He said it would be long. He didn’t lie. Donald Trump told reporters earlier this week that his State of the Union address would be “a long speech,” and unlike many of his key campaign promises, the president delivered. On Tuesday he spoke to MPs for 108 minutes breaking his own record from the previous year for the longest speech ever given to Congress.
Medals and records
The speech was filled with the usual presidential tributes to special guests in the audience. The U.S. men’s ice hockey team was in attendance, freshly crowned with its first Olympic gold medal in nearly half a century. Also there was Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow. The president also recognized working mothers, military veterans and first responders to the floods that devastated Texas last year.
Toward the end of his speech, Trump honored a 100-year-old Navy pilot before Melania Trump awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor. “I always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was told I wasn’t allowed to give it to myself,” said Trump, who also awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Purple Heart and another Medal of Honor during the speech. However, the foundation of the almost two hours that Trump stood before Congress was the president’s equally usual stream of tirades and untruths.
Attacks, migration and voting rights
The president claimed to have ended “DEI,” ushered in the “hottest” economy in American history and saved the country from the “scourge” of illegal immigration. He praised key policies that have caused his popularity to plummet across the country and defended the imposition of sweeping tariffs that have increased costs for consumers. In the presence of several Supreme Court justices, the president rejected a decision last week in which the court found that he had unlawfully exceeded the limits of his emergency economic powers and usurped tariff powers that the Constitution grants to Congress.
Despite declining approval ratings for his administration’s immigration policies, much of the speech focused on the kind of fear-mongering about migration that has already characterized his 2024 election campaign. Many Americans were appalled by the brutal actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Trump seemed to want to convince the country that immigrants, the real enemy, were here to kill them and their families. He described in graphic detail a series of violent crimes committed by undocumented migrants and linked them all – regardless of the perpetrators’ actual residency status – to open borders and democratic politics.
At one point, Trump urged lawmakers to “stand up” if they agreed that the primary job of the American government was to “protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” The Democratic side did not rise in response to this pointed question, prompting Trump to shout, “You should be ashamed of yourself for not standing up.”
Protests and Epstein documents
Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) shouted back that Trump himself had violated that principle under the guise of migration enforcement. “They killed Americans!” Omar shouted from the audience, referring to the killing of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by ICE officers in their home state of Minnesota. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she added.
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), known for disrupting Trump’s State of the Union addresses, could not be heard because he was escorted out of the room shortly after the speech began. He had held up a sign that read “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES,” a reference to a recent video Trump released that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
Trump translated his fixation on citizenship status into calls for federal voting reform that would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans but could help Republicans in future elections. The president repeated false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him victory in 2020 and suggested that this should actually be his “third term.”
He called on Democrats to help Republican senators pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The bill would require Americans to appear in person to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote, impose statewide voter ID requirements, severely limit absentee voting and registration, and give the federal government unprecedented access to state voter rolls.
Just hours before Trump arrived at the Capitol, NPR and MS NOW consecutively reported that the Trump administration had withheld documents related to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor, including dozens of pages of FBI interviews with the accuser that were missing from the Justice Department’s Epstein files released in recent months. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said Democrats were investigating allegations that the documents were improperly withheld.
Official reply
The revelation further highlighted the Epstein-related protests already taking place at the State of the Union address. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers boycotted the event, a rare occurrence in the speech’s history. Some of the Democrats in attendance invited survivors of Epstein’s abuse as their guests, while others wore buttons or held signs to draw attention to the scandal. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), both leading figures in transparency efforts surrounding the Epstein case, broke the partisan seating pattern of previous speeches and sat together at the event.
Many of those who stayed away from the speech instead attended the “People’s State of the Union,” a series of public speeches on the National Mall. Representatives in attendance included Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.), as well as Representatives Greg Casar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).
The official response to the State of the Union address was given by the newly elected governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, who wrested the governorship from the Republicans in a surprise victory last year. “Let me ask you, the American people at home, three questions,” she said. “Is the President working to make life more affordable for you and your family? And is the President working to make Americans safer at home and abroad? Is the President working for you?”
“We all know the answer: no,” Spanberger said
