What do folks want to hear Joe Biden talk about tonight when he addresses a joint session of Congress in his first-ever State of the Union speech? If the findings of a new Marist poll are to be believed, it’s inflation, inflation, inflation. And nothing else is even in the ballpark.

The question Marist asked of 1,264 American adults was which single issue should be Joe Biden’s top priority right now. The aforementioned Biden-caused disaster thoroughly dominated the responses at 38%, while coronavirus and voting laws both came in at 11%, and foreign policy and violent crime, both at 10%, rounded out the list of issues that registered in double figures.

Climate change? Only 7% of respondents believe that this blessing in disguise should be the president’s top priority.

Nancy Pelosi’s never-ending sham of a January 6 committee? A whopping 3% believe that the work of Nancy and her merry band of Trump-hating whitewashers should merit top billing. But by all means, Nancy, please keep telling us that this overplayed event, which barely registered a blip compared to the cost and the violence of the George Floyd riots of the previous summer, is “a threat to our democracy.”

But back to Biden: What will he talk about? What on earth can a guy talk about when his approval rating is under water in each of the 50 states?

Here’s our Pro Tip of the Day: Blaming it all on Trump won’t work. The folks are already onto that one.

Indefatigable White House Press Secretary and Paid Liar Jen Psaki said Ukraine and Russia will be on the president’s teleprompter, as will the economy and inflation. Somewhat predictably, Biden will call on us to ramp up manufacturing here at home, promote fair competition, strengthen supply chains, and eliminate barriers to well-paying jobs. Call us skeptical, but we don’t think any of these platitudinous measures will cure what ails us — or that he can deliver any of them anyway.

Nor do we think Biden has a grand plan for undoing the crushing tax known as Bidenflation. As our Nate Jackson put it recently, “Everything costs a lot more than when he dismissively asserted last July that ‘no serious economist’ believed all these price increases were anything but ‘temporary,’ all while bragging that he’d saved you 16 cents on a cookout.”

COVID-19 has clearly played itself out for most of us — so much so that even Democrats in local, state, and national government are finally letting go of the masks and the vaccine mandates. Perhaps Biden himself will finally pivot from his party’s permanent pandemic phase, declare victory on COVID, and loosen some of his government’s restrictions. Most folks, we imagine, would see through that.

But that doesn’t leave him much to talk about. As the public opinion experts at Marist note, “Americans’ concerns about their own personal finances and the overall direction of the country provide a stark backdrop for Biden, who will face the nation with dismal reviews of his first year in office and his lowest job approval rating.”

As our Mark Alexander observed recently: “Much has changed since Donald Trump delivered his final State of the Union Address in February 2020. At that time, he declared correctly as only Ronald Reagan could before him, ‘I say to the people of our great country and to the members of Congress: The state of our Union is stronger than ever before.’”

Sleepy Joe Biden can only dream of such a pronouncement. Think about it: In just over a year’s time, he’s opened our southern border to millions of illegals, hamstrung our economy and turbocharged inflation, emboldened Russia and China, lost Afghanistan while abandoning a strategic airbase and billions in weaponry, wrecked the world’s mightiest military through mandatory wokeness, gummed up the supply chain, squandered our nation’s energy independence, sent gas prices soaring, enacted unconstitutional vaccine mandates, demagogued the nation’s voting laws as Jim Crow 2.0, heightened tensions between and among the races, allowed criminals to control our streets and terrorize our citizens, presided over record fentanyl deaths, and sicced the Department of Justice on parents who don’t want their children to be racially indoctrinated.

Given all this awfulness, and given that the speech’s 9 p.m. start is past the president’s bedtime, we might not hear him say much more than, “Tonight, I can proudly report that the state of our union … is … mm … nngff … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”