US President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union (SOTU) Address on February 24th as the world braced for a possible US strike on Iran.

About one-third of all US Navy assets have been stationed in the waters surrounding the Middle East, including the USS Gerald Ford, which participated in the January 2026 military operation in Venezuela that saw democratically-elected leader Nicolás Maduro kidnapped and imprisoned in the United States. 

Nearly 150 US military aircraft have been stationed across the US’s numerous bases in the region. 

This build-up comes as Iran experienced deadly riots in late 2025 and a large portion of January 2026, leading to the death of over 3,000 Iranians at the hands of US-backed proxies. It has since been revealed that US government agencies sent hundreds if not thousands of Starlink terminals to provide connectivity to the rioters. 

In the first two months of 2026, the Trump administration has come close to authorizing military strikes on Iran but pulled back due to a combination of pressure from US allies in the region and fears expressed by the Pentagon over a lack of readiness for Iranian retaliation. 

Yet Trump’s State of the Union address spent only a few minutes on the US war drive on Iran. Instead, Trump boasted about America being “back” as chants of “USA” filled the House Chambers. He claimed that policies such as tariffs, mass deportations, and tax cuts for the wealthy have brought a “golden age” into fruition in the United States. He blamed his predecessor Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for whatever social and economic ills remained. He openly sparred with House Democrats such as Ilhan Omar over his aggressive rhetoric on immigration. 

Trump’s SOTU was historic in length but followed a familiar pattern. On the one hand, his speech attempted to persuade Americans that exceptionalism is alive and well in the United States. Economic anxieties and declining living standards were ignored entirely in favor of a laundry list of evidence-free talking points as to why life is better under Donald Trump’s presidency. On the other, a stark message of fear pervaded the speech throughout. Americans should fear an immigrant “invasion” of the country and trust Trump’s “strength” to eliminate the threat. In fact, Trump said numerous times that he already has by stopping “illegal” immigration into the country over the tenure of his administration thus far. 

The truth is that Trump’s SOTU was yet another stark indicator of American imperial decline. Beneath all of the celebration of American “greatness” and scapegoating that pervaded the speech is the stark reality of the administration’s declining legitimacy. In a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 48 percent of Americans believe that the economy has gotten worse since he took office as opposed to 29 percent saying it has improved. According to the latest CNN poll prior to his SOTU address, 61 percent of respondents said that Trump’s policies are moving the country in the wrong direction. The current U.S. president is polling at just 26 percent with independent voters. The numbers are just as bad when it comes to specific policies; including war, with only 20 percent of US voters currently in favor of a strike on Iran. 

Polling numbers such as these, however flawed, are a measure of the stark difference between what US politicians like Trump say and how ordinary Americans actually feel. And this contradiction is rooted in a fundamental and unspoken reality of U.S. governance. U.S. governance, far from being democratic, is inherently autocratic. While the U.S. political class and their wealthy elite & corporate donors demonize countries abroad for being “dictatorships”, U.S. monopoly capitalism is in fact a dictatorship of capital and the U.S. president nothing but the highest appointed political operative tasked with managing the system. 

And at this stage of its life, U.S. corporate and financial monopolies are witnessing a crisis they cannot arrest. Record profits and wealth inequality benefitting the richest corporate executives have not stopped the U.S. overall share in the global economy from shrinking, U.S. economic growth from stagnating, government and household debt from increasing, or the world from moving toward alternative opportunities for economic development provided by countries like China and Russia among others. In many ways, Donald Trump’s second term is a story of inheritance but not the kind that made him and his friends in the elite rich in the first place. Rather, he inherited contradictions that are spiraling out of control, whether it is the violent repression that has caused multiple Americans to be killed by immigration authorities or the escalations of wars with countries like Iran which threaten to destabilize the global economy and cause irreparable blowback on the declining American empire. 

That’s the watchword: decline. Trump’s SOTU speech tried to mask the American empire’s decline, but failed. Words cannot do this. But words are all that the US political class can offer at this time, and they are far from words of enlightenment. They are words of grandeur or fear, words meant to steer people into accepting the realities before them. But as the polls indicate, a massive discontent in the United States continues to fester. Where it leads will ultimately play a major role in the direction of U.S. governance for years to come.

The author is a geopolitical analyst and independent journalist based in the U.S.

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