Trump speech highlights: President’s partisan address celebrates his victory and deepens divisions with Democrats

DNC Chair Ken Martin released the following statement:

Tonight, every Republican got out of their seats and gave a standing ovation for skyrocketing costs, economic freefall, and the next American recession — brought to you by Donald Trump. I dare every single one of these Republicans who blindly applauded for Trump to go home and meet their voters face-to-face. But they won’t, because they know that the Republican tax scam to take money out of the pockets of working people to give trillions in handouts to the rich will cost them their jobs.

“Donald Trump says he loves a lot of people. He loves farmers so much that he killed their contracts and is raising their fertilizer costs. He loves seniors so much that he’ll shutter their nursing homes and go after Social Security. He loves young people so much that he’s going to defund public schools and take away their health care. He loves American families so much that he’s making it more expensive to put food on the table and harder to pay for child care.

“Instead of using his Joint Address to offer solutions or rehabilitate his image for the American people who — after only six weeks — have lost confidence in his presidency, he instead rehashed old grievances and evaded responsibility.”

Eric Garcia writes:

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.

Read on...

Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York, chair of the Hispanic Caucus, gave a rebuttal in Spanish, criticizing President Donald Trump for not doing enough to bring prices down and instead signing orders such as changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

“For the past 45 days, we’ve seen a president who acts more like a king, more like a monarch, than a president.”

Espaillat claimed in his Spanish rebuttal that the Trump administration created the Department of Government Efficiency to cut essential programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and benefits for veterans.

“President Trump and Elon Musk want to trick you.”

The Social Security Administration is preparing to lay off at least 7,000 people from its workforce of 60,000, according to a person familiar with the agency’s plans who is not authorized to speak publicly. It’s not clear how the layoffs would impact the benefits of the 72.5 million Social Security beneficiaries.

One of the lawsuits against the Department of Government Efficiency has been amended after President Donald Trump said in his speech tonight that Elon Musk is the “head” of DOGE.

The White House has previously gone out of its way in court filings to say that Musk was not, in fact, in charge...

Here’s more on that:

Rep Brandon Gill (R-TX) said of Rep Al Green’s (D-TX) protest:

It was another disgraceful political stunt. This was a joint address to Congress, and the president deserves respect. He's not going to get it from the other side of the aisle. As President Trump pointed out tonight, he could cure cancer and nobody on the other side of the aisle would stand and clap.

Richard Hall writes:

In the six weeks since Donald Trump has returned to the White House, he has empowered an angry billionaire to fire tens of thousands of people across multiple government departments, alienated historic allies in Europe and Canada, abandoned Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, and wiped out all stock market gains of the year with tariffs against America’s neighbors.

Or as the president himself called it in his first address to Congress of his second term, “nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.”

It’s a perk of the job that the president gets to write his own performance review, but even for a man not known for his modesty, this was a generous one.

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Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) said of President Donald Trump’s speech to The Independent: “I thought it was fantastic.”

Asked about the protests from Democratic lawmakers, he said:

I really wish that they would grow up. You had an eight-year-old young man who is a brain cancer survivor who wanted to be a law enforcement official who was made an honorary member of the Secret Service and held up by his father, and the democrats refused to clap for that...that's absolutely shameful and despicable. Those things are beyond politics.

My Democrat colleagues decide to throw a temper tantrum when we're talking about peace in Ukraine and world peace, and they don't clap for peace, they want endless war. It doesn't make any sense. I can't believe I spent my entire adult life in war, and I don't want to go to war anymore. I want peace in the world. And my Democrat colleagues can't clap for peace, that's pathetic and they should be ashamed of themselves — or they should join the Ukrainian army and fight.