Trump, once unstoppable, hits snag after snag ahead of State of the Union address

WASHINGTON - For a year, Mr Donald Trump has

governed the United States

with little standing in his way.

Now, as the president prepares for his State of the Union address on Feb 24, he is weighed down with

Supreme Court reversals on tariffs

, souring public opinion on his immigration crackdown and mounting economic concerns.

Mr Trump is unlikely to back down in his speech, a primetime American political institution where the president is invited by Congress to present his accomplishments and lay out his agenda.

But his boasts will have less sting on Democrats – and world leaders – who have up to this point been bulldozed by his agenda.

On Feb 20, the Supreme Court delivered a sharp rebuke of his use of tariffs, which he slapped on countries often arbitrarily via a simple order on social media in an effort to gain leverage over diplomatic matters sometimes wholly unrelated to trade.

The same day, the government data showed the US economy expanded at a 1.4 per cent annual rate in the October to December period – significantly below the 2.5 per cent pace that analysts had forecasted for the quarter.

Polls meanwhile show growing dissatisfaction with the cost of living as well as Mr Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Cost-of-living concerns

Mr Trump’s strategy so far on inflation has been to cede no ground.

“I’ve won affordability,” Mr Trump said during a speech in the south-eastern state of Georgia on Feb 19.

But “you cannot out-message the economy. People know what they are spending,” political science professor Todd Belt at George Washington University told AFP.

“People become very resentful when being told something they know is not true,” he said – which applies to both the cost of living but also the crackdown on immigrants, which many Americans had falsely believed would focus on deporting violent criminals.

American voters have proven extremely sensitive to economic issues, which in part sunk Mr Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden but now threaten Republicans.

As midterms approach in November, the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be up for grabs.

Mr Trump has already warned that if Democrats take control, they could try to impeach him.

Backing down?

Even the normally bombastic Mr Trump has been cowed in recent days, including when

a racist video of Barack Obama

– the country’s first Black president – was posted onto his Truth Social account.

The White House tried to brush off the issue before claiming that an unnamed aide posted it, as even loyal members of Congress broke ranks to criticise the president.

After federal immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens during their wide-sweeping operations in Minneapolis, the administration announced it was scaling back the deployment in the city, which was the scene of mass protests.

On the international scene, a US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss Washington’s security concerns in the Arctic, but Mr Trump has had to dial back his threats to seize Greenland.

He has imposed an across-the-board

10 per cent tariff on imports into the United States

after the Supreme Court rebuffed his previous tariffs on Feb 20– but that still means some nations are now trading at reduced rates than they had agreed to under his previous levies.

The administration has vowed to find other ways to implement tariffs as it decried the court’s “lawlessness”.

In the meantime, challenges to Mr Trump’s policies are slowly winding their way through the courts.

But while Mr Trump has been chastened, the House and the Senate still remain in Republican control – for now. And Mr Trump himself will be in the White House until 2029. AFP