Dual realities as Trump touts egg prices, tariffs and Dems cite inflation, ICE abuses

WASHINGTON – Is the country better off than it was a year ago?

President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress celebrated a year of victories at Tuesday night’s State of the Union address – for “hard working Americans” and national security.

“Our nation is back. Bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” Trump said at the outset of his nationally televised speech. “We have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before.”

Democrats pointed to a far different reality reflected in stalled job growth, a sharp uptick in Americans without health insurance, and erosion of democratic norms.

“This president has made the country sicker and poorer,” Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego said a few hours before the speech, adding later, “They want to call that the State of the Union. It is the state of denial.”

In his speech, Trump boasted of leading a “turnaround for the ages,” contrasting his record with that of his predecessor, Joe Biden.

The economy added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, according to revised data released this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

That was a severe slowdown compared to the 2.2 million jobs added during Biden’s final year as president and 3 million the year before that.

Still, Trump asserted, “we have more jobs, more people working today than ever before in the history of our country.”

Unemployment was roughly 4.0% when Trump took office last year. It has risen to 4.3%. 

“When I last spoke at this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy” and “inflation at record levels,” he asserted.

Government data shows otherwise.

Inflation was 3% in January 2025. It’s now 2.4%. The rate was 1.9% when Trump’s first term ended in early 2021, driven down by the COVID-19 pandemic. It spiked to 9.1% in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine – the highest since 1980.

“Last year we didn’t have the results that we are going to see now,” said Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Tucson, predicting the large tax cuts Trump signed into law last year will show increasingly positive impact. “The economy is recovering but we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Trump himself did not acknowledge anything like an “affordability crisis” described by opponents and in polls, by most Americans. 

Rep. David Schweikert, R-Fountain Hills, said Trump’s economy is doing well even if the public doesn’t see it. “We’ve done well on those things. We’ve done a horrible job explaining why we do those things,” he said.

Tariffs

The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimates that Trump’s tariffs have cost the average household about $1,000. 

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned those tariffs. The court ruled 6-3 that Trump lacked the authority to impose those import taxes, a ruling he called “very unfortunate” – far softer rhetoric than he used when the ruling came down. 

”These tariffs took in hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said during his 108-minute speech, the longest presidential speech to Congress on record. “Everything was working well. Countries that were ripping us off for decades are now paying us hundreds of billions of dollars.”

But import taxes are largely paid by U.S. businesses and consumers, and they are widely unpopular. In a recent Washington Post/IPSOS survey, over 60% of Americans said they disapprove of the tariffs.

Trump has argued that tariffs would improve the balance between imports and exports, though the U.S. trade deficit dipped by just $2.1 billion in the last year, or 0.9%, according to the Tax Foundation.

“Everyday Americans are paying it,” Gallego said. “Where is the refund? … It’s not coming, because this president does not care about working class people at all.”

And the tariffs aren’t the only Trump policy that has hurt ordinary Americans, the senator and other Democrats said.

Spending cuts to Medicare have left millions without health coverage, Gallego said, accusing Republicans of using the savings to cover the cost of tax cuts that favor the wealthiest Americans.

Trump announced a new round of 15% tariffs after his setback at the Supreme Court, citing authority from other statutes. The Tax Foundation estimates that those, too, would cost the average household about $1,000 a year.

Affordability

Among Trump’s early promises was that he would bring down the cost of eggs, gasoline and other goods and that in general, he would drive down inflation. 

Egg prices actually rose during the early months of Trump’s second term. The average price of a dozen peaked at $6.23 last March, though it’s down to $2.58, according to BLS data. 

Rep. Adelita Grijalva, R-Tucson, said business owners in her district tell her there’s “there’s no way for us to adjust” with “tariffs that ebb and flow.”

Grijalva said the speech was even more “gaslighting” than she anticipated, after Trump celebrated bringing down the price of goods. 

“What fantasy land are you living in? Because the rest of us are here in the real world, where we know that that’s not true,” she said.

The average price of regular gas is $3.25 a gallon in Arizona, according to AAA, far below the $5.39 peak in June 2022. The national average is now about $2.95, down nearly 11% since Trump returned to office.

“It was a disaster,” Trump said.

In December, as Democrats needled him for failing to bring down prices nearly as much as he’d promised, Trump declared that claims of an affordability crisis amounted to a Democratic “hoax.”

Tuesday night, he accused Democrats of a “dirty rotten lie.”

They invoked affordability “knowing very well that they caused and created the increased prices that all of our citizens had to endure. You caused that problem.”

He boasted that the cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, cars and rent have all come down since he took office. Even the price of beef has eased, he said, and “soon you will see numbers that few people would think were possible.”

But prices remain higher than they were five years ago. Polls show that most Americans say their wages haven’t kept up that most Americans say their wages haven’t kept up, on housing, energy, groceries and essentials.

Economists say inflation would be lower if not for his tariffs.

According to the Yale Budget Lab, Trump’s import taxes added 16% to the cost of imports last year, the highest rate since 1936.

“Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?” Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in the official Democratic response. Thanks to his tariffs, she said,“small businesses have suffered. Farmers have suffered.”

“They’re making your life more expensive,” she said.

Deportations

As part of Trump’s mass deportation effort, Immigration and Customs Enforcement went on a hiring binge. It now has 12,000 more officers – equal to one in 15 jobs created in 2025.

“In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States,” he said. “After four years in which millions and millions of illegal aliens poured across our borders totally unvetted and unchecked, we now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far.”

Republicans celebrate Trump’s crackdowns, which have included surges of troops and immigration officers in cities nationwide.

But six in 10 Americans disapprove of ICE, according to a Marist Poll taken after officers killed two U.S. citizens in January during a crackdown in Minneapolis.

At an event on the National Mall dubbed the People’s State of the Union, Gallego blasted ICE for “targeting U.S. citizens, racial profiling Americans.”

Speaking on the mall as Trump neared the end of his address, Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Phoenix, denounced him for pushing a “racist mass deportation agenda.”

“It is an agenda rooted in fear, rooted in hatred and the belief that some people simply do not belong. Masked agents, violent raids without transparency, communities living in fear – that is not public safety, that is authoritarianism,” she said.

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