What to know
- President Donald Trump delivered his first joint congressional address of his second term tonight — the longest one ever at roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes — in the U.S. House chamber in Washington.
- Trump touted his administration's aggressive cuts to the federal workforce and so-called America First approach to foreign policy. The speech followed Trump and Vice President JD Vance's stunning display of hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday.
- Some Democrats boycotted the speech, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gerry Connolly. Sen. Elissa Slotkin gave the Democrats' response to the address, with Sen. Bernie Sanders delivering his own.
Democrats would be wise to adopt Slotkin's straightforward approach
Jen Psaki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:
Delivering a response to a president’s joint address to Congress is the worst assignment in politics. But Slotkin’s speech tonight was about as good as it gets.
It was full of messaging and talking points Democrats would be smart to adopt. Slotkin said, “Americans made it clear that prices are too high.” That stuck out to me. That was something Democrats didn’t want to admit leading up to November's election. They were not acknowledging what people were experiencing. That’s a major lesson the party must learn moving forward. Slotkin also asked, “Do [Trump's] plans actually help Americans get ahead?” That is direct and straightforward way to frame that question.
There’s often this question about whether Democrats need to find a celebrity or somebody who is outside of politics or somebody who has six million TikTok followers to appeal to voters. Slotkin is a mom from Michigan. I doubt she’s on TikTok. She’s just a pretty normal person who happens to be really smart and got elected to the Senate. That’s the kind of messaging that I think works with voters.
For Republicans and Trump, the volume is the point. Trump’s speech was full of chaos. Democrats shouldn’t play whack-a-mole. They need to get specific. Democrats can oppose everything Trump said but they have to pick something to focus on. One thousand flowers cannot bloom.
These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Trump's tellingly imbalanced address
Even if joint addresses to Congress aren’t exactly a State of the Union address, they share the same basic architecture. These speeches lay out a president’s priorities and demonstrate how much weight a president gives those priorities. And on that score, Trump’s address was — intentionally or not — quite revealing.
Tariffs and Ukraine seemed almost afterthoughts, which is remarkable in light of how those two issues have dominated recent news cycles. Culture war issues — immigration, crime and anti-trans policies — received the bulk of Trump’s time. Though the president mentioned balancing the budget and cutting taxes, he omitted any mention of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — programs he will have to cut to accomplish those goals.
Even Greenland got almost as much attention as, say, the price of eggs.
But after Trump’s tariffs set off two days of stock market declines, why would he want to talk about them? When his and Vice President JD Vance’s petulant behavior in the Oval Office Friday led to international condemnation, why would Trump dwell on it? And after Trump’s promise to bring down grocery prices “on Day One” has fallen apart, why wouldn’t he change the subject?
By contrast, immigration and attacks on diversity and trans Americans are well inside the comfort zone for Trump, the Republicans in attendance and his base. And unlike other presidential addresses, Trump ping-ponged between two topics, anti-trans hate and anti-immigrant hate.
His comfort (or lack thereof) also explains why Trump spent so much of the speech interacting with invited guests. Such gestures have been part of presidential addresses for decades, but they took up an unusually long portion of tonight’s address. The former “Apprentice” host seems more comfortable when he can fall back on made-for-TV moments engineered to enrage an audience or tug at its heartstrings.
The problem for the president and his party is that, as even he admitted, many Americans voted for him (or stayed home rather than voting Democrat) not because of immigration or anti-trans views, but because of the economy. Trump sidestepped that problem tonight. Republicans won’t be able to sidestep it when elections roll around again.
In Dems' response, Slotkin has good ideas for countering Trump
I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical when Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., began her response to Trump’s address when she chose to emphasize not just her background as a CIA officer, but the bipartisan household she grew up in.
“We had shared values that were bigger than any one party,” she said, describing a political reality that no longer seems to exist. When coupled with her comments from November about Democrats needing to move beyond “identity politics,” I was concerned that she would fail to properly stress the needs of the moment that we’re living through.
But as she went on, while she definitely sounded like a standard center-left Democrat, Slotkin managed to do so in a way that felt more like a sincere expression of her values than a calculated attempt to win over suburban moderates.
Slotkin’s speech also managed to serve as a welcome reprieve to the reports we’ve seen of Democratic officials feeling fatigued by the pressure from their constituents to stand firmer in opposition to Trump’s consolidation of power.
Sen. Bernie Sanders rips Trump for what he didn’t talk about
The Vermont senator delivered his own response to Trump’s address tonight, criticizing the president for failing to talk about the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, the U.S.’ broken health care system, wealth inequality and climate change — “except, I guess, ‘drill baby drill,’” Sanders said. He slammed Trump for his proposed cuts to Medicaid, his attacks on Ukraine and DOGE’s mass layoffs across the federal government. Sanders also dedicated some of his speech to campaign finance reform, one of his longtime priorities.
Sanders ended his speech with a call to action:
Tonight's most beautiful moment was also its most tragic
Nicolle Wallace speaking on MSNBC moments ago:
If there was a moment tonight where your whole body could relax and you could celebrate, it should have been the moment when Trump shared the story of DJ Daniels, a 13-year-old cancer survivor who dreams of becoming a police officer. It was a genuinely beautiful moment.
But in the beauty of that child is the tragedy of the Trump presidency. We don’t know how DJ survived pediatric cancer, but it is likely he benefited from some sort of cancer research. And it is a fact that Trump’s massive cuts to government funding have put cancer research in jeopardy.
Trump also talked about wanting anyone who murdered a cop to receive the death penalty. But the president’s first action when he took office was to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, including those who violently assaulted cops.
There was a shallowness in what Trump said tonight. But I think it was also a lesson in finding one thing that can let yourself feel. I let myself feel joy about DJ and I hope he lives the life he wants to live.
These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Maddow fact-checks key lines from Trump's address
Hardship is on the horizon
The biggest takeaway from tonight’s address — amid the cruel jokes and shameless self-congratulation noted by my colleague Hayes Brown — was Trump’s acknowledgment that his economic policies are going to bring some pain for American households.
Trump’s acknowledgment that his trade wars will bring about a “little disturbance” almost certainly understated the chaos these policies are likely to unleash on the U.S. economy. But as Lawrence O’Donnell just said on air, it marks a departure from Trump’s previous claims that tariffs aren’t felt by consumers but rather by the countries on which they are imposed.
Brace yourselves, America, economic hardship is on the horizon.
Trump delivered less of a policy plan than an early victory lap
In the past, presidents have typically used their first joint address to Congress as a way to look ahead and to highlight their priorities for the coming year. Here’s how PBS described those speeches:
That’s not what we got tonight.
Rather than a vision of what his administration intends to do, Trump instead used the vast majority of his lengthy speech to take a rather premature victory lap. He hand-waved vaguely at a few goals apart from villainizing trans Americans and immigrants, preferring instead to run through the greatest hits of his grievances, old and new. In doing so, he broke the record for longest speech given to Congress by a president in his first year, let alone a State of the Union.
What a tremendous waste of time, devoted to an entirely unnecessary speech, which seemed primarily in the service of allowing Trump to bask in the applause of his congressional allies.
Trump wraps longest address to joint session of Congress ever
Trump ended his speech after roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes, making it the longest address to a joint session of Congress in history (and that includes State of the Union speeches).
The longest on record before tonight was then-President Bill Clinton in 2000 at 1 hour and 28 minutes, NBC News reported.
Sen. Bernie Sanders leaves chamber early ahead of his own response
While Sen. Elissa Slotkin will deliver the official Democratic response, the Vermont independent will be streaming his own thoughts after Trump’s address is over. “My speech is going to be better,” he told reporters as he left.