Trump speech to Congress: A GOP red meat feast, but what was missing for swing voters? | Opinion
Once upon a time, major presidential speeches were surgical. The chief executive would stand before Congress, boast about specific policies his side had enacted or would pursue, and throw out a few achievements or ideas that even the other party had to cheer for.
Now? That’s so 2015.
President Donald Trump, in his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, missed no opportunity to blister Democrats. He hit them on every issue he could mention, from taxes and regulations to women’s sports and their very response to his presidencies.
In doing so, Trump lost a prime chance to frame his young second term as responsive to two issues that most contributed to his election: the economy and immigration. He said almost nothing about efforts to reduce the nagging inflation that has Americans so unsettled about their finances and the future.
Those concerns may have been abated by Trump’s win, but they were not eliminated. If anything, they are roaring back, as consumer confidence dips and the stock markets wobble over Trump’s back and forth on tariffs.
If such concerns linger for two or four years, voters will blame Trump and his party every bit as much as they did Joe Biden and his.
Trump did more to tout his actions on the border, taking a deserved victory lap on the sudden reduction in illegal immigration just weeks into his term. He dramatically paused to stop and display an executive order renaming a Gulf Coast wildlife refuge for Jocelyn Nungaray, the Houston girl savagely killed in a crime attributed to two men in the country illegally.
But that came about an hour into the speech. Was anyone left watching beyond the political obsessives who have already made up their minds?
Trump and his team are at real risk of a pattern that befell Biden: paying too much attention to the niche political issues that his most fervent, most online base cares about and not the big-picture concerns of the vast majority of voters who don’t live full-time on social media.
For Biden, that looked like an administration with its head in the sand on inflation, led by an increasingly feeble, aging chief executive and devoted to unpopular language wars on race and gender.
For Trump, it registers as potentially reckless action by Elon Musk and DOGE, indulging conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein and overhauling the FBI — not concrete steps to reduce prices or help Americans find an affordable house to buy.
It’s not that millions of people don’t care about those cultural issues or political squabbles. Plenty do. But the swing voters who decide elections — and who will determine whether Trump’s legacy of having any chance of being cemented in the next two election cycles — vote based on their lives and the prospect of their futures and opportunities for their kids.
Try telling someone in Michigan who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020 and Trump again in 2024 that the most important issue before them is whether we call it the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America.
Democrats did themselves no favors, though, with their responses. Rep. Al Green of Houston once again proved himself to be a child in an elderly man’s body, shouting at Trump almost as soon as the president began speaking. House Speaker Mike Johnson had Green removed, and honestly, that was probably one of the few moments in which both sides got what they wanted.
A bigger problem for Democrats is that they have no credibility on anything related to ordinary Americans’ struggles, either. They spent four years denying inflation or declaring it temporary, burying their heads over the gasoline that Biden’s glut of spending spilled on the inflationary fire, and promoting divisive social policies.
These speeches are fleeting. Few Americans will judge or even remember what was said on this March night when they vote in 2026 midterms or beyond. An advantage is that Trump, by aiming to unleash the American energy industry, is taking one of the few steps that can truly reduce prices across the board. Everything we buy has to be shipped, and a consistent, reliable supply of affordable energy can broadly stabilize costs.
But as with everything else he’s trying to do, Trump better switch his allegiance away from executive orders to getting Republicans in Congress to write his preferences into law. Otherwise, in four or eight years, he’ll be sitting at home, ranting on social media about a Democratic successor easily unspooling everything he worked so hard to do.
This story was originally published March 4, 2025 at 8:32 PM with the headline "Trump speech to Congress: A GOP red meat feast, but what was missing for swing voters? | Opinion."
