Less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term of office as president, he delivered a 99-minute, heavily partisan speech to a joint session of the Congress – and the nation and the world via television and online streaming.
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Technically, this was not one of those constitutionally mandated, annual “State of the Union” speeches, given the fact that he had only recently been inaugurated as president. But a speech like this effectively should serve much the same purposes. These include: laying claim to governmental victories won; listing programmes to be advanced in the future; and at least attempting to reach across the partisan divide to nurture a sense of common national purpose and unity. After surviving an assassination attempt, Trump himself boasted that he had been anointed by God to carry out his plan.
If, in the first task, Trump appears to have been successful in staking a claim to a roster of victories in his first 43 days as president, for the latter two categories his speech notably was not. As one Washington correspondent noted for us after listening to it, in a word, it was “atrocious”.
Lustily applauded by his Republican Party colleagues and at least a significant share of the electorate, according to instant polling, the speech was very heavy on self-praise – and for Elon Musk and his team of 20-year-olds busily hacking and slicing their way through the government’s ranks of people and programmes. The irony of Trump’s announcement that the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats being over and then simultaneously applauding the unelected Musk’s wild rampage through the government, is pretty heavy going.
U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for his speech to a joint session of Congress as Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) holds a sign reading "This is not normal" at the U.S. Capitol on March 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump was expected to address Congress on his early achievements of his presidency and his upcoming legislative agenda. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
In his speech he made a great deal about those disputed cuts (the Musk DOGE team keeps changing its totals as well as what is included in their supposed cuts – including in their total programmes that had been cancelled during George W Bush’s tenure).
There was a spirited defence that Trump’s new tariffs will lead to a revival of the country’s purported golden age (the ghost of the 19th century president, William McKinley, continues to loom large in Trump’s brain). There were also threats of reciprocal tariffs in April whenever he adjudges the imposition of unfair tariffs by others.
In the background, once the first new round of tariffs had been implemented, there were sharp declines in the nation’s stock markets. (The tariffs have theoretically been in response to the illegal export of fentanyl across American borders.) And these tariffs have been regardless of warnings from the vast majority of economists in the nation that the Trump tariffs are heading towards the economic chaos and contraction that came from the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. Trump admitted that “there will be a little disturbance” from the tariffs but sunny days are coming. To this viewer that was a moment of flashback to Trump’s dismissal of the Covid pandemic as something that would be over in a few months.
Or as commentator Ishaan Tharoor noted for the Washington Post: “In his incendiary Tuesday evening address to a joint session of Congress, Trump said ‘we’ve been ripped off for decades by every country on Earth and we will not let that happen any longer’. He complained about the ‘large deficits’ in trade with the US’s neighbours and waved away widespread fears of an economic downturn as a ‘little disturbance’.”
Soon enough, perhaps even by next week, some economists predict, the costs of many familiar products, including agricultural items, will start to rise as a result of those tariffs. Some commentators have already noted that, if price inflation rises significantly, that applause line of “a little disturbance” could have real impacts on the mid-term elections for Congress in 2026.
And there was also the triumphal announcement of what appeared to be a version of modified surrender on the part of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who had issued a letter saying he was ready for the minerals deal and negotiations to end the conflict. (Some are noting there has been no parallel announcement from the Russian leader, let alone a public promise to withdraw from the occupied provinces. Concurrently, the Trump administration had put into effect a halt on US arms shipments to Ukraine, despite their having been funded and obligated by Congress earlier.)
Meanwhile, Trump announced he has magically brought back free speech protections, even as he had just issued threats to universities and colleges that funds would be cut if they permit protests, and there have been decisions to remove selected “woke” triggering words from government documents and websites.
The bottom line, of course, is that this speech, despite its crowd-pleasing, smirking texture in some ways, also included those lachrymose shoutouts to private citizen guests that have become the standard. For Trump these included families of victims of violence or deaths committed by an undocumented alien, or a freed prisoner, now released from trumped-up arrests and incarceration in Russia.
Maybe it is time for a moratorium on the continuing escalation of these shoutouts in presidential addresses before Congress, given the bread-and-circuses approach these moments now provoke. They originally began with Ronald Reagan honouring Lenny Skutnick who dove into the freezing Potomac River to rescue victims of the Florida plane crash. But subsequent versions are now standard punctuation marks in presidential addresses. Enough already.
While Trump is proposing zero income taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security payments, absent real cuts in government spending (beyond those phantom savings from the Musk cuts), the federal deficit will grow, increasing borrowing costs for the government.
In response to the president’s speech, for their countermessage, the Democrats reached to their bench, calling on newly elected Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin to deliver their party’s rebuttal. Slotkin had previously been a member of the House of Representatives, and earlier had served as a Middle East analyst for both Republican and Democratic presidents, including three tours of duty for the CIA in Iraq and acting in policy advisory roles in the Department of Defense and the White House. She grew up on her family’s farm in Michigan before she went off to university.
Senator Elissa Slotkin rehearses the Democratic response to US President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in Wyandotte, Michigan, on 4 March 2025. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Paul Sancya / Pool Image)
Slotkin was composed, articulate and crisp, with an everyman/woman touch – and an appeal to a broad bipartisanship – that surely must be emulated by other Democrats, given the country’s predominantly centrist political positioning. Based on this national “audition”, Slotkin should be given – or take – an increasingly visible role in making her party’s case to the nation – in place of the greybeards usually stepping forward or the more strident, hard-left voices so frequently being quoted. Sooner or later, the “great whisperer” is going to begin mentioning her as a plausible candidate for vice-president in 2028, if her upward trajectory continues.
To be fair, the president’s speech has obviously consolidated his favourability within his MAGA base (although virtually nothing he does could lower it). Nevertheless, this speech gained instant favourability ratings at a somewhat lower level than his previous State of the Union speeches during his first term.
Read more: Middle East crisis
Read more: War in Ukraine
As a result, beyond his continuing slash-and-burn attacks on “wokeism”, the real success of the Trump presidency hangs on the broader economic and especially consumer price effects of his tariffs, on the outcome of the Trump peace offensives in Ukraine and the Middle East, and how the disruptions of the Muskian scorched-earth attacks on the government bureaucracy play out. This latter effort will be weighed and measured by how ordinary citizens get – or can no longer receive – the services from the government they have come to expect and depend upon. DM