When Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, he assumed one of his favorite roles: Troller in Chief.
In a fiery, more than 90-minute speech, Trump converted a presidential ritual into a campaign stemwinder. But this time, he wasn’t running against a single opponent. He was twisting the knife into a Democratic Party that has struggled to find its footing in Trump 2.0. “America is back!” he said at the beginning. “We’re just getting started.” To half the chamber, it surely sounded like a threat.
Throughout the evening, Trump needled Democrats on everything from his first six weeks in office to his electoral victory in November. He spoke of his “swift and unrelenting action” since taking office, including imposing stiff tariffs, signing boundary-pushing executive orders, cutting off aid to Ukraine, and letting billionaire Elon Musk loose to slash government spending. Trump berated his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, for the woes bedeviling the country. He openly mocked his rivals, calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahantas.” And he relished reclaiming the White House in the face of four criminal indictments. “How did that work out?” he asked Democrats.
It was both a form of ridicule and strategy. Trump, still smarting from the resistance he faced in his first term, plainly likes to taunt his adversaries, especially after vanquishing them. But Trump’s rhetoric was also an attempt to depict the Democrats as obstructionists, signalling to the nation that he’s confronting them on behalf of his agenda.
Some Democrats helped make his point. The evening began with an outburst. As Trump was taking a victory lap, saying the American people delivered him a historic mandate for change, Democratic Rep. Al Green interrupted him by yelling “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” Republicans fired back. “Sit your ass down!” one yelled at him. Eventually, Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the Sergeant at Arms to remove Green from the gallery.
To some, the skirmish was symptomatic of deteriorating standards of Washington decorum. For others, it was an appropriate response to Trump bulldozing the norms of governance. “I’ll accept the punishment,” Green told reporters after the incident. “But it’s worth it to let people know that there are some of us who are going to stand up against this president’s desire to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.”
Either way, it triggered memories of an earlier era. In 2009, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson created a firestorm for screaming “You lie!” to President Barack Obama during a Congressional address on healthcare. Today, such an outburst is considered anodyne. Members have hissed and hollered at Presidents of the opposing party in recent years with casual regularity. Rarely, though, do they escalate to the point of a member getting kicked out.
The episode didn’t slow Trump down. He barreled ahead, blaming Biden for the economy and the border. “As you know,” he said, “we inherited, from the last Administration, an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” In fact, Biden handed off a solid economy: unemployment was down to 4%; inflation was coming down, and GDP was going up. Since Trump has taken office, the price of eggs and beef have increased, and the stock market has tumbled in response to Trump’s tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico.
Citing the decrease in border crossings on his watch, Trump made fun of a bipartisan immigration bill that he effectively killed last year when he told MAGA members in Congress to oppose it. Many suspected he wanted to prevent Biden from clinching a victory going into the election. “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.”
While Democrats in the House chamber held signs that said “Musk Steals,” Trump touted the Tesla founder’s cost-cutting operation, the Department of Government Efficiency, which has waged a coup against government agencies and fired thousands of federal workers. “The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” the President said.
Intermittently, he weaved members of his cabinet into his speech to trigger liberal sensitivities. “Over 130,000 people according to the social security databases are aged over 160 years old,” Trump claimed, before looking toward Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. “We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.” He also thanked Democrats for voting unanimously in favor of their former colleague, Marco Rubio, for Secretary of State.
But that was a rare cordial moment in an otherwise acrimonious series of exchanges. To hammer his point harder, Trump told the American people that Democrats would always oppose him for opposition’s sake. “I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud,” Trump said. “I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded, and these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.” Republicans erupted in big belly laughs.
Before Trump was finished, many Democrats had left the hall. “There’s only so much bullshit a person can tolerate,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager–Dove wrote on social media after walking out. With scores of empty seats on one side of the aisle, Trump was unapologetic, vowing to steam ahead with his plans to fundamentally remake Washington. “The people elected me to do the job,” Trump said, “and I’m doing it.”
