President Donald Trump stepped before a joint session of Congress Tuesday night to deliver his first official State of the Union address of his second term, using the high-profile speech to build his case on Trump and cost of living — arguing that he and the Republican-controlled Congress are the right team to keep pushing down prices for everyday Americans.
The speech came at a politically charged moment. With the midterm elections less than nine months away, rising prices remain the number one concern for voters across the country. A CBS News poll taken just before the address found that 57% of Americans said the economy and affordability were the most important topics they wanted to hear the president address. Trump walked into the House chamber carrying that weight — along with sagging approval numbers, a fresh Supreme Court blow to his tariff agenda, and a nation that still feels the pinch every time it fills a grocery cart or pays an electric bill.
Share your thoughts in the comments — are you feeling any relief on the cost of living, or is your wallet still under pressure?
The White House’s Economic Argument
The White House made clear in the days leading up to the speech that Trump would use the State of the Union to lay out what his administration describes as real, measurable progress on affordability. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump would “proudly tout his administration’s many record-breaking accomplishments” while also presenting “an ambitious agenda to continue bringing the American dream back for working people.”
The administration’s strategy has been to draw a sharp contrast with the Biden years, pointing to the inflation surge that defined 2021 through 2023 as the starting point for every American’s economic pain. Trump is expected to frame current cost-of-living pressures as a problem he inherited — and one he is actively solving.
Among the policy wins Trump highlighted: the One Big Beautiful Bill, the sweeping legislation signed into law on July 4, 2025, which included provisions eliminating federal taxes on tips and overtime pay for workers. The White House invited guests to the chamber specifically to put a human face on that policy. One such guest was Megan Hemhouser, a Pennsylvania mother who works as a waitress in the evenings while homeschooling her two children during the day. She and her husband, a heavy machinery operator, reportedly saw their take-home pay increase by $5,000 as a direct result of the no-tax-on-tips and no-tax-on-overtime provisions in the bill.
AI, Big Tech, and Your Electric Bill
One of the most significant announcements of the evening addressed a problem that has been quietly draining household budgets: skyrocketing electricity prices in communities near artificial intelligence data centers.
Trump announced what the White House has been calling “rate payer protection pledges” — deals his administration negotiated with major technology companies in which those companies agree to pay higher electricity rates in the communities where they are building new AI data centers. The move is designed to shield ordinary consumers from the dramatic energy cost increases that have accompanied the explosion of data center construction across the country.
The scale of the problem is significant. Electricity prices across the U.S. have been climbing sharply, with residential prices jumping roughly 10.5% between January and August of 2025 — one of the largest increases in more than a decade. In certain areas where data centers have moved in, local electricity costs have surged as much as 267% compared to five years ago. The PJM Interconnection grid, which serves more than 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. — including northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers — has been particularly hard hit.
The Trump administration had already been laying the groundwork for this announcement before Tuesday night. In January 2026, Trump and several northeastern governors pushed PJM to hold an emergency electricity auction, with the goal of locking major tech companies into 15-year contracts to fund the power their data centers demand. Several major technology companies have already made public commitments to cover their own electricity costs. Microsoft, Google, and Meta have all stated they will pay for the full cost of the energy their data centers consume and will contribute to local grid infrastructure improvements.
The rate payer protection pledges announced at the State of the Union go a step further, formalizing those commitments and tying them directly to new construction in local communities. The underlying message from the White House is straightforward: if artificial intelligence is going to reshape the American economy, the companies driving that transformation should bear the cost — not working families.
The Tariff Problem
Trump’s economic message at the State of the Union arrived against a complicated backdrop. Just days before the speech, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling striking down a significant portion of Trump’s tariff program, finding that the president had improperly invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad trade levies. The decision was a direct blow to one of the central pillars of Trump’s second-term economic agenda.
Tariffs had been a double-edged issue for the administration. While Trump had framed them as leverage in trade negotiations and as a revenue source to fund tax cuts, polls consistently showed that most Americans disapproved of the tariff increases. A Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of U.S. adults viewed the tariffs negatively, citing their impact on consumer prices.
Despite the court’s ruling, Trump signaled he would press forward, announcing plans to apply a 15% global tariff using a separate legal authority. The approach is untested and will almost certainly face its own legal challenges.
Democrats Fire Back
Democrats did not sit quietly. Several members boycotted the address entirely, holding counter-events outside the Capitol. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had urged his colleagues to dial back the protests staged at Trump’s previous addresses, hoping to avoid a repeat of the sign-waving and heckling that marked the 2025 joint address.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response immediately following Trump’s speech. Spanberger won her race for governor in 2025 by a double-digit margin, running almost entirely on an affordability platform. Her rebuttal was expected to argue that Trump’s economic policies — particularly tariffs, which have driven up prices on imported goods — are working against the very families he claims to be helping.
The political calculus for both parties is clear heading into the fall midterms. Democrats flipped several seats in off-year 2025 elections by hammering the cost-of-living message. Republicans know the House and Senate majorities they currently hold are within striking distance. The economy will be the defining battleground.
Additional Economic Promises
Beyond the AI electricity pledge and the tax relief provisions already in law, Trump previewed additional economic moves during the speech. He called on Congress to make permanent his executive order banning large investment companies that own more than 100 single-family homes from purchasing additional residential properties — a move aimed at addressing housing affordability. He also touted the recent launch of TrumpRx.gov, a White House initiative intended to connect patients with lower-priced prescription drugs.
Trump also called for additional tax cuts — both personal and corporate — though he indicated personal tax relief would take priority. The announcement comes at a time when many economists note that the tariff-related price increases have offset a portion of the savings workers received from earlier tax measures.
Where Things Stand
One year into his second term, Trump’s economic record is genuinely mixed. Economic growth numbers have come in below expectations, interest rates remain elevated, and consumer sentiment, while somewhat improved from the lows seen in fall 2025, has not fully recovered. Inflation has cooled from its peak, but prices across the board remain significantly higher than they were before the pandemic — and that cumulative price level is what most Americans feel every day.
Trump’s approval rating heading into Tuesday’s speech had fallen to 38% in some polls, its lowest point since his return to office. The State of the Union is traditionally a president’s largest television audience of the year, and for Trump, it represented a major opportunity to reset the economic narrative before the midterm season fully kicks into gear.
Whether the rate payer protection pledges, the no-tax-on-tips law, and the additional tax cut promises are enough to shift that narrative — or whether voters remain skeptical of progress they cannot yet feel in their bank accounts — will be answered at the ballot box this November.
What do you think — is Trump’s plan to make Big Tech pay higher electricity bills the right move, and will his economic agenda actually bring down your cost of living? Drop a comment below and let us know.
