President Donald Trump faced heckling from Democrats on Tuesday as he declared that “America is back,” delivering an address to Congress in which he boasted about his efforts to reshape the government and taunted his adversaries with references to his political and legal triumphs.
In the longest presidential address to Congress in history, Trump appeared to cool tensions from a blowup last week with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, reading aloud a message of gratitude that Zelenskyy had posted on social media earlier in the day. Trump said he appreciated the message, and that he had also received “strong signals” from Russia that they were eager for peace with Ukraine.
“Wouldn’t that be beautiful? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?” Trump said.
Democrats barely applauded during Trump’s visit to the chamber, while Republicans enthusiastically cheered. From the speech’s first moments, when Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, repeatedly yelled “you don’t have a mandate” and refused to sit down, the deep divisions in Congress and the country were on display.
“The people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements,” Trump said, referring to Democrats in the chamber. “They won’t do it no matter what.”
In a highly unusual move, Speaker Mike Johnson ordered Green removed from the chamber. There have been other outbursts during presidential speeches in recent years, including by Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia during the Biden administration and Joe Wilson of South Carolina during the Obama administration. Both remained in the chamber after interrupting the president.
Just days after threatening to abandon a European ally at war and kicking off a trade war that rattled global economies, Trump offered no new policy proposals and repeatedly denigrated former President Joe Biden and mocked Democrats in the audience for their inability to stand in the way of his agenda.
“Six weeks ago, I stood beneath the dome of this Capitol and proclaimed the dawn of the Golden Age of America,” Trump said, repeatedly appearing to veer from his prepared remarks. “From that moment on, it has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.”
The president did not dwell on foreign policy, though he again expressed his concern about Chinese control of the Panama Canal and his desire to take over Greenland. He announced that the United States had apprehended a terrorist who organized the bombing of the Abbey Gate during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Trump spent much of the speech telling the stories of Americans he invited to watch his address in the gallery, including the victims of violent immigrants and a boy with cancer who dreamed of becoming a police officer. Trump announced that the 13-year-old boy had been made a Secret Service agent.
Throughout, he appeared to obsess over his political rivals. At one point, he motioned to Democrats, saying the system of justice in the country had been taken over by “radical left lunatics.” In response, progressive members of the party held up panels that said “False” and “That’s a lie.”
A number of Democrats staged a small protest, standing up and turning their backs toward Trump with T-shirts that said “resist” on the back. Instead of risking being removed by the sergeant-at-arms, the group quietly walked off the House floor.
Trump accused Democrats of ignoring the “common sense revolution” that he and his administration had begun to implement. He addressed his opponents in the audience with contempt, gloating about his election victory, mocked them for his ability to evade prosecutions and called Biden the worst president in American history.
At one point, the president compared the treatment he received on the internet to the victims of revenge porn, saying “nobody gets treated worse than I do online.”
Trump claimed falsely that he had inherited an “economic catastrophe” from Biden. In fact, the United States had the strongest economy in the world when Trump took over, but it has been showing signs of strain in recent weeks from federal funding cuts and tariffs.
The president focused on what he claimed was fraud in the federal bureaucracy discovered by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. For several minutes, Trump listed off foreign aid and diversity programs that his government had eliminated, mocking them as unnecessary.
“Eight million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” the president said.
House Republican leaders have advised their members to stop holding in-person town halls amid a torrent of large-scale protests targeting some of the budget cuts Musk is overseeing. Even so, a number of Republican lawmakers jumped to their feet and cheered as the president referred to Musk, who was sitting in the gallery.
As he has in past speeches, Trump repeated false and exaggerated claims throughout the speech, prompting reactions from the Democrats in the chamber.
“That’s not true,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said quietly and shook her head as Trump ticked through debunked claims about the impossible ages of people collecting Social Security. Republicans, in contrast, cracked up and one yelled out “Joe Biden” when Trump asserted that someone on Social Security was older than 300.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan delivered the Democratic rebuttal from the town of Wyandotte, a place she says that both she and Trump won.
Slotkin opened by saying that “America wants change” but described two options, a “responsible way” and a “reckless” way. She framed Trump’s approach as the reckless one.
She said he had authorized an “unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends” and risked steering the country into a recession.
• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
