In Responding to Trump’s Speech, Democrats Tacked Right
Donald Trump’s speech last night sounded like a deranged remix of Ronald Reagan. Instead of slamming him where it hurts, Democrats responded by claiming Reagan’s poisonous legacy for themselves.
Vice President J. D. Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson applaud as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
During parts of his address to a joint session of Congress last night, Donald Trump sounded like a comic book villain. Referencing the assassination attempt he survived last summer, he said that he believed he’d been “saved by God” in order to inaugurate a new “golden age.” He said the United States needs Greenland for its national security and that “we’ll get it one way or the other.” He directed a number of schoolyard taunts at the opposition party, including referring to a sitting US senator (Elizabeth Warren) as “Pocahontas” to her face. Meanwhile, his supporters frequently interrupted even mundane utterances with boisterous applause and chants of “USA! USA!”
Early in the speech, Trump claimed that last November’s election “was an electoral mandate such as has not been seen in many decades” and that he had “won the popular vote by big numbers.” In reality, Trump won a plurality rather than an absolute majority of the popular vote, and in both absolute and proportional terms his margin of victory was much narrower than Biden’s had been four years earlier. In response, Texas congressman Al Green stood up and shouted, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” He was dramatically ejected by the sergeant at arms amid more shouts of “USA! USA!”
Green’s impulse to emphasize that Trump is an unpopular president pursuing destructive and deeply unpopular economic policies made sense. It’s far more challenging to understand the official Democratic response, delivered by my former congresswoman (and now Michigan’s junior senator) Elissa Slotkin.
The choice to have Slotkin deliver the response is itself deeply revealing. Putting a former CIA agent and a notorious national security hawk forward as the party’s representative is hard not to read as the Democrats doubling down on the same disastrous strategy that led Kamala Harris to spend much of last year trumpeting the support of Dick and Liz Cheney for her campaign as Trump was getting points with swing voters for allegedly being “antiwar.”
Slotkin included some half-hearted stabs at economic populism, but that part was fairly muted. Other parts of her speech were catastrophically bad. At the low point of the response, she said:
[Trump] believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends like the Canadians in the teeth. . . . As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War. Donald Trump’s actions suggest that, in his heart, he doesn’t believe we’re an exceptional nation. He clearly doesn’t think we should lead the world.
It would be difficult to imagine a worse message either in strategic terms or on its merits. Ronald Reagan was, by any sane reckoning, a poisonous figure. He illegally armed contra death squads in Nicaragua and bloodthirsty Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan. He invaded Grenada for the crime of building an airport. On the home front, he crushed labor unions and demonized “welfare queens” to further his austerity agenda. He presided over the “Greed Is Good” era of Wall Street hedonism. American politics is still deeply disfigured by his legacy.
And Trump has massively benefited from the widespread belief that he’s a different kind of Republican, one who wouldn’t cater to Wall Street or start bloody wars to assert America’s right to “lead the world.” It’s impossible to understand the Trump phenomenon without understanding the profound backlash, even among Republican voters, against George W. Bush’s seemingly endless wars in the Middle East (which were continued by Barack Obama). After years of working-class Americans coming home in flag-draped coffins, Trump benefited precisely from the impression that he didn’t believe America has some special mystical destiny to “lead the world.”
What the Democrats Should Have Said
A better response to Trump’s address would have been to point out that the political substance of what he was offering was little more than warmed-over Reaganism. His tariffs can be seen as a rejection of free-trade orthodoxy (although even Reagan was far more protectionist than people today often remember). But the domestic economic vision outlined in his speech sounded like a demented remix of something out of an ’80s Reagan speech — or for that matter a Newt Gingrich speech from the “Contract with America” years or a Paul Ryan speech at the height of the Tea Party.
Trump repeated a long-debunked lie about Social Security benefits continuing to be paid out to recipients who are long dead and made a series of bizarre claims about government waste (at one point, he claimed that several million dollars had been spent on “making mice transgender”). Just as Reagan’s lurid stories about the supposedly lavish spending of “welfare queens” were designed to justify rollbacks of social services, Trump’s unfounded claims about 160-year-olds being fraudulently listed on the Social Security rolls can’t be separated from his agenda of imposing some degree of austerity even on this most sacrosanct program. This isn’t mere speculation: the Trump administration has already been making administrative cutbacks in the Social Security Administration that could hamper its ability to function.
In other parts of the speech, Trump enthusiastically promoted a new round of tax cuts for the rich and lavishly praised oligarch and virtual copresident Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn attacks on the regulatory and welfare states. In a bizarre elevation of his subordinate, Trump even encouraged the assembled Republican congressmen and senators to turn around to direct a standing ovation to Musk. No nineteenth-century robber baron could have dreamed of exercising as much direct and undisguised personal power over the federal government as Musk, the richest human to have ever lived, exercises in the Trump administration.
In foreign affairs, Trump laid out an agenda that made Reagan look like a pacifist. It’s hard to know how to parse the claim that we’ll “get” Greenland “one way or the other” except as a threat of military force against Denmark. He also claimed without evidence that Panama had violated the treaty by which the United States had returned the Panama Canal and promised that the canal would return to American hands. Decades after the handover, that could only be accomplished by reinvading that country.
Trump also gloated about having officially designated the Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.” This means, he said, that they’re now “officially in the same category as ISIS,” which won’t be “good for them.” What could that mean if not that drone strikes (or even more intense forms of military intervention in Mexico) are on the table? As with US drone strikes in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, it’s an absolute certainty that the majority of deaths in any drone offensive would be Mexican civilians. As Kurt Hackbarth and José Luis Granados Ceja pointed out in the most recent episode of their Mexican politics podcast Soberanía, it’s hard to overstate how catastrophic this would be, not only in terms of escalation between the United States and Mexico (and the immediate human consequences in Mexico) but also because of the certainty that this would bring cartel violence into the heart of American cities.
Unsurprisingly, given the sheer number of possible new interventions he was floating, he called for beefing up the military and our “defense-industrial base” and building a giant missile defense shield over the United States. This last item was, as Trump himself mentioned, a failed project of the Reagan administration. But, Trump assured us, the technology “wasn’t there” in the 1980s. It is now, he said, and we should go for it.
Just about the only bright spot in all of this is that he didn’t bring up his recently unveiled plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, level all the buildings there, and transfer it to “long-term” American “ownership” so we can remake the world’s bloodiest conflict zone as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
The response to all this from Democrats could have been to denounce Trump as Reagan’s successor in all the worst possible ways — as an enemy of the American working class and a profoundly dangerous hawk. And that’s exactly what the response would have been if we had an opposition party that was worth a damn.