As usual, Donald Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday was filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and insults, though Democratic legislators did not cover themselves with glory, either, with one exception: freshman Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who effectively delivered the party’s rebuttal speech.
Democratic Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was removed from the House floor after refusing to stop heckling Trump—a violation of decorum worse than a single shout of “You Lie!” At Barack Obama in 2009 by Republican Rep. Joe Wilson (S.C) Wilson later apologized. Green did not.
Normally, opposition members would applaud the announcement of the arrest of a Taliban operative who planned the killing of 13 American servicemen or the appointment of a 13-year-old cancer survivor as an honorary Secret Service agent. Democrats did not applaud after any of Trump’s remarks.
To the contrary, one Democrat yelled at Trump, “Lies, lies, lies” and several others carried signs reading “Musk steals,” “Save Medicaid” and “No King.” Others walked out, especially when Trump said that Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history.” No student of history, Trump didn’t factor in Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan.
Slotkin, on the other hand, delivered a moderate, balanced response to Trump. Slotkin is a former CIA agent who served three tours in Iraq and carried Michigan, a swing state won by Trump.
She agreed with Trump that “we need more efficient government, and you want to cut waste.” But change doesn’t need to be chaotic or make us less safe, as she said Trump’s billionaire-friendly economic policies would.
Exhibiting bipartisanship, she praised Ronald Reagan’s version of “peace through strength.” After Trump’s Oval Office trashing of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, she said, “Ronald Reagan must be rolling in his grave.” Unlike Reagan, Trump “believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth.”
She said that with Trump choosing which rules he wants to follow and pitting Americans against one another, US democracy is at risk. Rather than yelling, she advised citizens not to tune out and to organize and hold their elected officials accountable.
She didn’t accuse Trump of lying, as other Democrat did. But Trump did lie—and often.
As one small example, he repeated a charge he’d made before when claiming that illegal immigrant “murderers, rapists and mental patients” were “invading” America— that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had “taken over” Aurora, CO, and made it a “war zone.”
Aurora’s conservative Republican mayor Mike Coffman previously declared Trump’s charge “grossly exaggerated” and said gang activity was confined to one sub-standard apartment complex in the Denver suburb of 400,000 residents.
Various fact-checkers also have called out Trump’s statement that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had identified “hundreds of billions” of dollars of fraud,” but DOGE has claimed only $105 billion in savings and has itemized just $19.8 billion, not even proving it was fraudulent.
Similarly, Trump claimed that government databases listed millions of Social Security recipients over the age of 100, including some over 160 and one supposedly 360 years old.
He said that many of these individuals were still receiving benefits—evidence of “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud.” It’s a well-known fact that Social Security’s outdated computer system defaults to a reference point over 150 years ago and the agency pays no benefits to anyone over 115 years ago. Social Security’s inspector general said that false payments number in the tens of thousands not millions.
Fact-checkers called out yet other misstatements, such as Trump’s claim that he inherited “an economic catastrophe” from Joe Biden. Trump claimed that more Americans say the country is headed in the right direction than say wrong direction. Actually, a CNN poll shows it’s 45% “wrong” and 35% “right.” And he claimed historic numbers of illegal immigrant deportations when more took place in the 1960s.
He claimed once again that the US has given Ukraine $350 billion in aid, far more than Europeans have provided. Germany’s Kiel Institute, keeping close track of aid flows, counters that the US has supplied $119 billion and European nations, $138 billion.
But, politically speaking, probably his most important misstatement concerned tariffs. He said “tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again. And it’s happening. And it will happen rather quickly. There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re ok with that. It won’t be much.”
Well maybe, but the overwhelming consensus of economists is that the tariffs—25% on all imports from Canada and Mexico, 20% on Chinese, 25% on aluminum and steel from anywhere and “reciprocal” tariffs matching what other countries charge US exports—will be paid by American companies and passed on to consumers, fueling inflation.
Trump has triggered a trade war with other countries. Canada, China and Mexico have/will impose tariffs on the US, hurting US manufacturers and farmers. No sooner had Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico taken effect (on Tuesday) than (on Thursday) he paused some of them.
Though previous pauses led to jumps in the stock market, imposition of the tariffs rattled Wall Street, apparently because of traders’ uncertainty. They seem to think that since Trump is so wedded to tariffs, the pauses won’t last long.
Congress’s Joint Economic Committee just released a report predicting that Trump’s tariffs will cost the average family between $1,600 and $2,000 a year for commodities ranging from electronics to clothing, cars, gasoline and food.
If that happens, Trump will have failed to repair one of the two key issues that got him elected. If Democrats don’t hand him weaknesses he can exploit, Trump’s wholly-owned Republican Party should suffer significant losses in the 2026 mid-term election. Given how slavishly they support him, they’ll deserve it.
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Excellent piece, Mort, thanks. Let’s hope that “the Dem’s don’t give him weaknesses to exploit,” something they have proven remarkably adept at doing.
Democracy dies in decorum. Mort. Al Green spoke the truth. Trump and Musk have no mandate to slash Medicaid funding. People will die if they do. Is there some “moderate” or “measured” or “bipartisan” or “pragmatic” way to express that, so that people will get the message, and recoil in horror from the consequences of these acts, without giving you “centrist” lot the vapors? Is Al Green to apologize, seriously? Do you really mean to claim that it’s more important that he do, when lives are literally at stake?
This insistence on propriety at the expense of all else, even sick people’s very lives, from our self-imagined “thought leaders,” is what’s killing this country, at a time when what we need the most is “The tea is in the harbor.”
Sure, there are ways to express these positions. There are also ways to strike a pose. Think Green got us anywhere with that?
At the moment, doesn’t our only faint hope for Washington DC, lie with the Republicans in the House and Senate?
Some of them have a clue how much harm there is in this, to the nation and to the world. If they cut loose, there’s at least a faint hope that they could do something about it. At the moment it looks like they’re paralyzed, with fear or something, and their voters have to step up and push them. People who voted for their Republican representative, and probably for Trump, have to break the spell. The only hope.
Democrats can help, or they can make it worse. Even if we’re just talking about the longer game, where we wait it out for two years, I think if things continue this way, the Democratic party has a good chance to come back and take a solid majority, but there’s a risk that they won’t, and anyway it will be far too late.
Maybe America’s worst affliction today is a lack of respect. Not a reliable quality in the American at best, but at pathological lows today. What happens then – is what’s happening now. I don’t know that there’s a way out – it isn’t something you can demand, or promise, and endemic disrespect is a valuable element for some of the factions pushing public opinion, but we can recognize its value and try to earn it. Decorum might be a small, ineffectual part of that, but it isn’t nothing.
Are you advocating that we respect people who want to slash Medicaid benefits for the poorest to enable tax cuts for the richest? You can. I won’t.
No, I’m not.
The president is obviously mentally ill, seriously ill. His action today, canceling $400 million in payments to Columbia University, his vow yesterday to open US Forest Service held lands for timber harvesting via executive action, his repeated flip flops on tariffs … these are proof of his unfitness for office. Does no one in the House or Senate have any means to remove him from office?
I don’t understand the reluctance of refusing to call him a liar. Would that Nancy Pelosi were House Speaker again; she had the guts to call him out.