Fox News’s Brit Hume, one of America’s most respected political analysts, and a man more given to wry scepticism than to partisanship or hyperbole, described Donald Trump’s speech to Congress as:
‘the most boisterous, the longest, the most partisan speech I’ve heard a President give… to a joint session of congress… and I go back maybe about 50 years on this. I also think it may have been the most effective. If you ever doubted that Donald Trump is the colossus of our time and our nation, this night and this speech should have put that to rest…’
There is no quarrelling with Hume about length. At one hour and 40 minutes, Trump’s speech broke Bill Clinton’s record of one hour, 28 minutes and 40 seconds. Or about partisanship. With the exception of Barack Obama – ‘I won. Deal with it’ – most presidents pose as unifiers and offer their defeated opponents an olive branch. Not Trump. He confessed that he knew the Democrats seated below him would not applaud anything he said. He called Biden ‘the worst president in American history’ and excoriated the Democrats for their open borders that allowed murderers and madmen to make our cities unsafe; inflation resulting from too much spending; men in women’s sports; selection by colour rather than merit; wasting billions on ludicrous programmes, and a host of other ills. All the while pointing at the objects of his scorn.
It is customary for the opposition not to rise for the standing ovations accorded a President by members of his party when he ticks off his accomplishments. Trump received 103 such recognitions of ecstatic approval. Meanwhile, the Democrats sat, and sat, and sat.
When Trump, following a custom established by Ronald Reagan in 1982, ‘acknowledged’ visitors who had been invited to the House Gallery, some Democrats fell into a trap some claim Trump set. It is one thing to remain seated when the President claims to have created a booming economy, another when he acknowledges a child, a victim of brain cancer, who loves the police and wears a police uniform, and who was wide-eyed with joy when the President named him an honorary Secret Service agent. It is one thing to remain seated when the President reports that illegal border crossings have declined from the millions to a few thousands, quite another when the President announces that a student aspiring to a military career has been awarded a place at West Point.
Trump overcame his natural modesty to list his achievements and claim, ‘I have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four years or eight years.’ And that his restoration of ‘our confidence’ might be ‘a comeback the likes of which the world never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again’ There is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its reconstruction of capitalism and expansion of the role of government in the economy to use for comparison, but that is to quibble.
Trump announced progress in disengaging from international organisation that treat America badly or adopt policies of which he disapproves. Out we come from the ‘unfair’ Paris climate accord, the ‘anti-American’ UN Human Rights Council and the ‘corrupt’ World Health Organisation. Biden’s ‘insane’ electric vehicle mandate is consigned to the scrap heap of history. ‘Unnecessary’ rules and regulations have been ended ‘like no other president has done before.’ Free speech is back in America and English is once again the official language of the US.
America will no longer be poisoned by ‘woke’. ‘Wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad, it’s gone.’ Out goes critical race theory, in comes an official policy that there are only two genders and a ban on federal funding of men in women’s sports. There is little doubt that the President’s rejection of what we might call the cultural assault of the coastal elites on conventional ‘common sense’, to use the President’s words, carried more weight with his supporters than the fact-checking of small-minded pedants.
The President’s economic policy centres on using our fossil fuels to drive down inflation; lowering taxes and the stifling effect of regulation to stimulate economic growth; reducing the cost of government by ending the billions spent on a long list of projects ranging from $22 billion for free housing and cars for illegal immigrants to $8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in Lesotho, ‘a nation… which nobody ever heard of’, to ‘$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique.’ The list goes on, most items accompanied by a Trump quip and a gasp from Republicans.
Throw in savings from Elon Musk’s elimination of waste and fraud – expensive leases on unused government office space and continued payments to tens of thousands of pension recipients remaining on the rolls after passing the age of 120. Add receipts from sale of $5 million ‘gold cards’ providing a path for citizenship to wealthy immigrants, 250,000 of whom are on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s waiting list, eager to pay more than $1 trillion that will be used to pay down the national debt. And you have a balanced federal budget ‘in the near future.’
The President’s list of accomplishments was not confined to domestic affairs. The first step in ‘reclaiming’ the Panama Canal was the purchase of the ports on both ends of the Canal from a Chinese company by a group led by America’s BlackRock, a money manager with $11.5 trillion under management. Progress is being made to obtain Greenland or at least make it a US partner, ‘one way or the other’, said Trump, sounding as macho or menacing as possible. The Abraham Accords achieved during Trump 1.0 are the basis for further progress in the Middle East, ‘a rough neighbourhood’. The terrorist responsible for the deaths of 13 Americans during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan has been apprehended and will ‘face the swift sword of American justice.’
Then we were treated to the dark side of this so-far successful President. Annoyed by the unwise response of Volodymyr Zelensky to an intentionally provocative interjection by vice president J.D. Vance, Trump had Zelensky evicted from the White House and suspended the supply of weapons, money and intelligence to Ukraine.
On Tuesday the President appeared to be satisfied by Zelensky’s grovelling, which included a willingness to sign the minerals deal the President is imposing on Ukraine. There will be no explicit security guarantees to deter Putin when he decides to treat the eventual peace treaty as he has all those that preceded his invasion of Ukraine.
Having received ‘strong signals’ from Vladimir Putin that Russia is ‘ready for peace’, Trump will resume his role as peacemaker. That seems to involve granting Putin everything he wants even before he asks for it, and in addition taking measures such as ordering a pause in offensive cyber operations against Russia. Nevertheless, given the Europeans’ inability to concoct a substitute for Trump, one that is truly independent and does not require America as a ‘backstop’, whatever that means, Trump is indispensable if the killing is to stop. The war is about to end, with Ukraine the loser.
There’s more, much more, including the tariffs Trump has levelled, allegedly to persuade Mexico and Canada to step up efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl across their borders into America. That situation is too fluid as of writing to be capable of reporting, much less analysis. For now, we must be satisfied with the longest speech of its type in American history.
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