Trump Tells Congress 'America Is Back' While Democrats Protest

Never one to be overly concerned with niceties, the president delivered a particularly bracing speech. If one of his objectives was to further bend Republicans to his will, it was effective theater. As Democrats sat sullenly on their hands, the GOP half of the room rose to applaud repeatedly even as he extolled his tariffs that launched looming trade wars and tanked the stock market. Trump welcomed an expansion of territory, vowing to reclaim the Panama Canal and predicting that Greenland would soon be in the possession of the United States. He vowed to erase and make a faint memory of all that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had done. It sounded at times as if Trump believed he was on a mission from God. In fact, he said as much.

When Trump told the chamber that the Almighty had spared his life during the first assassination attempt last summer so that he could make America great again, an aghast Nancy Pelosi was spotted mouthing to nearby Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, “Oh my God.” The former House Speaker was not the only Democrat baited by the president. But Pelosi kept her consternation quiet. Rep. Al Green did not, and he gave the White House a gift.

Some of the details in Trump’s speech were new but many of the promises were not. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson observed two days before the speech, Trump is “doing what he said on the campaign trail he would do.” This ostensibly includes trolling, which the president has perfected into an art.

Enter Al Green. Waving a cane, the pony-tailed 78-year-old Texas Democrat delivered a performance reminiscent of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, who interrupted former President Barack Obama’s first address to Congress more than a decade ago to shout, “You lie!” When Green began yelling that Trump did not have a mandate to make changes to Medicare, Johnson had the sergeant-at-arms remove him from the chamber.

It was a gifted pretext. Ten minutes later, Trump bemoaned his recent revelation that there was “absolutely nothing I can say” to make Democrats “stand, smile, or applaud.” An economic boom, an end to crime, or even a cure of “the most devastating disease,” he said, could not induce their applause. “It’s very sad, and it shouldn’t be this way,” the president said before inviting the Democrats seated before him, “for just this one night,” to join him “in celebrating so many incredible wins for America.”

Democratic women in the chamber wore pink in protest. Many held up black placards with white letters that read “Save Medicare,” and “Musk Steals,” and “False.” Not content with just one phrase, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib scribbled on a dry-erase board to offer handwritten rebuttals in real-time. But overall, despite the invitation, what Democrats barely did was applaud. In the eyes of the White House, who highlighted the Democratic reactions, it was bait, set, match.

The president did not announce new policies; he encouraged lawmakers to catch up. He called on Congress to codify into law his executive orders that made the murder of a federal police officer punishable by the death penalty and that cut off taxpayer funding of gender transition surgeries for minors. Republicans were happy to applaud both. Like the rest of the country, Congress has mostly been observers of the second season of Trump as their legislative efforts advance at the regular glacial pace.

Disappointing those who had hoped that exile would temper him, Trump has instead used all available levers of power to remake the government and root out what he sees as fraud in the federal bureaucracy. He has leaned on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency in this quest. The billionaire entrepreneur, dressed in a coat and tie in lieu of his trademark T-shirt and baseball cap, waved from the gallery as the president ticked off canceled foreign aid and diversity initiatives.

There were Republican annoyances from the previous administration such as the $22 billion from Health and Human Services to provide housing for illegal immigrants, as well as the $45 million for so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Burma. Then there was the bizarre $10 million circumcision program in Mozambique and an $8 million program the president said was “for making mice transgender.” All told, the now-eliminated programs that Trump listed added up to $24 billion.

Musk’s DOGE team has marched through the administrative state. One of his recent stops, at the Social Security Administration, made Democrats furious and Republicans nervous. Musk recently called it “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” though the president insists he won’t touch its benefits for seniors. He has said, however, that he will root out abuse and fraud.

“Over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are aged over 160 years old,” Trump said as he ran through the rolls, repeating a line that his own acting Social Security Administrator Lee Dudek has said is indicative of sloppy record keeping due to out-of-date accounting systems. Those individuals remain on the rolls, per a statement by Dudek, because their records do not include a death certificate, not because they are necessarily still receiving benefits. All the same, a 2024 Inspector General report found nearly $5 billion in excessive payments the previous year.

Then again, Trump quipped, referencing his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we may “have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.”

The White House argues that nagging inflation is the cursed inheritance of the previous occupant of the Oval Office, who Trump called “the worst president in American history.” The administration formula in miniature for whipping inflation: oil and austerity.

The president insisted that the best way to reduce inflation was to reduce the cost of energy, touting the National Energy Emergency he signed on his first day in office and a “very powerful program – it’s called ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!” Beyond reducing gas prices, he continued, the other step was “ending the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars.”

The president reiterated his call for “tax cuts for everybody”: an end to taxes on tips and overtime, on Social Security benefits, on car loans for automobiles made in America. He also pressed for a business tax cut that would allow for the deduction of capital investments, on items like new equipment, and promised to backdate the deduction to January of this year. He did not, however, weigh in on just exactly how Congress should achieve such a sweeping reform to the tax code.

Trump spoke also of the trade wars roiling markets and worrying consumers as tariffs against Canada, China, and Mexico take place. These tariffs would make “America rich again,” he insisted, though acknowledging that it would take time and dismissing market jitters as “a little disturbance.” He warned that reciprocal tariffs were indeed coming on April 2 as promised: “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.”

The goal is to protect American workers, he said, and to bolster his argument, the president pointed to a steel worker in the gallery from Decatur, Alabama, a man named Jeff Denard who worked the same job for 27 years, served as a volunteer firefighter, and fostered 40 kids in that time. “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump insisted, “they’re about protecting the soul of our country.”

The White House had hoped that a minerals deal with Ukraine would serve as a cornerstone for the speech. Trump has long said he wants his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. The deal was intended to lay the foundation for peace and to bring the Ukraine war to an end. It blew up, instead, with spectacular fashion last week in the Oval Office.

Trump struck a conciliatory tone when he read from what he called “an important letter from President Zelensky of Ukraine.” The note, which was posted on X earlier that morning, expressed exactly what the White House was looking for, namely cooperation and submission to Trump’s vision for ending the conflict. “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 “at any time and in any convenient format.”

Trump described this as welcome news and also heralded his recent conversations with the aggressor in that war, Russian President Vladimar Putin. He told lawmakers that he had spoken with Putin in recent days and that Russia was “ready for peace.” Said the president, “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.”

His focus stateside remains on curbing illegal immigration. Trump spoke of ongoing efforts to deport criminal aliens, noting how his administration designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations and his signature of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention of all illegal immigrants charged with a violent crime. The family of Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was murdered, watched from the balcony as the president assured them that she “did not die in vain.”

Encounters at the southern border have plummeted after Trump reinstated the remain in Mexico policy and as his border czar Tom Homan focuses initial deportation efforts on violent aliens. “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation to secure the border.” Trump said. “But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”

He has vowed to launch the greatest deportation effort in American history and to accelerate his efforts, the president called on Congress to deliver more funding for mass deportations. The White House sees this as going hand in hand with the president’s pledge to return law and order.

Trump called for a new crime bill that would increase consequences for repeat offenders while also giving new protections for police officers. This provided an opportunity for heart-warming showmanship as the president called out DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old boy diagnosed with brain cancer who dreams of being a police officer. At this, Sean Curran, the new Secret Service director, appeared in the gallery to make the young man an honorary federal agent.

It was one of the rare moments during the evening that a handful of Democrats applauded. They have struggled to arrive at a cohesive anti-Trump message since former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss, a fact reflected by New Mexico Democrat Rep. Melanie Stansbury’s decision to stand in the aisle as the president entered with a sign that read “This is not normal.” But after a decade of Trump and after a GOP popular vote victory, this is the new normal whether Democrats choose to accept it or not.

The job of offering a rebuttal fell to Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin who argued there’s more that unites than divides Americans, after Trump needled the opposition and Democrats sat stone-faced for nearly two hours. She spoke for little more than 10 minutes without the bravado of the president, insisting that despite politics, most Americans generally agree on three things: “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.”

Slotkin was plainspoken. Trump, “entertaining.” That is the word most used by viewers of the speech according to a snap poll conducted by CBS News/YouGov. It skewed heavily GOP with 51% of viewers identifying as Republican, 27% independent, and just 21% Democratic, but the results are sure to delight the White House all the same.

For his part, Trump was happy to survey on Tuesday night what he had wrought in just his first six weeks. He teased that more was to come, concluding that “it will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”