Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered a nearly 100-minute-long speech to Congress, which even his critics conceded was one of the best of his political career. He was unintentionally aided by angry and frustrated Democrat legislators. Their politically tone-deaf and emotionally insensitive reactions demonstrated the fact that their party is leaderless and struggling to find a message that can appeal to the millions of alienated working-class Americans who used to make up the core of their voter base.
In the meantime, Trump rededicated his presidency to the pursuit of the theme of his speech to the joint sessions of Congress: “Renewal of the American Dream.”
President Trump emphasized all that his administration has already accomplished since his inauguration:
“Six weeks ago, I stood beneath the dome of this Capitol and proclaimed the dawn of the golden age of America. From that moment on, it has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country. We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four years or eight years — and we are just getting started.
“I return to this chamber tonight 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. The American dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed.”
Trump ended his speech by promising that his administration would “take up the righteous cause of American liberty” and “fight, fight, fight for a country our citizens believe in and deserve.” America’s “Golden Age,” he declared, “has just begun.”
RealClearPolitics (RCP) analyst Philip Wegman called it “a particularly bracing speech [and] effective theater, as Democrats sat sullenly on their hands, [and] the GOP half of the room rose to applaud repeatedly.”
A PEP RALLY FOR REPUBLICANS AND A TRAINWRECK FOR DEMOCRATS
Charles Lipson, writing in the Spectator, agreed that it was “a bravura performance for the president, a pep rally for congressional Republicans and a trainwreck for the Democrats, who sat glumly in their seats, holding signs up attacking the president and booing his applause lines.”
Lipson also recognized “an upbeat coherence to the address. It included plenty of specific proposals, but they were not the focus of the speech. The emphasis was on a renewal of American patriotism.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel admitted that even though “Donald Trump’s style isn’t to everyone’s liking, his speech shows his team has cracked the code for making the substance count. The president’s fifth congressional address was the most effective of his presidencies, presenting an administration of action and resolve, [and] drilled home his biggest priorities.”
Barton Swaim, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, thought that the best line of Trump’s speech was, “The people elected me to do the job, and I’m doing it.” Mostly, he’s right. Four-fifths of the night’s address was an expression of policy aims supported by broad majorities of the American electorate: an expansion of drilling, a crackdown on waste in federal spending, an end to taxes on tips and Social Security, the suppression of out-of-control urban crime, the deportation of illegal aliens who break American laws, a ban on men competing in women’s sports, homeland missile defense, and on and on.”
In addition to the positive critical reviews, two separate polls showed that Trump’s speech was very well received by nearly 37 million television viewers, made up of 51% Republicans, 27% Independents, and 21% Democrats. A CBS poll of viewers found that 76% of viewers approved of Trump’s speech against 23% who did not, while a CNN poll found approval from 69% of viewers against 31% who disapproved.
A Quinnipiac poll taken in February indicated that 40% of voters approve of what the Republicans, led by President Trump, are doing, a record high, compared to just 21% of voters approve of the job Democrats in Congress are doing, a record low.
TRUMP DECLARES A NEW GOLDEN AGE FOR AMERICA
In his opening lines, Trump declared that a new Golden Age of America is now “dawning,” and promised that his “common-sense revolution” will be “unrelenting.”
“America is back!” the president proclaimed, “And we are just getting started!”
Trump also said that he believes that Hashem had miraculously spared his life during the assassination attempt last summer at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, so that he could make America great again.
Both Lipson and former Reagan White House speech writer Peggy Noonan noted the strong similarities of Trump’s message to a joint session of Congress to Ronald Reagan’s highly successful “Morning in America” 1984 presidential campaign theme.
Noonan also noted that the Democrats in 2025 are making the same mistakes in reacting to Trump’s return to power that they did during the Reagan era. In 1981, after the Democrats suffered a landslide loss of the White House and their majority in the Senate, the party’s “leaders on Capitol Hill [were] too proud and stupid to change.”
Sasha Stone, a popular Substack author who calls herself “a former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country,” wrote that Trump’s speech “proved himself more than worthy of my vote. . . For a man who was hunted, framed, falsely accused, spied on, impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of a ‘felony,’ almost assassinated twice, he stared down the Democrats and gave maybe the best speech of his entire political career.”
TRUMP ON MESSAGE, IN CONTROL AND CONFIDENT
Writing in USA Today, Ingrid Jacques agreed that “Trump delivered one of the best speeches I’ve heard him give. He stayed on message and was in control and confident the whole time. That served as a direct contrast with Democrats in the chamber, who came off as unhinged and pathetic.”
George W. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, who has been critical of Donald Trump in the past, called his speech last week “a tour de force of bold ideas, grand notions and vitriol. It had a laser focus on familiar themes from the campaign — securing the border, imposing tariffs, and ending wokeness and DEI.”
By contrast, the “protest” by Democrats against Trump’s confident and inspiring message struck many political observers as pathetically weak and duplicative. For example, just hours before Trump’s speech, Democrat senators Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker issued video clips with the identical texts repeating the familiar anti-Trump talking points.
Sasha Stone suggested that the Democrat response “did significant damage to their brand. While MAGA [supporters in the chamber] applauded [Trump] and chanted his name, [Democrats] like [Congresswoman] Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, [Senator] Adam Schiff, and [former House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi stared ahead, empty-eyed and stone-faced. . .
“Trump dominated the room, speaking with the confidence of someone [who is] finally over their decade-long campaign of hate against him.”
President Trump also said early in his speech that there was no point in his trying to reach out to the congressional Democrats in the office in an attempt to find common ground with them.
“This is my fifth such speech to Congress,” Trump said, “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.
“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,” Trump said, “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. It’s very sad, and it shouldn’t be this way.”
At one point in his speech, Trump invited the Democrats in the audience to join him “for just this one night. . . in celebrating so many incredible wins for America,” but his plea fell on deaf ears.
DEMOCRATS REFUSE TO HONOR NATIONAL HEROES
The Democrats’ suppressed reactions to the bipartisan applause lines in his speech over the next hour and a half then proved that Trump had been correct. The president acknowledged a number of ordinary Americans who have acted heroically and who were sitting in the visitor’s gallery of the House. They included Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a 13-year-old black boy who has spent half his young life battling brain cancer and who wants to become a law enforcement officer.
USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques said that she found herself “wiping away a few tears” watching Trump making DJ an honorary member of the Secret Service as millions of Americans and his proud father watched. The Republican half of the chamber stood and applauded, but the Democrats remained stone-faced and sat on their hands.
Trump also honored the members of the families of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray in the audience. The two girls were brutally murdered by illegal immigrants. Trump also recognized the wife and daughters of Corey Comperatore, who was fatally shot shielding them with his body by the assassin who tried to kill Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last summer. Yet the Democrats refused Trump’s invitation to stand or join in the applause of the Republicans across the aisle.
The Democrats also refused to respond when Trump announced that the U.S., with Pakistan’s help, had caught the terrorist responsible for killing 13 Marines and seriously wounding forty-two others during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or that a teenager whose father, a third generation military veteran and policeman, had recently died, had been given an appointment to attend West Point, or when he honored the wife of a cop who had been killed in the line of duty.
As Charles Lipson noted, “That kind of boorish behavior played right into Trump’s hands. Throughout the speech, he attacked the failures of the Democrats and the Biden administration, calling out their disastrous programs and introducing people in the [chamber’s] gallery whose lives had been crushed by those failures.”
DEMOCRAT VICTIMS OF TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
Karl Rove said that it would “have been smart to join in when Mr. Trump touched on topics that resonate with Americans.” But they were prevented from doing the right thing, in large part, because of their “warped worldview of the party’s left [and] their deep personal hatred of Mr. Trump.”
Very much like the Democrats, Trump Derangement Syndrome is also preventing the die-hard Never-Trump conservatives, such as David French and Bill Kristol, from recognizing Trump’s positive accomplishments. This has also undermined the credibility of their criticisms of some of Trump’s more dubious or arguably silly proposals, such as his declared intention to wrest Greenland from Dutch control, turn Canada into the 51st state, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
The Democrat women in the House chamber wore pink in protest against Trump’s alleged anti-feminist views. Some of the Democrats also held up professionally prepared black placards with printed white lettering that read “Save Medicare,” “Musk Steals,” and “False,” designed to send a warning message to the television audience watching Trump’s speech.
TRUMP DEFINES A NEW NORMAL
New Mexico Democrat Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury stood in the aisle as the president entered the House chamber carrying a sign that read “This is not normal.” Now that Trump has won a second term as president, this will be the new normal for the next four years in Washington, whether Democrats like it or not.
But these efforts by the Democrats to signal their opposition to Trump’s policies during his speech were completely upstaged by the unhinged antics of Texas Democrat Congressman Al Green, who waved his cane while yelling at Trump that he does not have a mandate from the voters. This forced GOP Speaker Mike Johnson to order Green’s removal from the chamber by the House sergeant-at-arms.
DEMOCRATS REPEAT THE MISTAKE THEY MADE AFTER LOSING TO REAGAN
Peggy Noonan wrote that by their reactions and lack of reaction to Trump’s speech, the “Democrats looked like fools.” She warns that Democrats are about to make the same mistake they made after Ronald Reagan beat them in 1981. Instead of recognizing that their policies had just been repudiated by the voting public, “they kept doing the same thing, as if they had a secret death wish. They lost in another landslide in 1984, and again in 1988.” It wasn’t until the 1992 election cycle that Democrats realized the “need to readjust [their] policy stands to be more in line with those of the American people,” which enabled Bill Clinton to win the presidency.
Noonan also said, much like USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques, that when “the boy with cancer high-fives the young man [admitted to West Point], the only response to such sweetness is tears in your eyes.”
TRUMP SHOWING LOVE VS. DEMOCRAT HATE
By setting up that memorable moment during his speech, Noonan wrote that President Trump was “showing [his] love for regular Americans.”
But by refusing to acknowledge the emotional appeal of that moment during Trump’s speech, the Democrats were doing just the opposite, enabling their intense hatred of Trump to overpower their love for brave children. “The Democrats brought the hate,” Noonan wrote. “They don’t show love for Americans anymore. They look down on them [and] feel distance from them.”
Noonan believes in the importance of the United States having “two strong and healthy parties vying for popular support” and that Republicans need a competent political opponent. She offered the Democrats this advice to enable them to carry out that necessary function in American democracy.
“Democrats have to understand where they are. They have completely lost their reputation as the party of the workingman. With their bad governance of the major cities and their airy, abstract obsessions with identity politics and gender ideology, they have driven away the working class. . . They have been [too] radical on the border, on crime, on [gender issues]. They should take those issues off the table by admitting they got them wrong.”
She urges Democrats to “align with what the Trump administration is doing that might be productive, but with a variation that shows you have a heart.”
Noonan also believes that Democrats simply repeating, “Trump bad” isn’t enough to win. “You have to start realizing how popular he is with your own voters. He’s a masculine presence, he’s funny, and he likes Americans. Those are three powerful qualities in America right now.”
Sasha Stone writes that the Democrats are still acting as if Trump has posed a dire threat to American democracy since he first announced his presidential candidacy almost ten years ago, and that it is not their fault that they lost to him in two out of the last three presidential elections.
She also compared today’s Democrats to the diehard advocates for the Confederacy in the South who never accepted the loss of the Civil War. “Losing is hard. Giving up your way of life is even harder,” Stone writes. But Democrats “are clinging to the past while the rest of us yearn to break free and move on to a brighter future.”
A WEAK SECOND DEMOCRAT RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
Brendan O’Neill, writing in Spiked, ridiculed the idea that the Democrat “revolt” against Trump’s Congress speech was as credible as the “Resistance” movement they organized at the start of Trump’s first term as president. “Can these people hear themselves?” O’Neill asked. Did they know what they looked like “holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like ‘False’ and ‘Liar’?”
He said that the ineffective protest against Trump’s speech wasn’t anything like “the Resistance” or even an uprising. Instead, he said, “The Democrat benches were a sea of self-satisfaction. There was rank hypocrisy, too. The day before the Democrat [women] brought a ‘wave of pink’ to Congress, they shot down a bill in the Senate that would have preserved the liberty and dignity of women and girls who just want to play [women’s] sports” only with other women.”
O’Neill was talking about the Senate Democrats who voted unanimously to block the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, even though according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 66% of Americans don’t want anyone else competing in women’s sports, both because it is unfair to the women athletes and raises the risk of physical injury to the women.
“Rarely has the gulf between the [Democrat] elite’s virtue-signaling and its real-world destructive behavior been so starkly illustrated,” O’Neill observes. “These congresswomen sign the death warrant of female sports one day and then [go] around in pink the next [day] to show what [brave] feminist they are.
“At some point,” O’Neill concludes, the Democrats “are going to have to fess up to the fact that the real rebels in America are those tens of millions of working people who voted [against them] for the overthrow of the old politics.”
Nicole Russell writes in USA Today that, “Overcome by President Donald Trump’s red wave, the Democratic Party isn’t just drifting, it’s drowning in rage and envy. Democrats are acting petty, petulant and uber-progressive. They’re out of step with most Americans, and even many of their own constituents.”
DEMOCRATS DIVIDED OVER COUNTER-TRUMP STRATEGY
The disappointing results of Democrat efforts to protest against Trump’s speech resulted the next day in serious recriminations and criticism of the party’s leadership, revealing the deep internal divisions among congressional Democrats over how to combat Trump’s surge in popularity and his radical efforts to downsize the federal government since taking office.
According to an Axios report, Democrat party leaders have been bombarded by progressive grassroots activists demanding that they take a much more bare-knuckles politics approach in attacking Trump’s governing agenda. But many party leaders and other “establishment” Democrats disagree. Several Democrats were deeply embarrassed because they felt that Congressman Green’s behavior was self-defeating and too disrespectful to the office of the presidency, regardless of their personal feelings about President Trump. They also believe that more subdued and traditional forms of political opposition will ultimately be more effective against Trump.
Axios quotes one unnamed senior House Democrat as revealing that while some more moderate Democrats are angry at progressives like Al Green for their heckling outbursts during Trump’s speech, “people are [furious] at [the party] leadership too. … Everyone is mad at everyone.”
On the other hand, the progressives argued that the failure of party leadership to provide proper coordination for the pushback against Trump’s speech left rank-and-file Democrats to improvise their tactics, resulting in poor overall results.
Michigan’s first-term senator, Elissa Slotkin, who delivered a low-key but generally well-received Democrat response to Trump’s speech address, told NBC that Congressman Green’s emotional outburst was the result of “so much frustration” with the Trump administration. But she quickly added that opposition to Trump was not enough: “We can’t just be against something. We have to be for something.”
A UNIFYING DEMOCRAT RESPONSE
In her own televised response immediately after Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress, Slotkin emphasized her bipartisan family background as the daughter of a Republican father and a mother who was a lifelong Democrat. She also cited her experience working as a member of President George W. Bush’s White House National Security Council and President Barack Obama’s State Department and Defense Department.
She then declared that most Americans share three core beliefs: That the middle class is the engine of our country; that strong national security protects us from harm; and that our democracy, no matter how messy, is unparalleled and worth fighting for. It was a refreshingly simple and non-controversial message which former Time Magazine centrist columnist Joe Klein, writing on his Sanity Clause blog, suggested might be a good start for a Democrat party that is lost and searching for an identity.
Pennsylvania Democrat Senator John Fetterman, who has developed a reputation for being one of the most open-minded Democrats in Washington today, lamented in a post on X what he called a “sad cavalcade of self-owns and unhinged petulance” exhibited by his fellow Democrats during Trump’s speech and told Axios: “I don’t think that’s the way forward.”
DISRESPECTING AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT
New York Democrat Congressman George Latimer told Axios he felt the disruptions by Green were “inappropriate. When a president — my president, your president — is speaking, we don’t interrupt, we don’t pull those stunts.”
Maine Democrat Jared Golden said of the attempts to disrupt Trump’s speech, “If anyone is thinking that it was an effective strategy, they’re probably in an echo chamber. My take is that the average American thought the optics were pretty bad.”
Axios quoted an unnamed centrist House Democrat as saying, “Not standing for Trump would have been a fine strategy, but you need to separate him from the kid with cancer.” He also said that “What [Green] did was inappropriate — [because] he became the story, not the [high] price of eggs,” for which Democrats have been blaming Trump.
On the Sunday television news interview programs, five Democrats, including two progressives, rendered their verdicts on the protest efforts during Trump’s speech and generally agreed that it was a “distraction” to the larger Democrat message criticizing Trump’s policies.
New York Congressman Tom Suozzi told CBS News that Congressman Green’s outburst “was a strategic mistake as well as something that just is not appropriate for the decorum of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey said on CNN that he did not approve of “that type of behavior” and compared Al Green’s disruptive tactics to those of GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who had routinely interrupted President Biden’s speeches to Congress.
California Senator Adam Schiff, who has long been one of Trump’s harshest Democrat critics, Democrat of said told ABC News that Democrats’ “lack of coordinated response” was “a mistake” and that Democrats could make a “winning case” by focusing on how Trump’s efforts to slash government spending could lead to sharp cuts on Medicaid.
CONGRESSMAN AL GREEN’S “DISTRACTION”
Progressive California Congressman Ro Khanna of California told Fox News that the Democrat response to Trump’s speech was “not a good look” for Democrats and that Green’s behavior was “a distraction” from the Democrats’ economic message. Defending his progressive beliefs, Khanna added, “You can vigorously disagree, as I do, but still respect some of the institutions of our country and some of our traditions.”
The day after Trump’s speech, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said that Democrats would do better by focusing on economic issues such as the rising costs of food, housing and gas, and that Congressman Green’s vocal protest was not “the best way” to get their message across to voters.
That same day, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said that “the vast majority of Democrats [attending Trump’s speech] showed restraint, listened to what the president had to say and of course we strongly disagree.”
Two days after the speech, Green was formally censured for his conduct by a resolution in the House which carried by a vote of 224-198, with 2 abstentions, in which 10 Democrats crossed party lines to join with all House Republicans to show their disapproval of Green’s disruptive outbursts during Trump’s speech.
However, Green was unrepentant. He defended his behavior as expressing his “righteous indignation and righteous incivility” in reaction to Trump’s provocative language and tactics and his administration’s attempts to circumvent Congressional authority.
DEMOCRATS IN SEARCH OF AN EFFECTIVE MESSAGE
The divisions among the Democrats over how they should have reacted to Trump’s speech were indicative of their larger problem, the lack of an effective and coherent political message to counteract the success with voters of Trump’s populist, America-First MAGA agenda.
Even the usually Democrat-friendly Politico columnists recognized that “If Democrats think standing up and walking out [on Trump’s speech] is their best path back to power, rather than adopting a more strategic approach to their Trump resistance, it could be a long four years — and possibly beyond.”
As Jeet Heer, the national affairs correspondent for the Nation, wrote, “Trump effectively turned his message to the joint session Congress, which usually functions as a State of the Union address, into an updated version of a typical Trump campaign rally speech. While State of the Union speeches typically emphasize national unity and attempts to find common ground with the opposition party, Trump’s speech was clearly designed to please his MAGA followers and offered nothing but contempt for the Democrat opposition and the policies of his presidential predecessor, Joe Biden.”
On the other side, Democrat congressional leaders Schumer and Jeffries remain unwilling to give up the unpopular woke agenda demanded by the party’s left-wing progressive activists, despite its rejection by enough working-class voters to cause the Democrats to lose last November’s election by a decisive margin.
CARVILLE TELLS DEMOCRATS TO WAIT FOR TRUMP TO MAKE A MISTAKE
That leaves the Democrats with no viable alternative to the passive strategy that was suggested in a recent New York Times article by Clinton-era political strategist James Carville. He recommends that, “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” and wait for Trump to make a politically fatal mistake.
But Trump’s electoral success in November and the incredibly fast start of his second term as president prove that he is no longer the political novice, ignorant of Washington’s inner workings, that he was when he ambushed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Trump has learned the hard way since then that to be successful at the game of politics, you have to play the game every day, 24/7, and give no quarter to your enemies. Trump has learned from his mistakes, and has proven that he is smart enough to avoid repeating them, so the odds are now very much against him beating himself by making such a serious mistake.
Veteran Democrat pollster Doug Schoen wrote that, “The starkest impact made by President Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress was the boldness of his vision and the absolute absence of any alternative from the Democrat Party.
“The president made clear to lawmakers, and indeed the world, that his overarching goal is American renewal and the reinvigoration of the American Dream.
“At the same time,” Schoen admitted sadly, “it does not appear to me that the political party that I continue to belong to, with increasing difficulty, has any answers at all.
Instead, Schoen believes that the Democrats “have become trivial and almost irrelevant.”
VETERAN DEMOCRAT POLLSTER ADMITS TO ADMIRING TRUMP
While Schoen denies that, after 50 years as a mainstream Democrat, he has changed parties, he concedes “nonetheless, anyone who cares about America has to support the president’s overarching goals on the economy, inflation, the southern border, crime and embracing peace around the world. . .
“We did get a clear sense that we have a president who is a bold, transformational leader dedicated to revitalizing the American Dream.” But Schoen does concede that “whether he succeeds or not is still very much up to question. “
Meanwhile, Mark Hemingway writes in the Federalist, that over the past decade, Democrat leaders have become so used to fixed primary campaigns that they have largely forgotten how to run an honest and successful election or primary campaign other than by acting out in increasingly absurd ways, as demonstrated by Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Nevertheless, Joe Jacobson, writing for Newsweek, still feels as if the Democrats did more to lose the 2024 election than Trump did to win it. On paper, the Democrats had all of the advantages, especially after party leaders ruthlessly forced Biden to drop out. The Kamala Harris campaign had control of the mainstream news media and outspent the Trump campaign in the final four months of the campaign by almost $700 million. But, Jacobson contends, “No amount of ads, door-knocking, or ‘all-star’ consultants could make people like Democrats. And now. . . Democrats still can’t figure out why voters keep turning them away.”
THE SECRETS OF TRUMP’S APPEAL
According to Jacobson, another part of their problem is that the Democrats’ elite-chosen candidates have little in common with their former core of working-class voters and “come across as stiff, preachy and painfully out of touch.”
Jacobson concedes that “with his absurd hair and larger-than-life persona, Trump is a walking meme [symbol], but that’s precisely his power.” According to Jacobson, Trump “won because he built himself into a character that millions of Americans feel they know. He’s not a politician to them; he’s an entertainer, a spectacle, a symbol of sticking it to the establishment. Democrats, blinded by their hatred of him, have ignored this. Worse, they’ve defined themselves entirely in opposition to him.”
TRUMP HAILS A POSITIVE MESSAGE FROM UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT
Before the Oval Office meeting between President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky melted down, creating a crisis in U.S.-Ukraine relations, Trump had hoped to use the proposed rare earth minerals deal as a highlight of his speech to Congress. Nevertheless, Trump was still able to strike a conciliatory tone during the part of his speech to Congress in which he read from “an important letter from President Zelensky of Ukraine” which had been posted on X earlier that day, and that expressed a desire for a ceasefire with Russia on Trump’s terms, which Zelensky had refused to agree to during the Oval Office meeting.
In the letter, Zelensky wrote that “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
Zelensky’s letter closed with the kind of recognition of America’s help that Trump had been looking for. “We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence,” Zelensky wrote, adding that he was now willing to sign agreements on minerals and security with the United States “at any time and in any convenient format.”
Trump described this as welcome news. He also suggested that his recent conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that Russia was also “ready for peace.”
Trump viewed these developments as validating his controversial negotiating strategy for ending the war in Ukraine, and told the members of Congress, “It’s time to stop this madness. It’s time to halt the killing. It’s time to end the senseless war. If you want to end wars, you have to talk to both sides.”
TRUMP CLOSED THE OPEN BORDER
During his speech, Trump also claimed credit for having quickly brought Biden’s open borders under control without any help from Congress. Last month, the Border Patrol recorded the lowest number of migrants who crossed the southern border illegally in at least 25 years. In February, after the Remain in Mexico border policy was re-instated, and Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, began the deportation of violent aliens, border agents recorded only 8,450 immigrant encounters, compared to well over 100,000 monthly border encounters during most of the Biden administration.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation to secure the border,” Trump said during his speech. “But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
Trump claimed that 20 million people had entered the country illegally under Biden, many with the help of organized gangs and international drug cartels, which Trump has designated as terrorist organizations. With the border now closed, Trump said, his administration is focusing on efforts to remove illegal immigrants, beginning with gang members and violent criminals, in order to restore law and order and to get the deadly drug fentanyl off of America’s streets.
Trump also spoke about the Laken Riley Act, a federal statute he recently signed into law, that mandates the detention of all illegal immigrants charged with a violent crime. As the family of Riley Laken, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, watched from the balcony, Trump assured them that she “did not die in vain.”
Trump also reviewed some of the accomplishments to date of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to streamline the federal government by rooting out waste, fraud and inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy, including the elimination of diversity (DEI) initiatives, unnecessary foreign aid programs supported by grants from USAID, and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spending on benefits for illegal aliens adding up to $24 billion so far.
Trump also cited the errors that Musk and his team have found at the Social Security Administration (SSA). Its database, Trump said, claims that “Over 130,000 people. . . are aged over 160 years old.” According to the SSA’s latest Inspector General report, it sent out nearly $5 billion in excessive payments in 2023.
INFLATION, TARIFFS AND THE PRICE OF OIL
Trump also insisted during his speech that the best way to reduce inflation was to reduce the cost of energy, by using the National Energy Emergency order that he signed on his first day back in the White House, and an energy policy based upon the active exploration for new sources of fossil fuels nicknamed ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!” in addition to the vigorous efforts by DOGE and across the federal government to end “the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Trump reiterated his call for “tax cuts for everybody”: an end to taxes on tips, overtime pay, Social Security benefits, and interest on car loans for automobiles made in America. He also pressed for an expanded business tax cut that would allow for the full deduction of capital investments on new equipment and promised to backdate the deduction to the start of this year.
TRUMP DEFENDS HIS TARIFF PROMISES
Trump also promised once again that his increased tariffs would make “America rich again,” but, for the first time, he admitted that it would take some time for the benefits from the tariffs to become obvious, and that in the meantime they could result in “a little disturbance” in the markets.
He also confirmed that new reciprocal tariffs would go into effect on April 2 and explained how they will work: “Whatever they tariff us, we tariff them. Whatever they tax us, we tax them. If they do non-monetary tariffs to keep us out of their market, then we do non-monetary barriers to keep them out of our market.”
“Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump insisted, “they’re about protecting the soul of our country.”
Trump emphasized that the new tariffs will result in more products being “Made in America,” and ending the unfair trade practices of many other countries, including some of America’s closest allies.
It is still unclear whether Trump wants to raise tariffs as a desirable goal in its own right, or is primarily using them as a negotiating lever as a way to get other countries to lower their tariffs on American goods. In the case of Mexico, Canada, and China, Trump is also raising tariffs to pressure them to do more to stop the flow of illegal drugs over their borders into the United States.
Trump reiterated his order requiring federal employees who have been working at home since the Covid lockdowns to return to their government offices. “They will either show up for work, in person, or be removed from their job,” Trump warned.
Trump called upon Congress to pass a new crime bill that would codify an executive order that made the murder of a federal police officer punishable by the death penalty.
TRUMP’S PATRIOTIC MOTIVES
According to New York Post columnist, Dominic Green, Trump’s motives are patriotic, and he is on a mission to “revive the righteous cause of American liberty. He loves his country [and] he wants Americans to be happy.”
Columnist Green also believes that Trump’s message to the American people is based upon a few simple truths:
The world is a cruel place.
A state cannot stand without borders.
A nation will disintegrate if illegal immigration continues.
A democracy cannot serve its citizens if non-citizens can vote and the courts are corrupted.
Fix these foundations, and the American people will do the rest.
