Trump seeks peace with Russia, confronts trading partners, smashes Democrats
President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union speech on the night of Tuesday, March 5 was an extraordinary performance and tour de force, even by his own larger than life standards. It offered much solid good news for prospects towards a reduction of superpower tensions and the threat of nuclear war, provided long-term serious hope for slashing the US federal deficit for the first time in a quarter of a century and for amputating hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and ludicrous waste at last from the federal budget.
The speech was also welcomed in Moscow, not for anything Trump said but for what he did not say. Unlike every major speech his predecessor President Joe Biden gave, Trump hardly mentioned Russia at all, and he did not ludicrously accuse Moscow of being the root source of every evil, tragedy, catastrophe and bungle to befall the American people back to the Johnstown Flood in 1889.
But Trump’s speech was sobering news for America’s trading partners, especially those that have grown rich and prosperous over the past 80 years from exporting their cheap, subsidized and domestically protected industrial goods endlessly into the United States while America’s own industries and enterprises withered and died.
The 78-year-old president spoke energetically, forcefully and confidently for an hour and 40 minutes. The previous year, his predecessor, the smaller-than-life, miniscule, blink-and-you-miss-him Biden gave a State of the Union speech that lasted one hour and seven minutes. No one remembers a single word of anything he said.
As usual, Trump was his natural lightning rod self. His speech threw his core millions of supporters into ecstasy. Every liberal and Democrat remaining in the United States – and polls show their numbers are evaporating fast – regarded it as tasteless, loathsome and filled with lies.
It was not any exaggerations that outraged Trump’s legion of haters – especially across the liberal Western European – it was all the incontrovertible truths that the president spoke and backed up with hard facts.
No doubt, there were indeed many exaggerations and terminological inexactitudes in the address. That is, after all, what politicians – especially American heads of state – do all the time. But there were infinitely less than Biden emitted every time he opened his mouth.
However, it was not any lies or exaggerations that outraged Trump’s legion of haters – especially across the liberal Western European, as well as New York and Los Angeles based mass media: it was all the incontrovertible truths that the president spoke and backed up with hard facts.
Throughout his election campaign, Trump was endlessly ridiculed and eviscerated across the US mainstream media for promising to turn off the spigot of illegal immigration that has flooded the United States for the past four years. The American people were endlessly told that it couldn’t be done, or that it could only be done if the Big Bad Republicans in Congress gave up their opposition to a lovingly crafted arcane huge and convoluted Democratic piece of proposed legislation that had more holes in it than a ton of Swiss cheese.
Well, as Trump pointed out, in his first six weeks in office, illegal immigration has magically been stopped in its tracks, and no new legislation at all was needed to do it. US law enforcement and border security authorities were simply redeployed and empowered to do their jobs. And they have.
Trump served notice that henceforth, without fear or favor, the United States would pursue a policy of reciprocal tariffs. Whatever any other nation imposed on its own imports of US goods and agricultural products would be exactly matched by US tariffs imposed in return. The long term strategic and historical consequences of this policy are going to be enormous. They do not mean at all that the United States is going to seek to withdraw into some imagined force field or bubble isolated from the wider world – a slur that was thrown at President Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s – and it was an outright barefaced lie even then. What it means, rather, is that Trump himself, like his forceful, articulate and hard driving new Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the Munich Security Conference last month, recognizes that the United States is not a global, omnipotent hyperpower. Rather, America must and will coexist in a world with other major powers. Consequently, the Trump administration will seek the prosperity and security of the American people first and foremost and not sacrifice it to some imagined, hypothetical and never achievable “good of the world.” In any case, that undefinable hypothetical “general good” has never been achieved or achievable by unilateral US action, inaction or suicidal self-sacrifice anyway.
The State of the Union speech was Trump’s triumph. And the Immediate Future of the United States and the American people remain his to decide: For good or ill.
The impact of Trump’s speech on the Democrats in the US Congress was epochal and astonishing. In 39 years of covering successive congresses in person during my long career in – and out of – Washington, I have never seen anything like it. The entire Democratic phalanx in Congress – cut off from its old use and abuse of the control of either the Senate or the House of Representatives by the devastating results of the November 2024 national elections – was struck speechless. They were poleaxed. And they reacted with all the grace of a spoiled disgusting six-year-old brat with the most petulant, ludicrous, useless and therefore highly entertaining display of bad manners in the long and august history of the US federal legislature, which has seen so much of it.
Yet again, the Democrats were led to absurdity, self-inflicted humiliation and well-earned national contempt by the beautiful but utterly brainless Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, Congresswoman from the fifth district of Minnesota. For it was she, according to circulating reports, who came up with the extraordinary idea that the Democrats from both the House and the Senate should express their rejection of everything Trump said by holding up uniform table tennis bats – which she herself reportedly distributed – with single words, most notably “False” on them whenever the President of the United States said any phrase.
Had the Republicans wanted to, they could have responded to any one of Joe Biden’s four state of the Union addresses, all filled with immediately verifiable fiction and lies, by putting up a 50-foot poster with the word LIES to fill the entire chamber.
The Democrats sent a unified message all right. As they have done so repeatedly, endlessly and helplessly through the past eight years, they played right into Trump’s hands. The message that the national leaders of the historic Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and even Bill Clinton sent was that they were not just all repulsive, childish and useless, but that the hundreds of thousands of honest and honorable, hardworking US federal government employees who are now being sacked from their positions – good and bad, useless and vital alike, without fear or favor – can expect and will get no protection or support worth the name at all from the party they have mostly loyally followed and funded for so many generations – at least since the inauguration of FDR 92 years ago. For what was the Ilhan Omar message that was driven through unforgettable visual images into the eyes and brains of the viewing audience initially estimated at 32.23 million people – with probably at least another 20 million to watch later on their personal computers? It was that the Democrats are marching – in full unity! – to defend them with table tennis bats. And that is all they are going to do. Not a single one of those august Senators and Congress members was even capable of hitting a ping pong ball back across the chamber at Trump. No wonder the President, Vice President J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson were in such good form through the night, as the network television cameras dutifully recorded and transmitted to the world.
None of this means that Trump’s unprecedented assault on the very manpower and fundamental capabilities of the federal government will work, or that his macro-economic strategies will succeed, or that his often wildly optimistic but certainly energetically pursued international policies from tariff wars with China, Mexico and Canada to his peace initiatives from Ukraine to Gaza, will fully achieve their stated purposes. But it does mean that the president is serious in his policies and is still filled with energy and confidence in forcefully pursuing them. It also means that the Democratic Party as a national force capable of blocking, derailing, undermining or sabotaging those policies – as they so relentlessly did eight years ago and through Trump’s first administration – has now totally collapsed. Passively holding up table tennis bats for babies is all they now remain capable of.
The profound consequences of this total moral and political collapse are going to be epochal. Four years from now, the Democratic Party will have been nationally decapitated: And it will have generated an entirely new political leadership. If that happens, the entire geriatric current leadership still shambling along behind former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and newly minted California Senator Adam Schiff – will be all gone. They will be writing endless memoirs no one will read in the most remote corners of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Northern California. Or they will have fled into national exile. Or they will be rotting in federal penitentiaries.
Then the Democrats will have an entirely new generation of far better leaders at last. For how could they be worse? Or an entirely new national grassroots movement to reincarnate the American center-left will have erupted across the nation to displace the for-so-long woke, complacent, corrupt and useless Democrats entirely: Provided the nation still survives.
In any case, the State of the Union on Tuesday night was Trump’s triumph. And the Immediate Future of the United States and the American people remain his to decide: For good or ill.
