That was some great theater. Trump asks the chamber to stand if they believe their “first duty” to “protect citizens, not illegal aliens.” Democrats don’t stand. Trump gestures at them. They glare at him. He mugs at them. They mug back. It was a full-on mug off.
“You should be ashamed of yourself for not standing up,” he said, needling them. But nearly all Democrats resisted Trump – all but Ilhan Omar, who started screaming unintelligibly and, apparently, involuntarily.
Trump is visibly much more energized talking about ballot security and voter fraud than he has been all night.
Now Trump is finally getting worked up: “You should be ashamed of yourselves” he yells at Democrats who blocked funding for the border and deportations.
The punch lands.
If the Democrats who boycotted tonight hoped to create an impression of an empty chamber, they failed miserably.
I think “you should be ashamed of yourselves” may be the headline that comes out of this address.
Trump just rolled right over heckling Dems.
Something Trump does, that no other president would ever dream of doing during the State of the Union Address: Not only did Trump assert that Democrats were at fault for last fall’s government shutdown (plausible); not only did he contend that the shutdown took two percentage points of the U.S. gross domestic product growth (in the ballpark), he speculated that it probably “made them very happy.”
So much for Hakeem Jeffries’s “silent defiance” strategy!
Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is having quite a bit of trouble restraining herself in the chamber this evening. “Corrupt!” she yelled a few minutes ago. She’s now yelling about how Trump is “shooting” American citizens.
She’s spent the past fifteen minutes or so muttering to herself sitting beside fellow Squad member Ilhan Omar, who is also heckling Trump’s speech.
Wasn’t DOGE supposed to root out the waste that JD Vance would be tasked with eliminating with the “war on fraud”?