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Trump Celebrates His Disruption but Slides Over Its Costs
The president’s speech to Congress covered tariffs, Ukraine and cuts to the federal work force but did little to address the perils that accompany the abrupt shifts he has engineered.
transcript
Takeaways From Trump’s Speech to Congress
During the 100-minute address, President Trump lauded the actions he has taken so far, while Democrats lodged protests throughout the evening.
America is back. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Remove this gentleman from the chamber. Once again, I look at the Democrats in front of me, and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy. The egg price is out of control. Pass tax cuts for everybody. They’re in there. They’re waiting for you to vote. Whatever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them. We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer. Today. I received an important letter from President Zelensky of Ukraine. The letter reads: Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.
David E. Sanger has covered six presidencies for The New York Times, and often writes on the revival of superpower competition and conflict.
In the days immediately preceding his address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Trump took a chain saw to government agencies, initiated a trade war, cut off arms to Ukraine and sided with a brutal authoritarian, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
But a visitor arriving from a distant planet who listened to Mr. Trump’s address before an audience of enthusiastic Republicans and dejected, powerless and angry Democrats would not have sensed the scale and intensity of the disruption of the past 44 days and the deep concerns it has produced.
While Mr. Trump resurrected familiar arguments from his campaign rallies to justify his actions — citing waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, the dangers posed by migrants entering the country illegally, the unfairness of the global trading system and the need to bring a bloody war to an end — something was missing.
He never made the case for why the potential benefits of the disruption he has triggered — “nothing but swift and unrelenting action,” he called it, quite accurately — were worth the very real costs at home and abroad. He never addressed the fears of investors who have been hitting the “sell” button amid an escalating trade war, or of allies reaching for their panic buttons as Washington aligns itself with Moscow. He never talked about why he was inflicting more economic pain on his allies than his adversaries.
“They’ll be a little disturbance” he said of his steep tariffs, the closest he came to acknowledging the reaction to his moves.
When he briefly turned to the war in Ukraine toward the end of his more than 100-minute speech, it was chiefly to ask the question: “Do you want to keep it going for another five years?”
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