Trump's First Joint Congressional Address, Recapped
The first joint address of Congress in President Trump's second term was a regurgitation of his biggest talking points on the campaign trail.
As I am writing this, Donald Trump just wrapped up his first congressional address since his reelection. And it was everything you would expect. Using it as a soundboard to tout all the supposed achievements his administration has done, it was, at times, a regurgitation of his campaign’s biggest talking points.
Lets break it down.
The biggest talking points of Trump’s was the economy and the border. The economy especially, with him touting the supposed benefits of his tariffs, and saying that the US will respond tit for tat with tariffs if their products aren’t made in the USA:
"If you don't make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff, and in some cases, a rather large one," he mysaid. "Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades and now it's our turn to start using them against those other countries. On average, the European Union, China, Brazil, India, Mexico and Canada — have you heard of them? — and countless other nations charge us tremendously higher tariffs than we charge them. It's very unfair.
Now, even though I am not necessarily an economist, I'm pretty sure a majority of us can say that Donald, your tariffs did not work. They sent the markets into literal free fall, with the Dow dropping by 700 points yesterday. I don't know why this is being used as a smoking gun, like oh we saved the economy, guys! when you are sending it into utter free fall. Blaming Joe Biden for handing him an economic catastrophe, (though most would argue the one that Trump has started would be worse) he blamed his predecessor for the prices of eggs, saying:
Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg prices out of control. And we are working hard to get it back down.
(He isn’t.)
However, he also talked at length about the border, boasting his supposed achievements, talking about how Biden was supposedly flooding our streets with hundreds of “drug dealers”, saying:
Just a regurgitation of campaign talking points here. Saying that Biden was letting in hundreds of thousands of migrants all throughout his administration, when the highest point of arrests in the whole administration was 250,000.
He thanked his border czar, Tom Homan for his help of “cleaning out our cities”.
But these two things weren’t the only things Trump mentioned at length. He also used it as a soundboard to scream his bigoted, hateful transphobic ideology from the rooftops. Again reiterating the same line he said during his inauguration saying,
But it gets worse, somehow. He then boasts about the trans sports ban executive order that he signed talking how he “got men out of women’s sports”, repeating yet another transphobic talking point, and then points out in the gallery, Payton McNabb, a North Carolinian high school athlete who got injured during a volleyball match. He continues to say that any school who is keeping trans female athletes on the team will lose federal funding, to raucous applause.
He then continues on to mention even more supposed examples of trans women “dominating” women sports (even though there is no scientific evidence to validate that claim) mentioning women’s boxing, in a clear shot towards Imane Khalif, an Algerian boxer, who was accused of being a trans women by the right, when she’s actually a cis woman, mentioning weight lifting, track, and swimming and cycling. Again, there is no scientific evidence that exists that even comes remotely close to proving this, so just spouting baseless bigoted and hateful comments, on national television.
Dear God.
He then thanks Elon Musk for his supposed hard work with the Department of Government Efficiency and its rampant cuts to the government. Listing out the supposed waste as:
$22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens
$8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, of which he says “nobody has ever heard of”
and another $8 million on “making mice transgender”
just to name a few.
First off “making mice transgender”? Are you serious? That’s not what the experiment was referring to. I swear to God, is this mans bigotry that blinding?
But back to the speech itself, he continues to go on and on about the supposed “achievements” Elon and his team have so far, naming programs that were ID’d for “waste” and cut. I will do myself, and you all a favor and spare you the details. It was bad.
Trump then goes into talking about Social Security and how there are people as old as 360, who are still supposedly being paid by Social Security, and how that fraud is stealing money from the elderly:
Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don’t know any of them. I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly. 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139, 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149, and money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now. In fact, Pam, good luck, good luck. You’re going to find it. But a lot of money is paid out to people, because it just keeps getting paid and paid, and nobody does, and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country, 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159 and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.
Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229, one person between the age of 240 and 249 and one person is listed at 360 years of age — more than 100 years, more than 100 years older than our country. But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty, by slashing all of the fraud, waste and theft. And theft we can find. We will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families.
Now, It could very well be that those people that Trump is talking about, they just forgot to be removed from the Social Security database, and they kept getting paid.
It could also just be a full blown error in the system. There are explanations that can be used to justify this. Instead of considering this, Trump just labels it under “fraud”.
The final thing I want to mention from his speech is the Gold Card. And before you ask, no it is not a new credit card tier. It is, as Trump puts it, “like the green card, but better and more sophisticated.” For the low low price of $5 million, you can buy a pathway to citizenship. And Trump is positioning this, as a Elite status card of sorts, With him saying the Gold Card would be for “the most successful job-creating people from all over the world”. and adding that they would still need to pay American taxes.
And using this to say that he will drain the National Debt this way and balance out the budget, while getting rid of “criminals, killers, traffickers and child predators” (I’m not touching that pile of horseshit with a ten ft pole), saying:
“So while we take out the criminals, killers, traffickers and child predators who are allowed to enter our country under the open border policy of these people, the Democrats, the Biden administration, the open border, insane policies that you’ve allowed to destroy our country, we will now bring in brilliant, hardworking job-creating people. They’re going to pay a lot of money, and we’re going to reduce our debt with that money.”
That is about all of Trump’s speech I can mentally handle talking about. If I were to go any further, I’d start to fear for my own sanity at that point.
What we saw last night was a President who is incredibly uninformed, unfit and hateful, take the stage and blast his hateful remarks from the rooftops. And for long time too, with his speech clocking in at around 100 minutes, making it the longest presidential address in six decades.
That was not only painful to sit through, but should show us to take Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large, no matter how batshit insane it is, to lambast against it and use our First Amendment rights to do this.
Because inaction, especially now, helps no one.