17 thoughts on Trump's big speech
He said a lot of things that weren't true
Trump often says things that aren’t true.
All politicians, I’m sure, make remarks in major speeches that don’t fully hold up to scrutiny. But it’s genuinely very unusual — very odd — to stand up before a joint session of Congress and tell easily debunked lies about things like right track/wrong track polling or approval numbers.
Donald Trump likes to be seen as strong, as a winner, as a domineering figure. Democrats like to portray Trump as a threat, a menace, a uniquely malign force. These two tendencies play off each other and feed into each other, and we’ve never seen that more clearly than in some of the sophomoric protest measures House backbenchers took during Trump’s speech.
The boring truth about Trump is that while he’s more popular than he was during his first term, he’s less popular than any prior president at this stage of a presidency.
The GOP has an extremely narrow margin in the House of Representatives and they are struggling to get a legislative agenda put together. Members keep saying they don’t want to cut Medicaid, yet their budget resolution clearly cuts Medicaid.
The decline in the stock market since Trump’s election is not particularly large or noteworthy, but it is genuinely extraordinary to see this kind of market reaction to a new GOP administration whose main policy ideas are to install business-friendly regulators and cut corporate taxes. You have to be making some extraordinarily bad trade policy choices to get that result. There’s been years of speculation that Trump’s trade instincts would be curbed by market reaction, but last night he presented himself as entirely undeterred and eager to levy more tariffs. An extended portion of this speech was dedicated to promising higher taxes on groceries!
Did you know they don’t consider it an official “State of the Union Address” when it’s given during the president’s first year in office? The idea is that they haven’t been in office long enough to be updating Congress on the state of the union. But, presidents don’t want to give up the opportunity to do a big formal prime time speech. So, we get a Year One Joint Session Address, and then every other year of a presidency it’s a State of the Union. This seems pretty dumb — we should call them all State of the Union addresses. As long as all our norms are crumbling, can we just fix this?
Speaking of obvious untruths, right at the top of the speech, Trump said, “We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four or eight years.”
This was greeted with thunderous applause from the Republicans in the chamber, but it’s just clearly not true. I don’t even mean this as a knock on Trump. You just obviously don’t accomplish that much in a few weeks! And, indeed, Trump has not accomplished very much. Because he’s been in office for 43 days.
The whole speech was full of stuff like that: wild, obviously false claims about the extent of his popular vote win and his mandate. He started saying that under Biden, we had the worst inflation in over 40 years (true), but then he couldn’t help but start lying and said it was the worst inflation ever. He loves lying!
There was a funny moment when Trump said he’s reopening power plants that Biden closed and the cameras were already on Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and you could see him looking confused.
The best part of the speech, by far, was when he ran down the list of goofy-sounding grants that DOGE has cancelled. It was a huge mistake of Joe Biden not to ever make this kind of effort to identify and cancel small-bore signs of waste.
The worst part of the speech came immediately afterwards, when he claimed completely falsely that Social Security is paying out huge sums of money in fraudulent claims. This is completely untrue. The spreadsheet problems he’s pointing to are interesting — the US government does not have a federal death registry, so these problems arise — but it has nothing to do with big picture fiscal issues. Again, he’s just lying wildly.
I could keep writing in this vein about lies and how I’m frustrated with lies and lying, but what’s the point? He got huge applause for a promise to balance the federal budget, and he’s also trying pushing for a gigantic multi-trillion dollar tax cut. In the speech, he didn’t just call for TCJA to be made permanent, he reiterated his calls for no tax on tips and no tax on overtime and pushed for a brand new tax cut on interest payments on car loans.
The problem with lying is that it doesn’t actually set you up to govern.
For all the braggadocio, Trump’s legislative agenda is in peril. Last night’s speech was a big opportunity to bring clarity to the budget situation, to set priorities, to rally Republicans around goals, and he just absolutely did not do any of that. He said he wants more money for the military and for deportations and also to cut taxes and also to balance the budget, and then he didn’t say anything about Medicaid or any other way to do that. It was the longest State of the Union ever, and he had nothing to say on one of the most critical issues on the table.
The really nasty partisan tone was new for this stage, different even from Trump’s first term. Conservatives seem to love this, but fundamentally, it’s what prevents him from ever becoming more popular or finding a way to secure big legislative wins. One view is that maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe we’re in a new era where trolling and executive orders is all that matters. But I am skeptical!
Why do Democrat Congressional members in deep blue districts seem to lack the part of the brain that grasps that they can only garner power if, with every action, they take into account their Democratic colleagues in purple and red districts?
The tariff issue is so obviously a problem of wanting his cake and to eat it too, among other problems. He wants to use it as a stick to get what he wants out of our allies, and he says he’s getting just that, but he also wants the revenue from the tariffs and competitive advantages for US manufacturing.
But our allies aren’t going to keep responding to a stick that Trump intends to beat them with regardless of their willingness to acquiesce to his unrelated demands! I think they know a deal with Trump is never a deal, and for now they are willing to do small things that are meaningless to see how long that pacifies him. But they also are preparing in the background to call his bluff or just get the tariffs going because they know he’ll be back threatening in a month, and a month after that, and a month after that regardless of what they agree to now.
Taking it back to the speech, this is going to be a big problem for Trump sooner rather than later. He keeps promising to be able to spend tariff money and get what he wants by threatening tariffs. Eventually he’s going to have to deal with the failure on one side or the other to deliver.