MS NOW Highlights - Feb. 24

It is midnight now on the East Coast. You're alive. We have all just outlasted the longest State of the Union in history. It didn't kill us. We did it. We're alive. We're sentient. Nobody can take that away from you. It itself is an accomplishment.

Despite talking for more than an hour and 47 minutes, the longest State of the Union address ever in U.S. history, and by far, President Donald Trump offered very little in the way of policy. If you were like me, you might have even missed what was maybe the main thing he offered.

Thankfully, Lawrence O'Donnell was able to get in there and dig it out of the speech and then succinctly nut it up as trading in the income tax for tariffs, LOL. This was not a State of the Union that will be remembered for presidential proposals. In addition to the weird sort of digressions and no policy, it may be remembered just for his awkward verbal cul-de-sacs, like this one about his dad.

Think of it in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years, year 1900. In fact, substantially before my wonderful father, I had a wonderful father, Fred, before he was born, substantially before he was born. That's a long time ago. He wouldn't like me to say that, but that's a long time ago.

So there was stuff like that. The president also shouting a lot through a lot of his speech a number of times in ways that stretched the capacity of his microphone to handle it. There were many also long, sort of gruesome descriptions of violent deaths and injuries, which he seemed to relish describing in detail with a lot of ad-libbing.

There were also his repeated attacks on Democratic lawmakers in the chamber, screaming at one point, loudly, that they were crazy.

Isn't that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself. That is why I'm also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities.

Tonight's address may ultimately be remembered for the indelible image of Democratic Congressman Al Green silently holding up a sign in the House chamber that said, Black people aren't apes. A reference to Trump posting a video recently on social media depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

That said, perhaps in the long run, tonight will be remembered for the Democratic response. Responses to State of the Union addresses are very difficult, notoriously. But tonight's from Abigail Spanberger was very good and thus far, at least, seems to have been very well received. A punchy, clear, effective speech from the new moderate Democratic governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, she essentially kicked off her party's midterm election pitch

by taking aim, among other things, at Trump's violent immigration raids, his chaotic economic policies, and bluntly, his corruption.

Who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he's pushed through this Republican Congress. Somebody must be benefiting. He's enriching himself, his family, his friends.

The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. There's the cover up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation's capital. This is not what our founders envisioned, not by a long shot.

From the Democratic response again by Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a couple of our new colleagues have joined us today, tonight, and it's gonna be a long night still. Claire McCaskill's here, Eugene Daniels. Claire, what was your reaction to what you saw tonight?

You know, I was thinking about, first of all, there were a lot of Democrats that weren't there. Yeah. I don't know if you guys noticed, but you'll remember this, Lawrence, that the ambassadors usually sit in Folding chairs in the aisle because there's not room for them in the chairs I noticed some of the ambassadors very excited because they were sitting where normally senators sit You know, they were all like my god, we got real chairs on the floor. Nobody's here. I noticed no one was there I noticed that it felt like a game show

More than a pres. Or an award show. Yeah. Like I was thinking he's going to say, now look under your chair. There's something for you there. And it would not instill confidence in anybody watching this that this was the guy that we want in charge, deciding whether or not we're going to bomb Iran and go into war in the most dangerous neighborhood in

the world, especially the Republicans. You know, you would think at this point they would want him to give a speech that would lead them out of the thicket. Instead, they're going, hey, we're going to follow you right in there. Let's go deeper in the woods and see how deep we can go in there and never come out again politically.

and never come out again

politically. It was fascinating to me. And

then finally, the thing

that struck me with the

smirks of Vance and

Johnson sitting behind

him like they thought it

was kind of a joke. You

know, they were always

and he like he's clever or he's funny. And it was

if I were somebody that

wasn't as involved as I am and as engaged as I am in this, it would have struck me that they were smirking the whole time like this was something not to be taken seriously. And it

didn't feel like America

should take it seriously. I don't think this speech is going to do anything for him. And I think it's very forgettable and will be forgotten very, very

quickly. I think it's

interesting about

Johnson and Vance. I think it's interesting about Johnson and Vance. I don't put much I don't put much stock in kind of body language stuff or whatever but particularly those two Republican leaders have kind of resting smirk face like they both just kind of have that look which it's it's an accident that it's the two of them behind the panel but both of them kind of have the arms-folded smirk as a resting look.

And so particularly striking that they never got out of that pose for this whole speech tonight.

Eugene.

You know, I have been texting with some Republicans who are sitting in that room. And before the speech, I asked them, I said, what do you want the president to do? And they said, well, we want him to do what he's going to do is to help the American people understand why we should keep the gavel come November. And in no way, shape or form did he do that. Right. And they said that they're very clear about that. They always say these things in text messages to us and they never say that in front of cameras. But that is what they said. And I think at the

end of the day, this could have been a time in a different presidency where the president would stand up there and say, look, I know you guys aren't feeling what we've been doing. We're going to keep working on it. At the end of the day, we hear you. We're going to fight for you. And we are turning it around. And that is not what you heard at all. Instead, you heard President Trump over and over and over again say mission accomplished. And the American people who are going to go to the grocery store tomorrow will know that the mission was not accomplished on the economy. They don't feel safer with ice in their streets and they don't feel safer with the president of the United States talking and fumbling around with what he might do with Iran.

And these Republicans that are sitting in that space are thinking the same exact.

Just on the Iran thing. I think this is actually important. You know we have not put we many assets into that r Iraq. No, right. Now, if at 2003, there was a mul right? Leading up to the at persuasion and propag all those things. He spe

it tonight. Maybe two an have like entire carrier groups there. It's possible that if things go awry, we're going to start a war with Iran. And to the extent that he articulated a justification for what we're doing there, it was as much about our concerns about the Iranian government's mistreatment of their own people than it was about the nuclear program or any other thing. I mean, it was a mention of the nuclear program,

a mention of sponsors of terrorism, and then just as much, if not more, about how much they are mistreating their own people, as if that's Donald Trump's reasoning for how he approaches the rest of the world. It was really, to me, it seemed strange.

And also, yes, internally incoherent and inconsistent. I mean, particularly in the same speech in which he said, like, our great new partner, Venezuela, they've given us 80 million dollars. I was like, wait a second, it's the same government. It's just has a different guy.

Now they're our great new partner.

He called out Delce Rodriguez, too, who is essentially Maduro's handpicked person.

And remember, I mean, that was the last military action. explain it all. And now he's like blown just right through it. But it's like I

remember a certain point in my life I was doing tutoring with kids in high school and talking about like persuasive writing.

And we would start with I

would be like, well, who's your favorite musician? Right. And then you'd say like, well, just convince me that's the case,

because everyone knows how

to argue and persuade when page. Well, I like them because he didn't do that. He never does it with anything. But like we're going to start a war with a country. There was nothing. There was no attempt to

make an argument for why that might be necessary or in the national interest or anything.

There isn't one.

There's none. And also, they don't feel like they have to. Right. This administration does not believe that they have to explain to the American people why they're sending, if they're sending boots on the ground, why carrier groups or wherever they are, they don't care. And when you talk to folks within the administration, what they will tell you is that they're fine with that. They don't think that Congress, they know Congress isn't

going to do anything. They able to sell the American people on

Anything that they put in front of or if he doesn't have to bother I mean the common theme between all the things he likes to do right give speeches, right? impose tariffs build Knocked down the White House and build things and built himself things These the wars in the way that he's approaching them the common theme in the way he approaches all of these things is that he just gets to do them.

That there is no other countervailing force that he needs to engage with. It's the power, not the policy. It's the power. There's no reason to get the consent of the government because who cares about the government? Everything he wants to do is only about stuff that he can do on his own. And Lawrence, I was wondering what you thought about the fact that there was no mention of the ballroom. I had expected, but I thought he might pull out like a white

chocolate version of the ballroom, you know, the model or the great arch, you know, the great art or say what he's doing with Lafayette Park or show us about the gold Gugas he's put up all over the Oval Office and, the Trump Kennedy Center, or the Trump Institute of Peace. I mean, all of this stuff that... The Trump Dulles Airport, all the different things that he wants named for himself, that he's bulldozing, that he's demolishing the banners

with his face on them all over Washington. No mention of any of those things.

You know, there must have been an intervention to stop them from talking about the ballroom. You know, the whole family was there, the whole White House staff, they must have spent the day getting him to not talk about the ballroom because you know the Democrats wanted him to. Please talk about your ballroom, the thing that you care about more than anything else that the American people care about. You know, when I see a Trump speech in this setting, I always worry about the people,

those high school kids who are watching their first State of the Union address tonight. There are foreign students in our colleges who are freshmen this year who have arrived in this country the first time, they're watching their first State of the Union address. They should know that the president does not say to half of the room, these people are crazy. Those were his exact words.

These people are crazy, pointing to the Democrats. That's never happened before. No other president would do that. He also said, Democrats are destroying our country. No Republican president has ever said that. And no Democratic president has ever said Republicans are destroying our country

ever and I just want the high school kids who are watching this for the first

time to know that doesn't happen.

Well they're up too late.

But just imagine if any Democrat ever said it. By the way if the next Democratic president in that setting says Republicans are destroying our country that president will be condemned the next day by the New York Times and every editorial board in the

country. This will be ignored. There will be no massive outraged editorials tomorrow about Donald Trump saying Democrats are destroying our country. And I just want first-time viewers of this to know this is not the way it ever was.

When it goes down in history, we hereby declare there shall be asterisks on all Donald Trump's State of the Union addresses. From Williamsburg, Virginia, the official Democratic response to President Trump's State of the Union tonight, delivered by newly elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger. She is a calm presence. She is a steady presence in terms of the way that she presents her material. But that was a rip-roaring speech. That was a, to my mind, that was a very good speech. I think she has avoided the curse of the opposite party's response, which we so often see after a State of the Union.

We always talk about how difficult it is to follow up the tremendous pomp and circumstance of that room and the presidency and, you know, there are all these notorious moments, Marco Rubio at the water, the Katie Britt response a few years back.

I'm still scarred by the Katie Britt response.

That was really quite memorable. And you know, what struck me there, aside from the sort of smart thing that she had borrowed from Bob McDonald, who also did this and having people there so that you're clapping, it's not in an empty room, it was forthright, straightforward, succinct, and normal.

It was the opposite of weird. What we just saw before that was very odd. I mean, profoundly odd. And that's sort of Trump's shtick at this point. He's a strange person. And his strangeness is kind of like captivating to some,

beguiling to others. That was kind of the antidote to that. I was struck also as she talked about her section on immigration, because it was a little bit of a, it was a real window into how the politics of that issue have changed, particularly what was in her speech and was not in Donald Trump's very long speech. She talked about

masked ICE agents. She talked about children in spider-web backpacks being taken away. She talked about American citizens being killed. There are now we now three of them not just two one of which was apparently kind of covered up by Department of Homeland Security officials. The one in Texas recently? In Texas, yeah. Last year. And what was striking about that is, as she went through that litany, again, this is a fairly centrist politician, as she said, centrist seat, like, ran a pretty centrist

campaign forthrightly on offense on those issues. And then I thought back and I was like, oh, you know what? That is pretty striking. Go back to the Trump speech. There's one mention of Minnesota and it's on the fraud question. There is no mention of the deployment there. There is no mention of anything that's happened there in the last.

I mean, it's something that was at the center of the nation's imagination. The deaths of two Americans, the marauding agents on the streets, not not not a defense. No mention. There's no mention of Tom Homan. There's no mention of Kristi Noem. All of that, which I think he thought was going to be his big calling card.

Gregory Pevino is crying at home right now in the shoe he lives in.

I mean, but think about that. Like, think about here's your big thing you're doing, you know, and this is your big Stephen Miller, Donald Trump project. We're doing mass deportation. They had the mass deportation sound signs out at the RNC. And now you are and you've been doing it. And the whole country's been watching and you have your big speech.

Yeah, only the Democrats will talk about it to remind America what they're doing. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Michael. Yeah, I want to pick up on that point because the way he brought all of that into focus was in the stories he told about immigrants killing white people in America. Yeah, that was it. Back to the playing the hits. It was back to playing the hits. He was trying to make it very clear. I'm not going to tell you about Minnesota. I'm going to tell you about the truth. You know why the truth's on the ground. Let me tell you the story about the young woman who was killed over here,

or the young woman who was killed over there. So Donald Trump, wanting to avoid the very thing that you just talked about, did a little side curve around the corner. Let me take you on a different kind of trip to that block. So you see it from a different perspective, my perspective.

And I thought that was a very fascinating way to do it because the issue is so fraught and because Americans are so resolute about how they feel about it. Right. And he didn't want to step into that. He wasn't going to step into that. So let me remind you of the thing you're afraid of. Let me remind you of the thing you're afraid of. Let me remind you of the thing you don't like.

Let me talk about blood.

Let me talk about murder and the blood and the gore, the blood and the gore. I love the way you talked about it. It's violence, porn. It really it was really kind of just like, dude, really? This is how you're going to talk about a U.S. soldier who was wounded. You decide you're going to talk about a young woman who was attacked. But again, that's the calling card.

That's the the the the energy that his base feeds off of. They like those stories. They want to hear those stories because they run over and over in a loop in their minds in so many ways. The second point off of that, it's really interesting what Trump's economy is. It's really three things.

It's the market, Wall Street. It's 401Ks, right. And it's tariffs. That's it. That's it. And so now he's sort of reaching out and saying, hey, I'm going to give your child $1,000 a year for 18.

I'm still trying to figure out how $18,000 over 18 years grows to $100,000. But, okay, there may be some good math there. But this is his way of trying to connect the dot with everyday folks that he's abandoned and left to the side of the economic road. The last point, and this goes to the governor of Virginia, I'm not a fan of the speech after the speech for a whole host of reasons. The response category, category.

For a whole lot of reasons, Lawrence and I could probably identify with over the years because in many respects, unless you're prepared to take that moment and tell the country what you're going to do, don't talk to me. I mean, regardless of what Donald Trump says or George Bush or Barack Obama, the opposing party should come in that moment and say, you just heard this, but let me tell you what we're prepared to put on the floor tomorrow. And that's how we begin to reignite an idea around policy and around parties kind of trying to solve problems. Don't give – that was a good speech. I'm not going to take it from the governor.

I liked the speech and she hit on some really good things, but I just think we need to think a little bit bigger and better as political, how we can move the country off of what we're now in, into something a little better.

I think it was an anti-authoritarian measure. No, not just specifically, but in the way she said, people who are going to run this year are going to win. And I won. I turned a seat by 17 points that a Democrat hadn't held in 50 years.

And we took 41 seats. She's trying to say, he is portraying himself as a dictator for life in this country. There is a political future coming, and we are going to ascend in that political future. And so think about things in a short, essentially in a shorter timeframe. And that's, I actually, I was thinking about it in those same terms like, oh, she's not

talking about a lot of policy. She's trying to give people a vision of there still being a democracy in this country in which the chairs will change in terms of who's in them.

Lawrence, both speeches. So to the governor's speech, and I take Michael's point, but I do think she did something really effective. Which is, remember her job, Donald Trump's job, is to try to elect Republicans in the coming election. That's what this speech was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a campaign speech. Her job is trying to win seats for Democrats. And so with that in mind, she left the voter with a very simple question.

She said, is the president working for you? And what I loved was the way the answer was phrased. She didn't just say no. She said, we all know the answer is no.

Yes, yes.

I'm sure you've made it.

A national, unanimous opinion that you know it. He just cares about building the ballroom. He does not care about building anything in your community. And to the Trump speech, it has to be in proportional terms the least amount of governing policy per minute of speech. So you've got about two hours.

The biggest applause in the speech is for a goalie. It's not for the president. It's for a hockey player and his team. And 20% of it maybe is about policy. All the rest of it is introducing people in the audience and stealing the applause that way.

And when you get to the policy, the policy is he wants tariffs to replace the income tax. OK, so you are in raging dementia when you're in the policy section of the speech. Like, out of control, he's gone. And here's the nutty thing.

The Republican Party...

I didn't even absorb that that actually was what he was proposing. But you're right, that was the speech.

But it's worse. The Republican Party in that room could have just winced and been quiet. They clapped for it. They clapped for it. Because they are lost. And so the policy piece of the speech was absolute zero. And all the rest of it was just trying to cheat applause from people he brought to the show.

We're just coming up on 11 p.m. Eastern time.

You have just experienced the longest State of the Union ever in State of the Union history. It wasn't just the feeling you had. It was the math. Over an hour and 47 minutes, the president blowing out of the water the previous record for the longest State of the Union speech ever, a record he himself set last year. In terms of the length of the speech, which I think will probably be the bottom line up front that people take away from this speech was just how achingly long it was. Part of that was because of the pace.

The president proceeded through this speech with two remarkably different speeds. At the very beginning, he was speaking very quickly and very excitedly, and he ran through a number of striking lies on economic matters. The very beginning of the speech, he talked about having inherited the worst inflation in the history of the country, completely ignoring the worst inflation in the history of the country was in the 1980s and the 1920s.

He then talked about gas prices and misstated them dramatically. Gas prices on average are like two ninety four a gallon. He was talking about a dollar and eighty five cents a gallon gas. He then talked about his miraculous and best ever in the history of the country job creation. Just for context, in twenty twenty three under Joe Biden, the economy of the country job creation. Just for context, in 2023 under Joe Biden, the economy created over 2 million jobs.

2024 under Joe Biden, the economy created over 2 million jobs. 2025 under Donald Trump, job creation was less than 200,000 jobs. So just a wild misstatement by the president. Also, in general, talking about the health of the economy,

talked about having inherited the worst talking about the health of the economy, talked about having inherited the worst economy in the history of the country and turned it into the best. Economic growth, GDP growth in 2023 was 2.9 percent under Joe Biden. 2024 was 2.8 percent under Joe Biden. Last year, under Donald Trump, it was 2.2 percent. So again, just sort of rushing through

These statements he was bragging about grocery prices Food prices inflation there is actually up 2.9 percent over general inflation at 2.5 percent grocery inflation is up This year compared to last year The president didn't seem very invested and the lies that he was talking about the economy But he did list a whole bunch of them right off the bat. But as I say, some of the takeaway there, I think, is mostly going to be his pace and

his freneticism. I asked our control room to pull just one, like, 30-second clip from this front section

of the speech, so you can just hear how wound up and weird he was. In fact, we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we're winning too much. We can't take it anymore. We're not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we're just always losing. But now we're winning too

much and I say no no no you're going to win again you're going to win big you're gonna win bigger than ever

that was what was going on with the president at the beginning of his speech we at least at that point thought that the speech would go quickly because he was speaking quickly even if he was ad-libbing a lot But then he ended up slowing down a lot and particularly slowing down markedly for long stretches of the speech that were essentially sort of violence porn

He talked about people being covered in blood gushing blood blood pouring out of things He talked about people being on the edge of death. He went into graphic detail on a number of different people's injuries of various kind. And in those moments, he slowed down, ad-libbed a lot, and tried to give seemingly as much sort of gory detail as he could in talking in very stark detail about a terrible attack on a Ukrainian woman in North Carolina, ad-libbed that the person who had attacked her had gotten

into this country because of open borders, which was not at all true. That woman was not attacked by somebody who had come from outside this country. But that was the sort of—as, again, sort of violently pornographic riffing that the president did very slowly throughout the back half of his speech, which made it go on for the longest period any State of the Union address has ever gone on before. There were very few actual proposals that were announced.

He announced a war on fraud to be led by J.D. Vance. He announced something about 401Ks. I think the length of the speech—there will be two takeaways, my take. It's from this speech. And one is the length of it, as the president luxuriated in the descriptions of the goriest things that have ever been mentioned in any State of the Union speech. And I think also this indelible image from just before he started, Congressman Al Green, who famously heckled the president and sort of wielded his cane at the president last year, this time holding up a sign at the beginning of the speech that said,

Black people aren't apes, before he was rushed out of the chamber. That, of course, is a reference to the president having posted something on social media, putting the heads and faces of former president and former first lady Barack and Michelle Obama on apes' bodies. Representative Green putting that front and center tonight at the very start of this speech. The president has now rushed out of the chamber fairly quickly. And we now await the Democratic response.

Nicole, what did you see tonight?

Well, I saw the same things you saw, but I circled the same moment. And I didn't know what sound bite you were going to play. But there were two things said before the speech that just clanged in my ears the whole time. One of them was Senator Cory Booker, who said to you in response to your last question, an explanation for why he wasn't going. Donald Trump is violating the rule of law. He's violating judicial orders. He's taking our children. He's violating

our public safety. This should not be business as usual our country is in crisis And then Stephanie rule talked about how he's in a gilded bubble and I actually viewed the speech as a window It is Chris said he's not trying to persuade anyone of anything This was a window into what Stephanie's describing He lives in a world and and and after he talks about all that winning He talks about how everyone comes up to him and talks about how hot

we are. Well do you know who thinks that? Not the, I mean 34% of Americans approve of the job he's doing. I don't know what subset thinks the country's hot but it definitely most likely includes the people on the omelet line at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. And so his entire feedback loop is exactly what Stef Ruhl described after being with him today. This is not just a bubble, which all presidents can end up in, most try hard to push out of it, literally and figuratively.

He has wrapped himself in the kind of people who think the country is hot. And when he said that to a country of which 66% disapprove of the job he's doing, including large swaths of his own coalition, just revealed himself to be completely, completely out of touch.

Jen, we're about, we think, just a couple minutes away, maybe even less than that, away from Abigail Spanberger's Democratic response. So we'll have to go to that in a minute, but let me get your first response to Trump's remarks.

As I was watching that, I was just thinking about the fact that we are just over eight months from the midterm elections. And that is, no matter what number of people battled through that nearly two-hour speech, it's still going to be his largest audience of the year.

And if you're sitting in a White House before a speech for any president, you're thinking about a couple things. How does the president use that speech to give a message to not just the people in the chamber but his political allies out there about what they should be talking about, what the agenda is, what the winning message is? And Trump decided to double down on things that are hugely unpopular.

I mean, to your point, it was like a three-part speech. There was the gross, violent pornography part of it. There was the circus entertainer part where he was bringing out unrelated people and vignettes. And then there was a part that was policy ish. Right. And that was doubling down on tariffs in the ABC poll. Fifty eight or seven. Sorry. Seventy two percent of independents disapprove and doubling down on immigration. And his policies were 58 percent disapprove.

So if you're a Republican sitting in there, you're a Republican running for office, that is not a speech that gives you a guidance, not a speech that helps you out there try

to win.

If one of the primary reasons for our country's stunning economic turnaround, the biggest in history where the Dow Jones broke 50,000 four years ahead of schedule and the S&P hit 7,000, where it wasn't supposed to do it for many years, were

tariffs.

I used these tariffs, took in hundreds of billions of dollars to make great deals for our country, both economically and on a national security basis. Everything was working well. Countries that were ripping us off for decades are now paying us hundreds of billions of dollars. They were ripping us so badly.

You all know that. Everybody knows it. Even the Democrats know it. They just don't want to say it. And yet these countries are now happy, and so are we. We made deals.

The deals were all done. And they're happy. They're not making money like they used to, but we're making a lot of money. There was no inflation, tremendous growth. And the big story was how Donald Trump

called the economy correctly. And 22 Nobel Prize winners in economics didn't. They got it totally wrong. They got it really wrong. And then, just four days ago, an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court

— it just came down. It came down. A very unfortunate ruling. But the good news is that almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made — right, Scott? — knowing that the legal power that I, as President,

have to make a new deal could be far worse for them, and therefore, they will continue to work along the same successful path that we had negotiated before the Supreme Court's unfortunate involvement. So, despite the disappointing ruling, these powerful countries saving, it's saving our

country, the kind of money we're taking in. Peace protecting, many of the wars I settled was because of the threat of tariffs. I wouldn't have been able to settle them without. We'll remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes.

And they have been tested for a long time. They're a little more complex, but they're actually probably better, leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary. It's already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid

for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love. Members of Congress and my fellow Americans, our nation is back, bigger, better, richer,

and stronger than ever before. Less than five months from now, our country will celebrate an epic milestone in American history, the 250th anniversary of our glorious American independence. This July 4th, we will mark two and a half centuries of liberty and triumph, progress and freedom in the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of the

Earth. And you've seen nothing yet. We're going to do better and better and better. This is the golden age of America. When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide-open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world.

But tonight, after just one year, I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before, and a turnaround for the ages. It is indeed a turnaround for the ages. It is just a very short time ago. We're not going back. Today our border is secure. USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! Thank you.

Today, our border is secure. Our spirit is restored. Inflation is plummeting. Incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before. And our enemies are scared.

Our military and police are stacked. And America is respected again, perhaps like never before. After four years in which millions and millions of illegal aliens poured across our borders totally unvetted and unchecked, we now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far. admitted to the United States. But we will always allow people to come in legally, people hard to maintain our country. The flow of deadly fentanyl across our border is down by a record 56 percent in one year. And last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history.

This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history. The lowest number in over 125 years. Year 1900. In fact, substantially before my wonderful father, I had a wonderful father, Fred, before he was born, substantially before he was born. That's a long time ago. He wouldn't like me to say that, but that's a long time ago. He wouldn't like me to say that, but that's a long time ago.

The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in the history of our country. But in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years. And in the last three months of 2025, it was down to 1.7 percent. Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor — it was, quite honestly, a disaster — is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places $1.99 a gallon.

in some places $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.