On March 4th, the current president of the United States spoke to a joint session of congress, and within ninety minutes, he hypocritically undermined a myriad of policies he claimed to support, leaving critics to question the legitimacy of his administration.
I sat down to watch his speech with my older sister, in her third month of student teaching. I do not envy her duty to stay entirely neutral during class debates. With every news article that comes out, I am glad I decided to switch my major from teaching when I did.
The actual address took far too long to begin because of the constant clapping and chanting by the Republican congress members in the audience. Speaker Johnson allowed the cheers for Trump to continue, and only put his foot down on interruptions when Senator Al Green of Texas began heckling about Medicaid.
While on the topic of crowd participation, when did it become appropriate for politicians to chant “U.S.A! U.S.A!” in the middle of a president’s speech? Is an address to congress nothing but a bragging session? The following morning, I got the usual Gen X “back in my day” rant from my father: We only had three channels when I was growing up; if the president was speaking and you did not want to listen, too bad! I will never be the person to defend traditional values, but is it not one of these values to not interrupt the president? And wouldn’t the party built on traditional values uphold traditional values? Anything else is hypocritical.
Trump began his speech by claiming that he was ushering in the American Golden Age. He followed this with half a dozen buzzwords meant to paint a picture of tradition, without ever explaining any plan. Critical Race Theory was mentioned, but not explained (Carlos Maza on YouTube does a fantastic job explaining the moral panic surrounding CRT). The president also referred to “male” and “female” as genders rather than sexes—an upsetting claim to make when Google is free.
Based on how much I hear about tariffs in the news, I expected to hear more about them in the address. Although Trump did not fully explain why tariffs are used, he did roughly explain his plan to place tariffs on foreign imports.
My favorite part, however, was when the president said “And the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” and the camera for a major broadcast network immediately cut to Elon Musk, an unelected bureaucrat. Musk nodded in approval, but did not clap, leaving us to wonder if he saw the irony in the statement.
After achieving previously unthinkable levels of bootlicking, the POTUS listed government programs and projects that were cut via DOGE. Simply listing the headlines of these operations is not a valid method of comprehending their importance. For example, the claim that eight million dollars were dedicated to making mice transgender is a disgustingly dense take. All it takes is one quick search to find out that the treatments done on the mice were to determine the effects of certain gender-affirming treatments on humans. No one was injecting a mouse with estrogen just for the fun of the game. It is unclear whether Trump was intentionally leaving context out of his claims as a pseudoscientific method to prove his point or if he really does just read the headlines and titles of Fox News articles.
Deepening the political polarization we face in our two-party system, Trump devalued the Democrat members of Congress in the audience. He claims that not even if he cured the worst sickness or significantly decreased the crime rate would Democrats be pleased. This declaration only fuels the propaganda that leftists are permanently bitter no matter who is in charge.
Are your eggs cheaper yet?