Forty-three days after taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump delivered a joint address to Congress on Tuesday, in the same chamber that an angry mob of his supporters ransacked four years earlier in an attempt to overthrow the government. Like most Trump speeches of late, this one was a lengthy, rambling affair that clocked in as the longest-ever joint address to Congress by a healthy margin. Many Democratic lawmakers elected not to attend at all, and several who did show left well before Trump wrapped for the night. Apparently, one can only spend so much off-the-clock time in the same room as a euphoric, seal-clapping Lauren Boebert before deciding to try and beat traffic instead.
The speech’s substance will be familiar to anyone who has seen clips of a Trump rally over the past 10 years: a jumble of unhinged culture-war screeds and inscrutable conspiracy theories, sprinkled with the occasional gesture toward making America great that prompts the sycophants to pop out of their chairs like reactionary jack-in-the-boxes. But to a greater extent than most joint addresses to Congress, which newly elected presidents typically use to preview their loftiest aspirations, this felt more like a victory lap from a lame-duck president who sees his victory as a license to plunder the country as much as the law allows, and sometimes beyond it. If Tuesday’s agenda is any indication, for the next four years, Trump’s plan for governing is to make every decision based on how much he thinks he and his cronies stand to profit from it.
Trump of course spent a considerable amount of airtime touting the accomplishments of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s ambitious project to make the entire federal government as buggy and nonfunctional as Twitter became shortly after he purchased the site. DOGE has already uncovered “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” said Trump, who rattled off examples of foreign aid expenditures he wants to scuttle in the jeering cadence of a comedian who knows his audience does not need to hear the punchline to understand the racist joke. “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” he said at one point, soaking in the laughter that followed.
Later, Trump highlighted his and Musk’s ongoing efforts to gut the federal agencies charged with implementing the laws Congress passes. “For nearly 100 years, the federal bureaucracy has grown until it has crushed our freedoms, ballooned our deficits, and held back America’s potential in every possible way.” he said. “The nation founded by pioneers and risk-takers now drowns under millions and millions of pages of regulations and debt.” In order to “unshackle our economy,” Trump promised that under his leadership, the executive branch would eliminate ten existing regulations for every new one it creates, building on his first-term record of “ending unnecessary rules and regulations like no other president had done before.”
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that seemingly every time Musk and the DOGE teens announce some new source of cost savings, their estimates turn out to be wrong by an order of magnitude at least. Grousing about purportedly frivolous expenditures and onerous regulations are time-honored traditions among wealthy conservatives, whose definition of “wasteful” government spending includes all government spending that does not redound directly to their benefit. Musk and Trump want to cut foreign aid because they want the government to do fewer things that require their tax dollars, and know that in a Republican Party animated by bigotry and xenophobia, humanitarian assistance for developing countries makes for an easy political target. And by kneecapping agencies’ ability to do the day-to-day work of governing, Trump and Musk would ensure that deep-pocketed corporations relentlessly chasing shareholder value are free to abuse and exploit consumers without fear of meaningful consequences.
The balance of Trump’s speech continued in this same vein: He framed his second-term tax agenda as offering “cuts for everybody,” which glosses over the fact that, according to a Wharton School analysis, the top 10% of earners would receive about 56% of the proposed cuts’ value. He reiterated his pledge to “take back” the Panama Canal, presumably to the delight of billionaire investor Larry Fink, whose firm, BlackRock, just bought key ports on either side of it.
When discussing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, and probably more countries to be named soon, Trump promised to “take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before,” ignoring the reality that the real-world burdens will fall first on farmers who can’t sell crops and working people paying more for cars, cell phones, and t-shirts. In the two days after Trump announced that his tariffs would take effect, the Dow fell some 1300 points, which Trump characterized as “a little disturbance”—but, he added, “We’re okay with that.” I am not sure the millions of normal people whose retirement savings the president is staking on a harebrained trade war are quite as sanguine.
Last August, Trump held a press conference surrounded by foodstuffs in which he promised to “immediately” bring down prices—“starting on day one,” he added as if to clear up any ambiguity. Yet his speech only occasionally referenced what some two-thirds of voters describe as a “very big problem”; when he did bring it up, it was mostly by framing DOGE’s scorched-earth approach to governance as a cure-all for everything ailing the country, from spiking egg prices to the high cost of vehicle financing. “By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families,” he said after a lengthy riff about alleged rampant Social Security fraud. Again, for everyone whose weekly bills have not plummeted since Trump took office, I do not think “just trust Elon Musk” will be an especially persuasive message.
Perhaps the most oafishly venal policy Trump discussed on Tuesday was his idea for a “gold card,” which would extend green card-style privileges and an easy path to citizenship to foreign nationals willing to pay a $5 million fee. “We will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship,” he said, promising that the cards would go “on sale soon,” as if he were a late-night TV pitchman trying to get you to buy a wearable blanket with cat ears affixed to the hood. For all the scorn that Trump displays for immigrants fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, he is happy to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone with the means to write a seven-figure check.
Trump has never had any real interest in governing; like everything else he’s done in his career, his decision to seek the GOP nomination in 2016 was mostly an elaborate branding exercise that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams when he accidentally won 304 electoral votes. Ten years later, he is (presumably) winding down his political career by running an even more transparent version of the same playbook, scrounging up every last opportunity to reshape American society in ways that will make wealthy people like him even wealthier. For Trump, it does not matter how many others get hurt in the process, because enriching himself is one of the privileges he enjoys as president. If it weren’t, why would anyone want the job in the first place?
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