Trump’s speech to Congress live: president delivers address amid global turmoil over Ukraine and trade wars
Key events
Joan E Greve
Representative Al Green, a Democrat of Texas, was escorted out of the House chamber after interrupting Donald Trump‘s address by saying, “You don’t have a mandate.”
Trump had been bragging about his electoral victory, framing it as a landslide, but the win was one of the closer results in US history.
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points, making it the smallest margin of victory for any successful presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968.
In the electoral college, Trump secured 312 votes, easily clearing the threshold of 270 votes needed for a win, but his performance fell well shy of Barack Obama’s 332 electoral votes in 2012 and 365 electoral votes in 2008.
Trump says that among his highest priorities are to “rescue” the US economy and get “dramatic and immediate” relief to working families.
He claims that he inherited from the Biden administration an “economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare”.
Trump says Joe Biden’s policies “drove up energy prices, pushed up grocery costs, and drove the necessities of life out of reach for millions and millions of Americans.”
“As president, I’m fighting every day to reverse this damage and make America affordable again,” he says.
David Smith
Some Democrats are holding black signs that say ‘Save Medicaid’, ‘Protect veterans’ and ‘Musk steals’.
Trump claims he has “removed the poison” of critical race theory from public schools.
He says he has signed an order making it the official policy of the US government that “there are only two genders: male and female”, and that he has signed an executive order designed to prevent transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
Trump points to Payton McNabb, who is attending tonight’s speech in the chamber, who he says suffered a “traumatic brain injury” as a result of a volleyball match by a transgender athelete.
Trump says he signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America, renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”.
He says he has “ended the tyranny of so-called Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies” across the entire federal government, private sector and US military.
“Our country will be woke no longer,” Trump says.
Trump says he has ended “weaponized” government, and cites an example where “a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me.”
“How did that work out? Not too good,” he says.
Trump says he has stopped “all government censorship” and “brought back free speech in America”. “It’s back,” he says.
Trump boasts about changes to federal workforce and withdrawal from global initiatives
Trump says he imposed an immediate freeze on all federal hiring since taking office as well as a freeze on all new federal regulations and on all foreign aid.
Trump boasts that he terminated the “ridiculous green new scam”, and that he withdrew the US from the “unfair” Paris Climate Accord, the “corrupt” World Health Organization and the “anti-American” UN human rights council.
He says he has ended Joe Biden’s environmental restrictions that he says were making the country “far less safe and totally unaffordable”.
“Importantly, we ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction,” he says.
Fact-check: Trump incorrectly claims that “Now, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the RIGHT direction than the WRONG direction”.
In fact, Trump appears to be referring to a single poll three weeks ago from the Republican-leaning polling firm Rasmussen, which showed a 47%-46% edge for the right direction over the wrong direction. However, that same polling firm’s most recent survey, this week, shows that 45% of Americans now say the country is on the right track, and 50% say it is on the wrong track.
As the polling expert Nate Silver noted last year, when it was revealed that Rasmussen was secretly showing its results to the Trump campaign, “this sort of explicit coordination with a campaign, coupled with ambiguity about funding sources, means that we’re going to label Rasmussen as an intrinsically partisan (R) pollster going forward”.
Other polling firms, not associated with the Republican party, show that more Americans say that the country is on the wrong track now than on the right track.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, in late February, shows that 49% of Americans say that the country is headed off on the wrong track, and just 34% say that the country is headed in the right direction.
An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 50% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, with just 38% saying it is on the right track.
The most recent Morning Consult poll, published on Sunday, shows that the current spread is 56% wrong to 44% right. In the final week of the first Trump administration in 2021, Morning Consult found that 81% of Americans said the country was on the wrong track, with just 19% saying it was on the right track.
Trump says he declared a national emergency on the southern border and deployed the US military and border patrol to “repel the invasion of our country”.
He claims that under Joe Biden, who he says was “the worst president in American history”, there were “hundreds of thousands of illegal crossing a month”.
He says that looking at the Democratic lawmakers in front of him tonight, he realizes “there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud”.
“It’s very sad. You shouldn’t be this way,” Trump says to the Democrats.
Trump continues his address after Democratic Texas congressman Al Green is removed from the House chamber.
Trump says he has signed nearly 100 executive orders and taken more than 400 executive orders since taking office six weeks ago.
“Our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation,” he says.
He says that George Washington’s presidency was “number two” after his own, which makes it “even more impressive”.
Johnson orders Democratic congressman Al Green to be removed from chamber
Trump’s speech is being interrupted by lots of jeering and shouting from the floor of the House.
House speaker Mike Johnson says that members are engaging in “willful and concerted breach of decorum”.
Johnson directs the sergeant at arms to remove Democratic congressman Al Green from Texas from the chamber.
Trump says he returns to the House chamber tonight to report that “America’s momentum is back”.
“Our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back, and the American Dream is surging bigger and better than ever before,” he says.
He says the American dream is “unstoppable” and that the country is “on the verge of a comeback”.
Trump says that six weeks ago, he stood beneath the dome of the Capitol and proclaimed “the dawn of the golden age of America”.
Since then he has brought in “swift and unrelenting” action to usher in “the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country”, he says.
We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years, and we are just getting started.
Trump: ‘America is back’
Donald Trump has begun his address to a joint session of Congress.
“America is back,” Trump says to the chamber. Republicans begin chanting “USA!” again.
