Out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explained in three words why the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday was so terrible.

“Weakest performance ever,” Buttigieg said on CNN after the speech, noting that the speech received low approval ratings from voters, much lower than previous State of the Union addresses from Trump and other presidents. But the former secretary’s three-word criticism also applied to Trump’s presidency overall.

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“There’s this big disconnect between the tone he’s taking: ‘Everything’s going along fine, and we’re just going to do more of it,’ and what people are actually feeling at home, where things are more expensive and the country feels like it is even more chaotic than it may have been before,” Buttigieg said.

“Remember the central promise of his campaign, certainly the day one promise of his presidency is, ‘I will make things more affordable for you.’ He’s come in, he’s done the opposite,” Buttigieg continued. “He’s actually actively increased our costs, and you can’t trick people about that.”

Buttigieg then mentioned that Trump’s unconstitutional tariff policies, which the Supreme Court struck down last week, have added an average of $1,000 in additional costs that importers pass onto everyday consumer goods.

“You notice that in your family budget, and you can’t be tricked about that by the president spinning stories for a two-hour-long speech,” Buttigieg said.

When CNN anchorperson Jake Tapper mentioned that Trump regularly blames the economy on his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, Buttigieg replied, “Yeah, if [Trump] was in his first few months, he might have been able to get away with that — but now that we’re in the second year…”

“It’s not just that we’re paying more, it’s that these economic measures are getting worse,” he continued. “We saw economic growth dramatically slowing in the last quarter. We saw manufacturing jobs — which went up and up and up [during the Biden era] — they went down in the course of the last year. So you got to ask yourself: Well, what’s changed in 2025? And obviously, what changed is the president.”

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