Meridith McGraw

The goal of President Trump's speech really was to promote his record during his first year back in office and try to make the case to the American people that he's working to make their lives safer and more affordable.

So a lot of the speech was a defense of his policies, whether it was a crackdown at the border on illegal immigration or his big, beautiful bill and no tax on tips or the Trump accounts for children.

But he really didn't roll out too many new policy announcements and really stuck to trying to sell the American people on what he's done so far.

Yeah.

And, you know, polling shows Trump really lagging when it comes to the economy.

Voters have a lot of concerns about the cost of living.

And in Trump's speech, he tried to blame affordability issues on Democratic policies and

claimed he's working to try to turn things around by lowering the cost of energy,

of health care and housing.

Which will be better health care at a much lower cost.

And, you know, he did lay out a couple new policies, like a plan to offer Americans access to retirement accounts that federal workers have, and another plan to have top tech companies promise to pay more for electricity in areas where they're building new AI data centers.

So he was really trying to target areas that he has real vulnerabilities with,

And the Republican Party has real vulnerabilities with going into the midterm elections.

That was one thing I was really watching for, was how he was going to talk about his tariff policies after the Supreme Court

struck down his use of emergency powers just last week.

And sitting front row there in front of him were four justices, some of whom ruled against Trump's tariffs.

And Trump didn't go off on them too much.

He just said the ruling was unfortunate.

But he really tried to defend his tariff policy and say that they're still forging ahead with using tariffs as an economic tool.

Well, one of the things that Minority Leader Jeffries warned Democrats were not to protest too much during Trump's State of the Union and give the president any sort of fuel during his speech.