The Winners in Trump’s America Are Not You and Me

The United States, you may have heard, is the “hottest” country in the world. It’s a phrase President Trump often uses to sell his presidency, and he did it again in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. “What a difference a president makes. Not long ago we were a dead country. Today we are the hottest country in the world. The hottest.” Were “win again”, live “a turnaround for the ages. If his meandering, nearly two-hour speech had a theme, it was this: America is back, baby, thanks to Trump.

That’s certainly true if you’re a business executive or major shareholder in a company that reaped huge profits from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This is even more true if you are a businessman with close ties to the administration. Just look at David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, who attended last night’s State of the Union address and whose efforts to build a massif The pro-Trump media empire is still alive and well – thanks, of course, to its ties to Trump.

Things are also going great for you if you’re a member of what Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff recently called “the Epstein class.” This is a historic moment for the rich and powerful who behave as if the rules – financial, legal, moral – do not apply to them. Corruption is fundamentally legal. If you’re close to the president, or even just a major donor or high-profile fan, he’ll make sure prosecutors look the other way. Even if you are not a member of the Epstein class, but simply one of the foot soldiers of this fascist regime, then you can behave with impunity – like the federal agents who murdered two American citizens last month but are not even under investigation for a crime.

Speaking of the Epstein class, things really aren’t that bad even if you’re named in the Epstein files. Some have had to withdraw from public life and apologize, like Bill Gates, or take early retirement, like Harvard professor Larry Summers, but there are few signs that prosecution is in the offing. It’s not England, after all. In the hottest country on earth, we don’t hold powerful people accountable.

Of course, the only person for whom any of this is true is Trump himself. He used his presidency to make hundreds of millions, even billions, peddling fraudulent crypto tokens, accepting foreign “investments” and “gifts,” and even selling products like $100,000.Trump Watches» on (where else?) Fox News. The president is of course not only a tenured member of the Epstein class, but he is mentioned more than a thousand times in records released by the Justice Department late last month. It appears the DOJ is also withholding from the public records that are particularly damaging to Trump, including those related to a woman who claims Trump and Epstein sexually assaulted her decades ago.

But what about everyone else – those of us who aren’t the president or head of a multinational corporation? Trump claimed in the State of the Union that things were going really well. “Inflation is in free fall,” he said, praising the merits of a website…TrumpRx.gov– which helped reduce the price of prescription drugs by up to “600 percent.” Meanwhile, gas prices have also fallen, falling below $2 a gallon in some areas.

None of this is true. Inflation is about where it was at the end of Biden’s presidency, which means prices continue to rise. Thanks to Trump’s tariffs, food prices continue to rise and many household items remain stubbornly expensive. If prescription drug prices had fallen more than 100 percent — let alone 600 percent — drug companies would be paying consumers to use their products; it’s just basic math. Yes, gas prices have fallen somewhat — they’re down about 18 cents a gallon, according to AAA, since the start of his second term — but not in a way that makes a huge difference compared to other rising costs. (When gas prices rise again this summer, will he still claim such omnipotence?)

This is really the story of the State of the Union during Trump’s second presidency: He was elected because Americans were fed up with post-pandemic inflation under Biden — and he spent most of his term lining his own pockets and sending federal stormtroopers into American communities. Meanwhile, the price of consumer goods continues to skyrocket, health care costs are even worse, wages are stagnant, and job growth is anemic — and none of what Trump outlined in the State of the Union will do anything to reverse these trends. War with Iran is certainly not the solution workers are looking for.

The Democrats recognize this. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s State of the Union response focused almost entirely on rising costs, with some pointed mentions of Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown. “Every minute spent instilling fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children or criminals bilking elderly people out of their life savings,” Spanberger said. “Our president told us tonight that we are safer because these officers are arresting mothers and detaining children. Think about that.”

This is the Democratic message as the midterms approach: the president is seeking to enrich himself and terrorize – rather than help – ordinary people. Spanberger only needed 12 minutes to present his arguments convincingly.