In a Castro-length speech to Congress, the President claimed victory, while proving that even the most unhinged address can be boring if it goes on long enough.
March 5, 2025
Photograph of Win McNamee / Getty
Six weeks and two days after returning to the Oval Office, Donald Trump headed back to the Capitol, the site of his very recent swearing-in ceremony, to declare victory—again and again and again. Over Joe Biden. Evil foreign gangs. Canada. In his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he had done more in his first wild weeks back in power, with his “swift and unrelenting action,” than any President ever, including George Washington.
A flood of words followed, so many that Trump, channelling his inner Fidel Castro, easily broke the modern record for a Presidential address to Congress: Bill Clinton’s one-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute stem-winder in 2000. And yet there was little news in it, beyond the frisson of excitement at the beginning when Al Green, a Texas Democrat, was thrown out of the chamber for protesting. Trump made little effort to explain his disruptive moves to jettison America’s traditional alliances and assault the federal government at home, preferring instead to string together greatest hits from his campaign rallies and brickbats aimed at his predecessor, “the worst President in American history.” Much of what Trump said was inflammatory, radical, and dangerous. But it was also familiar, his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies. It turns out that even the most unhinged of Presidential speeches can seem kind of boring if it goes on long enough.
There’s no doubt that Trump, in just six weeks, has compiled a most unusual list of accomplishments to boast about—much of it a result of allowing the world’s richest man to take a chainsaw to the federal government, cutting hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and unilaterally shutting down federal programs and contracts worth billions of dollars in defiance of Congress. The lawless rampage of the second Trump Administration has already touched everything from rangers at America’s treasured national parks to the very pillars of the decades-old transatlantic alliance.
But you wouldn’t have known it from hearing Trump wind his way through nearly a hundred minutes of mostly standard-issue Fox News culture-war talking points and alpha-male American exceptionalism. (Sample: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It’s gone,” he said. “Don’t we feel better?”) Let’s just say it was the opposite of the technocratic laundry lists that Biden liked to run down. Trump’s only major legislative proposal in his second term is to make permanent the tax cuts that Republicans in Congress passed during his first term; his big reveals in the speech were an announcement of a planned “Office of Shipbuilding” in the White House and a pledge to balance the federal budget, which literally no one thinks can be redeemed. Theatrical displays arranged for the night included Trump signing an executive order mid-speech to rename a national wildlife refuge after a twelve-year-old murder victim, a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor being inducted as an honorary Secret Service agent, and a young man in the House gallery learning of his acceptance to West Point from Trump.
No amount of performative distraction, though, could erase the sense of the world in a state of Trump-induced chaos, whether he chose to mention it or not. The day of the speech, after all, had begun with a Trump-prompted market plunge as his long-threatened twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect. In the morning before Trump went to Capitol Hill, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, made a dramatic televised appeal, “directly to the American people.” “We don’t want this,” Trudeau said. “We want to work with you as a friend and ally. We don’t want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”
Trudeau’s plea captured a bit of the bewilderment of the moment—how is it that one man acting alone could upend so much in the world? And just why, exactly, has Trump decided to turn Canada from America’s best friend to its enemy? “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Trudeau—who is routinely insulted by Trump as the would-be “governor” of America’s “fifty-first state”—said. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
Trump can’t and he won’t. The remarkable thing, as Tuesday’s speech showed, is that he doesn’t even seem to think he needs to.
Before the speech, there were indications from Trump’s team that just maybe he was playing a familiar Trump game with the tariffs, a sort of scare-the-shit-out-of-everyone-and-then-quickly-climb-down approach that appears nowhere in any statecraft manual of which I’m aware but is no doubt painfully familiar to many of Trump’s former business associates. On Tuesday afternoon, Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Wall Street buddy and a major campaign contributor, who is now installed as his Commerce Secretary, suggested, on Fox Business, that a compromise was at hand with Canada and Mexico, and would shortly be announced. Trump is “very, very fair and very reasonable,” Lutnick insisted, adding, “I think he’s going to work something out with them. It’s not going to be a pause—none of that pause stuff—but I think he’s going to figure out ‘You do more and I’ll meet you in the middle some way,’ and we’re going to probably be announcing that tomorrow.”
In the speech itself, however, Trump waxed almost poetic about the beauties of the tariff as a tool of national power. “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump said. “They are about protecting the soul of our country.” Rather than foreshadow an imminent deal to end the standoff with America’s two neighbors, the President warned his supporters to brace for “a little bit of an adjustment period” and, later, “a little disturbance,” which was as close as he came to acknowledging the threat of spiking prices and crashing stocks that economists have warned about. In fact, Trump said he was doubling down on tariffs, promising that on April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs would go into effect on every country in the world that imposes any duties on American goods. So much for Wall Street’s conventional wisdom.
As for the geopolitical consequences of alienating America’s allies, abandoning Ukraine, and pivoting U.S. foreign policy to a decidedly Putin-esque view of the world, Trump hardly mentioned it. On the eve of the speech, the Trump Administration announced that it was immediately suspending all remaining aid to Ukraine—an apparent retaliation after Friday’s shocking televised confrontation in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. But in the speech Trump skipped over this move entirely, choosing instead to mention a conciliatory new letter Zelensky had sent him and portraying himself as a would-be peacemaker. It was one of those tree-falls-in-a-forest moments with Trump; if he blows up the liberal international order but doesn’t explain why America is now on Russia’s side, how do you know if it happened at all?
Even before the gut punches of the past few days, Trump was already in negative territory with the public. According to FiveThirtyEight, he had a net negative favorability rating of close to two per cent as of today—worse than any other President of our lifetime at this point in his term, except for Trump’s own first term, when he was already six points under water, as the pollsters put it, on this day in March of 2017. The point is not so much that Trump is unpopular as that he is the most polarizing figure possible. Tuesday’s speech was like getting smacked in the face with that fact over and over again, as half the House chamber applauded rapturously at Trump’s words and half sat stone-faced, looking as if the world had ended.
Which is why, for me, the scene of the night came even before Trump started talking, as he walked down the aisle and was, briefly, confronted by a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury, wielding a small, hand-lettered sign. “This is Not Normal,” it said. Almost as soon as she flashed it, a Republican congressman from Texas, Lance Gooden, ripped the sign out of her hands and threw it in the air. Call it the Trump era’s new normal, where members of Congress fight like toddlers on the House floor while Putin gloats over the greatest self-own in modern history. It’s a golden age, of bunk. ♦
