Trump’s speech shows U.S. can’t make an omelet without breaking a few expensive eggs | Opinion
“Trump was right about everything!”
That’s what the crown of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s red ball cap loudly proclaimed as the Georgia Republican rapturously watched a congressional address by President Donald Trump Tuesday night that frequently sent supporters to their feet and fact-checkers into overdrive.
You’d sound naive to bemoan the demise of decorum in politics these days, but it’s barely been a generation since Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, called Barack Obama a liar during his 2009 presidential address of Congress then called the White House that night to apologize.
Taking his dissent a step further Tuesday, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was removed from the chambers by the House sergeant at arms for interrupting Trump by standing and shouting that he didn’t have a mandate to cut Medicaid. No Democrat stood again for the entirety of Trump’s speech, which included several emotional moments to acknowledge invitees in the gallery ravaged by brutal crimes or cancer.
Whether you saw these moments as petty or political probably depends on how you voted. But it was a bad look for Democrats, a party seeming like a ship lost at sea since Trump claimed a mandate in a presidential election that was actually one of the closest in 20 years. The reality in our deeply divided America is the only candidate Trump surpassed in popular vote percentage and margin since George W. Bush’s re-election victory was the 2016 winner, Trump himself.
Such details are ignored by Trump and irrelevant to supporters who see a man made for the moment and who meet his remarks not just with agreement but adulation. Best speech ever was a common refrain. What Trump knows more than anyone, of course, is that words matter.
On Trump’s signature issue, immigration, it is his rhetoric, not any congressional compromise, that has sent the number of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border plummeting to its lowest level in decades. The morning after his speech Axios reported that the Border Patrol recorded just 8,300 apprehensions of migrants illegally crossing between ports of entry in February, down from about 29,100 such encounters in January and 47,300 in December 2024. There were more than 130,000 such apprehensions in both February 2023 and February 2024.
“Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history, and we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded,” Trump said in his speech. “The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
The outcome is a huge policy achievement Trump can share with Americans, but Border Patrol figures from the 1960s show three entire years with 21,000 border encounters for those years, providing context to his inaccurate claim the nation is experiencing historic low border crossers.
Neither nuance nor accuracy is Trump’s strong suit, so by now no one should be expecting either. For a glimpse into his psyche, we need look no further than actor Sebastian Stan, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Donald Trump in the movie “The Apprentice.”
Stan laid out Trump’s “three rules of winning” and set the stage for the next four years as well as Tanyone in a scene with biographer Tony Schwartz, played by Eoin Duffy.
“Rule one, the world is a mess,” said Stan as Trump. “You have to fight back. You have to have a tough skin. Attack, attack, attack. If somebody comes after you with a knife, you shoot them back with a bazooka.
“Rule two, what is truth?,” he said. “You know what’s truth? What you say is truth. What I say is truth. What he says is truth. What is the truth in life? Deny everything. Admit nothing. You know what’s true? What I say is true.
“And third of all, and most important, no matter how f----- you are, you never, ever, ever admit defeat. You always claim victory. Always.”
It’s clarifying to consider Trump’s fifth annual congressional address through this prism. (At a record one hour 40 minutes it was 12 minutes longer than the previous mark set by Bill Clinton in 2020.) This is how Trump seeks to pin blame on Joe Biden for “out of control” egg prices.
In truth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average price of a dozen grade A eggs in U.S. cities when Biden took office was $1.46. Three years later, as the ongoing avian flu began to spread, the average price was $4.82. In January, when Trump took office, it was $4.95. There’s been no update since, but last month the government predicted prices would increase by 41.1% in 2025.
It’s not Biden’s problem anymore. It’s Trump’s, despite his contrary claims or missing context. Just as Americans turned on Biden when inflation soared, they look to Trump for solutions now.
Time will tell how Trump handles the economy. This is America in the 21st century so it will be the subject of dispute. But in less than seven weeks, while his immigration policies are working as he wants, his economic policies — tariffs and tax cuts — are as wobbly as the stock market.
In a fleeting moment of true candor, Trump actually began to acknowledge the economic pain ahead, for farmers and for all middle-class Americans, because of the trade wars his tariffs may spark. “There will be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that,” he said. “It won’t be much.”
Much, as we all know, is relative to those without much.
Ultimately, talk is cheap, and tariffs aren’t. Over and after the next four years, this president, like all presidents, will be judged by his actions, on what he does rather than what he says. For sure and for now, Trump is reshaping America with big talk and a flurry of 100 executive orders and 400 executive actions. But he’ll eventually need binding legislation to cement any major victory.
The best advice for Americans is to buckle up — and tighten your belts. If Trump escalates trade wars with Mexico and Canada, our biggest trade partners, and with others worldwide, everyday costs are going to climb. The midterm elections will show if there’s any political cost to him for bringing a bazooka to the White House or if wars of words are our new normal.