US President Donald Trump took a lengthy victory lap at the US Capitol on Tuesday, telling Congress that his administration was “just getting started” after a tumultuous six weeks that upended US foreign policy, ignited trade wars with friends and foes alike and ousted tens of thousands of government workers.
At 100 minutes, Trump’s address to Congress was the longest in US history, its tenor more that of a campaign speech than an address to Congress.
“Like many things with Donald Trump, it was a record-breaking speech, at least in length,” said FRANCE 24’s Washington correspondent Fraser Jackson, describing the address as “mostly culture wars, not much for middle America, with foreign policy crowbarred in at the end”.
Read moreTrump touts accomplishments, taunts opponents in speech to Congress
A president’s speech to Congress is typically a time for a call to national unity, but Trump chose the opposite course. He set a tone of division almost from his first words, calling his predecessor Joe Biden the worst president in history and chiding Democrats as a lost cause.
Trump likened his achievements to those of George Washington, the country’s first president, and inflated the scale of his victory in November, all while peppering his remarks with exaggerated or false claims.
He leaned hard into cultural flashpoints, including his opposition to affirmative action, diversity programs and transgender rights, declaring: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone, it’s gone, and we feel so much better for it, don’t we?”
Republicans stood and cheered, while Democrats sat in icy silence, some holding placards that read “lies” and “false”.
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“It was a made-for-television event that appealed to his base,” said David Schulz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
“Remember, Donald Trump is a showman who spent 17 years honing his skills on the show ‘The apprentice’,” Shulz added. “Tonight was showmanship designed to appeal to a particular audience.”
A letter from Zelensky
Trump’s disruptive foreign policy has dominated the opening weeks of his presidency, with several cabinet members engaging in furious shuttle diplomacy throughout Europe and the Middle East in a bid to wind down the Ukraine war and the conflict in Gaza.
His speech to Congress, however, was focused almost entirely on domestic matters.
“It was very, very thin in terms of Ukraine or his goals and objectives for us foreign policy,” said Schulz. “It was also not clear what he wants to accomplish with all the tariffs and all the sanctions he has promised.”
The president waited until the end of his address to discuss the Ukraine war, the Middle East or national security generally. When he did, he largely repeated past statements, such as reiterating his intention to take control of the Panama Canal and Greenland – vowing to take the Danish-ruled island “one way or the other”.
Read moreThe Chinese interests behind Trump’s Panama Canal bluster
In one notable piece of news, Trump said he received a letter earlier in the day from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, just four days after an Oval Office meeting between the two leaders devolved into a nasty public argument.
“The letter reads Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer,” Trump told Congress, adding that Zelensky said he was ready to sign a proposed minerals deal between the two nations.
The US president, who had repeatedly berated his Ukrainian counterpart, said he “appreciated” the tone of the letter, offering a hint of a possible cooling of the acrimony between the two leaders.
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“Whether that will be enough to heal the spat that erupted in the Oval Office remains to be seen,” cautioned FRANCE 24’s Jackson.
Isolationism
Trump, who has been unsparing in his criticism of Zelensky, shocked America’s European allies on Monday by abruptly freezing US military aid to Ukraine – a move that has stoked concern about the strength of America’s decades-long commitment to European security.
On Tuesday he boasted about pulling America out of several international treaties and organisations, including the landmark Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization (WHO), which he described as “corrupt”.
He claimed that exiting the Paris Accord would save the US “trillions of dollars”, in one of several unfounded claims flagged by Schulz.
“By the time the dust settled on his speech, it was obvious there were a lot of inaccuracies and falsehoods,” said the Hamline University professor. “For example, his claim that the US spent hundreds of billions of dollars helping Ukraine is just false,” he added.
Schulz said withdrawing from international accords was “popular with Trump’s base, but not the wider American public”, pointing to a contradiction in the president’s foreign policy objectives.
“Clearly he is thinking that these things are making America great again,” he added. “But the strength of the United States since World War II has really been the alliances and the organisations we created. Isolationism is weakening America.”
Tariffs ‘indigestion’
Few issues have irked America’s allies more than the steep tariffs Trump has slapped on many of the country’s main trading partners, triggering a trade war that has spooked markets and businesses.
“Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades, and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries,” Trump told Congress, reiterating his intention to impose additional tariffs on April 2 and claiming his trade policies will be a boon for the agriculture industry.
He did, however, acknowledge that adding a tax on imported goods from Canada, Mexico and China might cause a “disturbance” and that US farmers might feel a “period of indigestion”.
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It was a small but significant admission, said Jackson, noting that the US president had previously claimed other countries would take the hit.
“If we look at Trump’s first term in office, his trade war with China ultimately cost the US government 60 billion dollars to bailout farmers,” added FRANCE 24’s correspondent.
Farm-state senators have warned against the tariffs and many Republicans remained seated when Trump promised to impose further levies, signalling divisions within the party on the subject.
Trump, who has often taken credit for market increases, did not mention stocks sliding this week as investors fret over his trade wars. He also barely addressed stubbornly high costs, blaming his predecessor and saying he would bring down inflation via increased energy production.
“Trump blamed Biden for the price of eggs but gave little detail of what he plans to do to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, other than talk of tariffs, which are also inflationary measures,” said Jackson.
Blame Biden
The high cost of eggs – a consequence of bird flu outbreaks – was just one subject Trump seized on to round on his Democratic predecessor and settle old scores.
“I’ve never seen a speech like this in America where a sitting president goes so far out of his way to blame a previous president for problems – you don’t see that,” observed Schulz.
Unlike his predecessor, who sought dialogue with Republicans and bipartisan victories, Trump did not look to enlist support of Democrats for his agenda. Instead, he largely mocked and dismissed them during the speech as if he were still a candidate on the campaign trail.
In response, several Democrats either turned their backs to Trump or walked out of the chamber. By the time Trump was finished, their side of the aisle was half empty.
Schulz said the president’s address “spoke to all the problems in America about polarisation, winner-takes-all politics”, offering an alarming indicator of what lies ahead.
“The fact that he was taunting the Democrats indicates that he knew he was speaking to one side and not trying to reach across the aisle, to reach across America,” he said. “It wasn’t a speech to unite America, but one that played on divisions that are already there.”
(With Reuters, AP)
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