is understandable—given that this past year the US economy has created a total of only 181,000 jobs; i.e. barely 15,000 jobs month, a level which isn’t even sufficient to provide employment for new entrants to the labor force which ordinarily averages at least 100,000 every month.

On the topic of jobs, Trump also made no mention whatsoever of the current unemployment level. When including involuntary part time, temp, and discouraged workers, as well as full time employed, per the government’s own estimates unemployment has been averaging around 8%. That’s more than 11 million US workers jobless! Moreover, even that 8% number excludes the 10 million workers who are self-employed independent contractors which government statistics conveniently ignore by classifying them as business owners, not workers. So the actual unemployment number of unemployed is thus at least 10% when properly estimated.

Trump made passing reference to the fact that the 181,000 jobs created were 100% in the private sector—without indicating the number of course. Nor did he bother to mention that he managed to fire 27,000 federal government workers. It’s true, as he said, the US economy is at the highest employment levels ever in 2025—by 181,000 jobs of course.

Another economic topic, this time completely unmentioned, was the overall real growth of the economy in 2025. Measured in Gross Domestic Product terms, GDP, the most generally accepted indicator, the US economy grew only 2.2% in all of last year! That’s down from 2.4% in 2024 before he was elected. More ominous, in the last three months of 2025 the economy slowed rapidly even more to only 1.4%. And it was actually even much slower, since the inflation adjustment used by the government, called the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) price index notoriously underestimates inflation which, in turn, boosts the reported GDP numbers. If properly inflation adjusted, actual GDP in 2025 was closer to 1% than even the reported 2.2%.

Nevertheless, Trump on several occasions bragged “we’re the hottest country in the world!”

As for future economic growth Trump continually says other countries have promised to invest $18 trillion in the US economy! But virtually all of that are just verbal pledges, mostly designed no doubt to placate Trump during negotiations over tariffs. It’s difficult to see how the Europeans, Japanese and others—all of whose economies are either in recession or stagnant—are going to invest that amount in America’s economy instead of their own.

Trump did spend some time repeatedly claiming that inflation was reduced dramatically during his first year in office.  More than once he proclaimed “inflation is plummeting”. He referenced what is called ‘core’ inflation in the PCE price index,........

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