By Collins Chong Yew Keat

KUALA UMPUR, Malaysia: At almost two hours and being the longest modern presidential address to Congress, the speech functioned as a sweeping case that the United States has already turned a corner, ushering in the Trump led Golden Era.

The address advanced a broader thesis and argument: that America under President Trump turning the page especially in his second term and is moving toward stronger growth, cheaper energy, secure borders, strategic trade leverage, and renewed global strength, as it nears its 250th anniversary. 

This speech is also a continuation from Trump’s December 2025 address, where he insisted that public pessimism of his administration’s efforts and impact was uncalled  for, where many lingering frustrations were actually stemming from fallout of the Biden administration.

This State of the Union transcended conventional dogma from a first-year progress report into a bold new vision for the future, in projecting strength rather than apology.

Championing Economic Success

Trump’s economic message is a reflection of his own trademark economic moves in fixing the loopholes of the past and directly addressing core concerns of ordinary Americans: wages, prices, savings accounts, and investment returns. 

The positive numbers of the economy have not been fully portrayed in projecting President Trump in a good light. Real GDP expanded at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the second quarter of 2025 and 4.4 percent in the third quarter, showcasing substantial growth.

Inflation, one of the key pressing issues, has been well managed and controlled, in contrast to the Biden era. The consumer price index rose only 2.3 percent year-over-year in April 2025, the lowest inflation reading since early 2021 and also considerably far below the 40-year peak recorded earlier in the decade. 

Energy prices have been down, and this reflects the core tenet of Trump’s drive to increase output and bring down prices. The national average gasoline price in 2025 is around US$3.10 per gallon, down from the previous year. The “drill baby drill” mantra has meant more domestic supply, effectively lowering prices and reducing foreign dependency. 

Financial markets and stock returns, another key feature in Trump’s economic narrative, also show promising momentum. By early 2026, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had crossed 50,000 and the S&P 500 exceeded 7,000, proof of investor confidence. Millions of retirement savers will stand to benefit.

Tariffs as the Economic Playmaker

Trump’s insistence that tariffs are the ultimate effective tool in serving the interests of America has been backed by reality on the ground, which has helped to correct the course for the country. No other presidents has got the bold new audacity to state the obvious and to wield this tool, for obvious reasons of political correctness. 

Tariffs under President Trump have served simultaneously as a revenue source, negotiating tool, and industrial strategy. 

Rather than seeing tariffs as a campaign tactic, he presented them as a permanent instrument of statecraft that has saved the country from being continued to be ripped off by foreign countries, and to prevent the country from falling deeper into the abyss of economic and debt trap. 

The data from 2025 strengthened this argument. U.S. customs duties reached US$27.2 billion in June 2025, around more than four times earlier levels. Tariff revenue exceeded $100 billion for the fiscal year, rising to roughly 5% of total federal income, compared with about 2% historically. Tariffs have become the federal government’s fourth-largest revenue source, a feat not achieved before. 

Tariff threats helped secure concessions from foreign powers, recorrect past systemic injustices and reshape supply chains while funding core domestic priorities. Despite the legal challenges and setback, Trump continued to stand his ground to ensure that tariffs  continue to be used to protect American interests and to stop the steal by others. 

Border Control and War Against Drugs

Border security and the urgent need to stem the inflow of illicit drugs and illegal immigrants has been the top priority for President Trump, and this remains a question of sovereignty, public safety, and national security, and also labour-market stability.

The most stark and powerful result on the ground is the dramatic decline in illegal crossings. 

In 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, U.S. border control showed measurable results in both migration and drug enforcement. U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,538 migrant encounters at the southern border throughout last year, a dramatic decline from 1.53 million in 2024, 2.05 million in 2023, and 2.21 million in 2022. This represents the lowest annual total in more than fifty years and indicating that the tough measures taken are bearing fruit.

Monthly enforcement numbers showed a rapid drop after Trump took office. Southern border arrests fell from over 46,000 in December 2024 to fewer than 8,000 by February 2025, indicating that measures to deter immigrants from attempting to cross in the first place and imposing real deterrent costs, are now working.

The war against illicit drugs that have tormented the American people has also been showing direct results. Approximately 7,517 pounds of fentanyl were seized at U.S. borders between January and September 2025, about 55% lower than the same period in 2024,proving the success of the disruption of trafficking networks.

Strict enforcement has restored order and deterrence at the border, a sharp contrast under the Biden administration, and has restored order and public trust, and saving lives.

Deterring Wars and Saving Lives

Trump’s foreign policy message centred on his famous mantra of peace through strength, combining direct military might that will deter adversaries from threatening peace, with transactional diplomacy.

President Trump has also revived NATO, by pressuring members do increase their own defence commitment, and they have agreed to a 5 percent of GDP defence spending commitment by 2035, a major increase from the traditional 2 percent target. 

At least seven conflicts have been prevented last year by President Trump’s personal unique approach, but four major ones are notable. 

A wider Middle East war involving Iran, escalation in Ukraine beyond regional limits, renewed India–Pakistan conflict in South Asia, and expanded regional wars in Central Africa are the four main standouts. Each of these situations carried the risks and high potential for large-scale casualties had they escalated into full wars and unchecked spiral.

Historical comparisons will project the scale of lives potentially saved through deterrence. Large Middle Eastern conflicts in recent decades have produced hundreds of thousands of casualties and Trump’s strategy may have prevented one of the most dangerous escalation scenarios in modern geopolitics in the region. 

In similar terms, continued escalation in Ukraine will edge the casualty number into the hundreds of thousands if the conflict were to expand into a direct NATO-Russia confrontation. The administration’s push for burden-sharing and negotiations sought to prevent that expansion.

The cessation of escalation of conflict between India and Pakistan remains one of the more important ones. Two nuclear-armed states with a combined population of over 1.6 billion, if a direct conflict was to escalate, it will be one of the most consequential. Even limited wars between the two countries have historically produced thousands of casualties, while nuclear escalation scenarios will be worse. 

In Central Africa, conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has in the past resulted in millions of deaths across multiple wars since the 1990s. Trump’s efforts helped to stabilise the situation. 

Taken together, the plausible range of lives saved through deterrence and conflict prevention runs from hundreds of thousands to potentially millions over time, as Trump has stated  in his address.

The lives saved by deterrence rarely become a much acknowledged feat, statistics precisely because catastrophe never arrives.Yet it is often the most consequential form of statecraft.

Deterrence works when adversaries believe strength will endure, not merely appear temporarily, and the belief that there is both ability and willingness to impose credible costs should red lines be crossed, and this is exactly the framework brought by Trump, in which he emphasised on diplomatic means at first, with a full force of deal making through pressure, sanctions, economic tools including tariffs, and other negotiating statecraft used effectively out of his Art of the Deal playbook, but when eventually there is no willingness on the other side, the use of force is used as the last deterrent. 

Trump also emphasised clarity and speed as tools of prevention. By making red lines more visible and consequences more predictable, his administration sought to narrow the grey zones where miscalculation thrives, and sending a clear message and warning to anyone out to escalate the situation. 

The strongest form of the deterrence argument is hence direct and simple in this model: deterrence saves lives when it prevents wars from starting and prevents wars from expanding.

Resonating Changes in Domestic Policies

Trump’s domestic policy narrative is anchored on sensing the direct pulse on the ground affecting ordinary households: taxes, housing, healthcare, retirement, and opportunity for economic returns.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included major tax changes such as the elimination of federal taxes on tips and overtime income and expanded relief for seniors, set the first tone.

A major philanthropic commitment pledged $6.25 billion in additional contributions for millions of children.

Housing policy is also revamped, aimed to restrict large institutional investors from dominating single-family home markets. This ensures that the model remains: “homes for people, not corporations.”

Healthcare reforms are among the major focus areas under his administration. He emphasised price transparency and Most-Favored-Nation drug pricing, with projections suggesting $36 billion in taxpayer savings and more than 10% reductions in common health-plan premiums.

The Argument for a new Golden Era

Leadership involves choosing a national argument, and Trump used the 2026 State of the Union to present a coherent and compelling case with a clear priority structure: energy dominance, border security, people safety, trade leverage, alliance burden sharing, and military strength. All these are backed by visible milestones for last year: strong GDP quarters, historically large tariff revenues, record market levels, lower energy prices, and sharply reduced border crossings.

Trump’s broader ambition is to combine effective economics with wealth creation while restoring American sovereignty abroad.

His argument is ultimately about national direction and making it great again, where, the U.S., according to him, should move toward abundance rather than scarcity, sovereignty rather than drift, and strength rather than apology.

The State of the Union made clear that Trump sees his presidency not merely as a change of administration but as the beginning of a new American awakening: one defined by his own legacy and mantra of change and rejuvenation based on realistic strength and changes and no longer trapped by political correctness of the past, and a belief that American strength remains the world’s most powerful force for stability and peace.

*Collins Chong Yew Keat is a foreign affairs and strategy analyst and author in University of Malaya.*