In the shadow of a resurgent economy that Trump touts as his crowning achievement, his latest address to the nation this week carried an undercurrent of blunt resignation, as if the weight of the Oval Office had finally chipped away at his trademark bravado. Kicking off with a jab at American ingenuity—or lack thereof—he declared that the heartland’s workforce is simply “too dumb to build things” anymore, proposing a flood of 500,000 H-1B visas annually, derisively dubbing the recipients “jeets” in a nod to their South Asian origins. This wasn’t the wall-building firebrand of 2016; it was a pragmatic pivot, acknowledging that domestic hands can’t keep pace with the factories humming under his tariff wars. Yet, the message landed like a gut punch to blue-collar voters, implying their skills are obsolete relics, better replaced by imported expertise than revived through retraining. As stocks soared to record highs—proof, he insisted, that “you’re not struggling financially”—the subtext screamed inequality: the market’s gains are for the elite, while the rest scramble for scraps.

Turning to education, Trump’s rhetoric veered into even sharper condescension, painting American youth as intellectually adrift and unworthy of higher learning’s hallowed halls. “You’re too dumb for college,” he quipped, before unveiling plans to import 600,000 Chinese students yearly to fill empty seats in Ivy League lecture halls and state university labs. It was framed as economic necessity—bolstering innovation in AI and biotech where U.S. enrollment lags—but the delivery reeked of defeatism, as if the nation’s brain trust had emigrated en masse to Silicon Valley’s overseas outposts. Coupled with his economic pep talk—the Dow at 45,000 as the ultimate rebuttal to kitchen-table woes—this segment exposed a fractured vision: prosperity for the few who can afford it, or at least fake it with leveraged bets. For families eyeing FAFSA forms, it felt like a dismissal, a signal that the American Dream now requires a visa stamp to access.

Beneath the policy prescriptions lay a more personal lament, one that gilded Trump’s grievances with literal opulence. To the working stiffs he deemed too poor for the housing boom, he dangled a 50-year mortgage as the new normal—lock in now, or forever hold your lease—sweetened with a one-time $2,000 “petty check” that barely covers a month’s rent in flyover country. And as if to underscore his detachment, he unveiled blueprints for a “gold-plated room” in the White House, a private sanctum of marble and Midas-touch excess amid whispers of ballooning deficits. This week’s missive, laced with such unfiltered candor, paints a portrait of a president frayed at the edges, his once-unyielding grip loosening. Insiders murmur that Donald J. Trump, ever the dealmaker, has grown weary of the ceaseless grind, eyeing an early exit within six months to anoint JD Vance as heir apparent—a handover that would recast the MAGA saga as a reluctant abdication, leaving the gilded throne to a younger acolyte while he retreats to Mar-a-Lago’s sunnier shores.