A defiant Donald Trump used the first address to Congress of his second term in the White House to announce that he was pressing on with his controversial agenda of tariffs and dismantling the machinery of the federal government in a speech full of partisan red meat that was more like one of his signature political rallies than remarks usually delivered from the Capitol by previous presidents.
Trump, who entered the House chamber to chants of “USA” from the Republican majorities in the assembled House and Senate, opened his speech by noting the relatively short interval that has passed since he was sworn in under the Capitol rotunda and claiming to have “accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years.”
The president told members and a television audience expected to number in the millions that he was there to report that “America's momentum is back, our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back, and the American Dream is surging bigger and better than ever before,” despite recent polling and economic data that shows the U.S. careening towards a recession with sliding consumer confidence on account of the uncertainty he has injected into the political environment with unilateral import tax increases and cuts to government services.
Democrats, despite pleas from their leadership to maintain decorum and not provide content for a Republican media attack machine that routinely weaponizes displays of emotion from their party, began protesting within minutes of Trump arriving in the chamber.
Rep. Al Green of Texas raised his cane almost as soon as Trump began to speak and said that Trump did not have a mandate. That led to Republicans, led by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – who wore a red Make America Great Again hat – and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, urging him to be thrown out, which led to the House Sergeant at Arms escorting Green out.
Seemingly in response, Trump launched into a partisan rant after bragging of having declared a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, attacking his predecessor, former president Joe Biden, as “the worst president in American history” and lambasting the Democratic side of the House chamber as being packed with people who are so blinded by partisan hatred that they could never bring themselves to see any value in anything he might say.
“This is my fifth such speech to Congress, and once again, I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud,” he said. “I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded. And these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements. They won't do it no matter what.”
As if they were eager to prove his point, Democrats in the chamber heckled the president right back, shouting criticisms of his various policies even as they were drowned out by the Republicans in the chamber chanting the president’s name or simply “U.S.A.”
Some Democrats, like Maxine Dexter of Oregon, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, Maxwell Frost and Andrea Salinas of Oregon, walked out of the chamber during Trump’s address as they wore black t-shirts saying “resist” or “No Kings Here.”
Continuing, Trump shrugged off the displays from the opposition party and went into a rote recitation of his administration’s first actions, including a federal hiring and regulation freeze, a freeze on foreign aid that is being challenged in court, and withdrawals from several international organizations and agreements such as the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council.
He also claimed to have “ended weaponized government,” even as his handpicked interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has attempted to initiate prosecutions of Democratic members of Congress, and told the audience that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America” less than 24 hours after he posted on his Truth Social platform that he was ordering a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
Trump also bragged of having eviscerated a whole class of longstanding programs meant to aid recruitment of minorities to federal employment under the guise of ending diversity programs he and his supporters say discriminate against white people, claiming that the U.S. “will be woke no longer” under his leadership.
Almost uniformly, throughout the evening, Trump’s biggest acolytes like Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led applause lines or cheered openly.
Throughout the speech, Trump rehashed the past, lambasting Biden for the inflation that surged during his presidency.
But he also vowed to continue with explicitly inflationary tariff policies that have raised the spectre of a worldwide trade war and sent stock markets sliding in recent days to levels that meant an erasure of any and all gains made since his inauguration in January.
Trump said he was moving forward with plans to implement unilateral tax increases on imports from any country that places tariffs or unspecified “non-monetary trade barriers” on American goods.
“On April 2, reciprocal tariffs kick in, and whatever they tariff us ... we will tariff them. That's reciprocal back and forth. Whatever they tax us, we will tax them,” he said.
Yet Trump failed to acknowledge, as he always does, that tariffs are not taxes on other countries because the American government does not collect taxes from foreign governments.
Tariffs, in fact, are taxes that are paid by importers and passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Trump did appear to acknowledge that the tariffs he is imposing unilaterally will cause pain for consumers, but he dismissed the impact of higher prices and claimed that the tariffs he champions are “about protecting the soul of our country” and “about making America rich again and making America great again.”
“There'll be a little disturbance, but we're okay with that,” he said.
As the president’s speech neared the two-hour mark, he continued with the partisan attacks on his predecessor’s administration, again blaming Biden for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 and for the ISIS-K attack during the withdrawal of Afghanistan that his team had negotiated in talks with the Taliban before he left office in 2021.
But Trump also used the speech to provide a measure of comfort to the families of the 13 service personnel killed in the ISIS-K attack by announcing that U.S. authorities have “apprehended the top terrorists responsible for that atrocity.”
Continuing in the foreign policy section of his remarks, he announced that Ukraine’s government had capitulated to his demand to agree to “peace negotiations” and a mineral rights deal that appeared to have been scuttled after a shouting match between him, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last week.
Trump, who has reoriented American foreign policy towards Russia and away from the country’s traditional democratic allies in NATO, said it was “time to stop this madness” and “stop the killing” that has taken place as a result of the war, which he refuses to say was started by Russia.
He also said he “appreciated” that Zelensky had sent a letter declaring that his team stands “ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership to get a peace that lasts” and claimed that his administration has “received strong signals” that Russia is “ready for peace” even though Moscow has violated multiple ceasefire agreements in the years since it began attacking Ukrainian territory a decade ago.
