Every story has a foreshadowing, and Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress is no different. The day before he spoke, the Senate confirmed Linda McMahon, the former WWE executive, to be his secretary of Education, a department he wants to eliminate.
Typically, a delegation of both parties accompanies the president as he enters the chamber. As we watched Trump enter the chamber that his supporters tried to breach four years ago, he received jubilant applause. Republicans are still riding on the sugar high of their November 5 victory. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of his biggest supporters in Congress, donned a red Make America Great Again hat.
In the week that the world of wrestling was shaken by longtime hero John Cena turning heel – that is, becoming a villain – we watched as the address quickly devolved into a pugnacious entertainment.
Trump had barely begun to speak when Rep. Al Green, the septuagenarian Democrat from Texas, raised his cane and said the president had “no mandate.” That earned heckles from the Republican side led by Greene and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who took a break from focusing on which bathroom transgender people should use on the Hill, to call for Green’s ouster, which House Speaker Mike Johnson gladly did.
The jeers and heckles from the Democratic side did not abate throughout the night.
“There is absolutely nothing I can do to make them happy or to make them stand, or smile or applaud,” he said, as his stablemate Vice President JD Vance gave a smirk behind him saying he could achieve any litany of accomplishments, but that the Democrats would refuse to applaud him.
Throughout the evening, Democrats would boo or heckle him. They held up signs reading “That’s a lie” or “false” or shout back at him. All this came despite the pleas from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to have a “strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber.”
That may be because Trump, himself a former WWE hall of famer, is able to recognize a “worked shoot” – which in pro-wrestling talk, is a scripted action that comes off as unscripted to appear real – when he sees one. In turn, throughout the night, he would engage in little digs at the Democrats.
Like an authority figure not too dissimilar from his education secretary’s husband Vince, he threw back the boos and jeers from one half of the room at the goading and encouragement of the Republicans, who threw back Democrats’ jibes with chants of “USA! USA! USA!” and “Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Around me, Democrats throughout the speech sought to make a spectacle to show that they disapproved of the president’s actions. Reps. Andrea Salinas and Maxine Dexter of Oregon as well as Reps. Maxwell Frost and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who knows how to get under both Mace and Greene’s skins, walked out.
Rep. Dave Min, a freshman Democrat from California, also hightailed it when Trump repeated his repeatedly debunked lie that childhood vaccination causes autism as he praised his new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump taunted them for that too.
“With the name Kennedy, you would have thought everybody over here would have been cheering,” he quipped “How quickly they forget.”
Trump also engaged in some cheap heat, a tactic used to get a rise out of the crowd, when he rattled off renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and called Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” when talking about the War in Ukraine.
Sen. Bernie Sanders eventually exited the speech before it ended, saying “My speech is going to be better.”
Democrats began this more aggressive approach after leadership had hoped to compromise with Trump on immigration after the president won the popular vote. But Democratic activists have since assailed their elected officials for not aggressively fighting back against him.
“We're indicating that this is not normal, and this President is not normal, much as our Republican colleagues want to give all the trappings of it being normal,” Rep. Mark Takano of California told The Independent.
But the lack of a coordinated response muddled the Democratic opposition on Tuesday evening and made it look like a cacophony. Shannon Watts, who last month told The Independent that she wanted to see Democrats push back more forcefully against Trump, said a coordinated response would have been better.
“Tonight some Dems attended to SOTU, some held town halls, some hosted online events,” she told The Independent over text message. “And I think three different Democrats are responding to Trump’s speech. They’re clearly listening to the constituents telling them to act like an opposition party — they’ve got the opposition part right, it’s the party part that still needs work. There’s strength in numbers.”
But if Democrats are going to engage in a three-on-one tag team match against the Final Boss that is Donald Trump for the millions and millions of Democratic and swing voters across the nation, they will need to figure out a better orchestrated maneuver.
They may have more opportunities soon as the government faces a shutdown in nine days and Republicans seek to pass their legislation to cut taxes, which could come at the expense of Medicaid.
Democrats may have finally drawn blood against Trump, whom they view as the ultimate heel, but they have yet to secure a win come the 2026 midterms.
After the speech concluded, Trump’s White House put out a press statement saying “Democrats Showed Whose Side They’re On — And it’s Not the American People.”
