Dude, he actually used the word “malaise”. If you’re younger and don’t understand the relevance, see here and here. In short, it recalls Jimmy Carter’s downbeat speech that proved once and for all that he was an incompetent leader unworthy of another term. Quoth:

It was an address in which he looked critically at himself and his own failures but also warned Americans in dire, near-apocalyptic terms about the potential consequences of theirs.

“The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America,” preached the president, a devout evangelical Christian who saw in Americans a crisis of faith not in God but in the nation — and in themselves.

Delivered against a background of inflation, rising oil prices and gas lines, the address was derisively dubbed the “malaise” speech by the press. And when Carter requested resignations from his entire Cabinet a few days later, the speech became all the proof anyone needed that he was blaming Americans for his own mistakes.

And here.

At any rate, Carter took a lot of well-deserved criticism for that speech. It was inappropriately introspective, but it was also depressing, negative, and unsatisfactory, in a way everyone understood instinctively. Carter surveyed a “national crisis of confidence,” spoke of Americans discovering that “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” and then proposed to address the problem by setting fresh numerical goals for a US energy policy.

With that in mind, here’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, describing the national mood under Barack Obama as “malaise”. Someone isn’t making the White House’s winter solstice list this year.