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Glee at disruption papers over the costs: Trump sparks global concern, Democrat outrage

U.S. President Donald Trump attends a joint session of Congress as Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) holds a sign reading "This is not normal", in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 4, 2025

In the days immediately preceding his address to Congress on Tuesday night, US President Donald Trump took a chainsaw to government agencies, initiated a trade war, cut off arms to Ukraine and sided with a brutal authoritarian, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

But a visitor arriving from a distant planet who listened to Trump’s address before an audience of enthusiastic Republicans and dejected, powerless and angry Democrats would not have sensed the scale and intensity of the disruption of the past 44 days and the deep concerns it has produced.

While Trump resurrected familiar arguments from his campaign rallies to justify his actions — citing waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, the dangers posed by migrants entering the country illegally, the unfairness of the global trading system and the need to bring a bloody war to an end — something was missing.

He never made the case for why the potential benefits of the disruption he has triggered — “nothing but swift and unrelenting action”, he called it, quite accurately — was worth the very real costs at home and abroad. He never addressed the fears of investors who have been hitting the “sell” button amid an escalating trade war or of allies reaching for their panic buttons as Washington aligns itself with Moscow. He never talked about why he was inflicting more economic pain on his allies than his adversaries.

“They’ll be a little disturbance,” was the closest he came to acknowledging the reaction to his moves, in that case, speaking of his steep tariffs.

When he briefly turned to the war in Ukraine towards the end of his more than 100-minute speech, it was chiefly to ask the question: “Do you want to keep it going for another five years?”

He never addressed the question of what a just peace might look like or whether America or its European allies would guarantee that Ukraine would remain an independent state. And not once did he suggest that Putin might have to give up something in return — or what would happen if the Russian leader decided to keep on fighting.

It was, in short, a speech oddly detached from the questions that have been roiling Washington since Trump began issuing his wave of executive orders, since he insisted that the US take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal and rebuild Gaza without Palestinians, or since he began suggesting, first as a joke and then in tones more menacing, that Canada would be wise to become the 51st state.

True, Trump has never been one to dwell on policy; in his first term, presented with a series of options on dealing with a complex telecommunications issue, he declared, “This is really boring”.

But given the gravity of Trump’s recent actions, it was not unreasonable to look to the speech for insight into where his America First instincts are taking the country and the world, as he seeks to scrap portions of the Western-dominated system of laws and rules that have guided states in Nato or the European Union.

No insights were offered. In some ways this speech was pure Trump, designed more for applause lines than deep examination. And the theatre of it all was impressive, down to the removal, at the order of Speaker Mike Johnson, of the 77-year-old Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat, for standing in protest and shouting, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid”.

It turned out to be the only discussion for the evening of Medicaid — among the most politically explosive issues facing the administration and the Republican-controlled Congress — and it ended when Green, waving his cane, was escorted from the floor.

But it was also pure Trump to celebrate disruption he had triggered without describing its long-term objectives, beyond the slogan of advancing what he called a “common-sense revolution”. He did not talk in any detail about how to take on America’s biggest global challenges — such as handling China’s growing reach and expanding nuclear arsenal or a strategy for peeling the Russians and the Chinese away from each other.

In fact, he barely mentioned America’s two biggest nuclear-armed superpower competitors at all, much less their work together.

Nor did he dwell on his order for a “freeze on all foreign aid”, a step that has had profound human consequences: the inevitable deaths of the world’s poorest, who had been dependent on American food or medicine that was suddenly locked away in warehouses across Africa and West Asia, or the paralysis of a programme to fight AIDS that President George W. Bush says was the crown jewel of his Republican administration, because it saved millions of lives.

He also did not talk about how the US planned to replace the role that USAID played in countering the roots of terrorism, or the risks of hacking away at a little-known part of the energy department, the National Nuclear Security Administration, that keeps America’s nuclear stockpile secure.

Trump appeared to welcome an overture from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to get back on track with discussions over peace talks and a mineral deal. But Trump left in place his ban on delivery of further weapons or other major aid to Ukraine.

And on trade, he gave no hint that he would back down on the higher tariffs he imposed on Tuesday on China, Canada and Mexico, and he offered a dizzying array of explanations of what he was doing, including forcing a crackdown on fentanyl, protecting American businesses and punishing adversaries.

While he said Canada and Mexico must do “much more” to curb the flow of drugs, he didn’t give specifics.

However, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, earlier suggested the tariffs might be in large part quickly lifted to prevent them from turning into a tax on American consumers.

But Trump stuck with his demand for “control” of the Panama Canal, something he is already a step closer to this week with the sale of two of its Chinese ports to an American investment group. He sounded less martial about buying Greenland or taking it by force.

All this zigzagging has understandably left America’s traditional allies confused, angry and suspicious. Canada’s exiting Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who now takes seriously Trump’s jokes about turning the country into the 51st state, said he believed the intent of the tariffs levied on his country was to hollow out the country.

“What he wants is to see is a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” He added: “That’s never going to happen.”

Perhaps stunned by what Steve Bannon, the MAGA strategist, calls the “muzzle velocity” of action and orders, Democrats have had a difficult time addressing the disconnect between what Trump talks about and what they see as workers get fired, tariffs put upward pressure on prices and hold times for tax assistance stretch into hours.

But in her response to Trump on Tuesday, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, started trying to marshal the argument.

She zeroed in a Trump administration critique on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is central in Trump’s effort to shrink the federal workforce.

Musk watched the President’s address from the House gallery.

“Is there anyone in America who is comfortable with him and his gang of 20-year-olds using their own computer servers to poke through your tax returns, your health information and your bank accounts,” Slotkin asked, with “no oversight, no protections against cyberattacks, no guardrails?”

Were Americans OK, she said, with “the mindless firing of people who work to protect our nuclear weapons, keep our planes from crashing and conduct the research that finds the cure for cancer, only to rehire them two days later?”

Slotkin, a former CIA officer and moderate Democrat who was elected in November in a swing state that went for Trump, sought to flip Musk’s argument that he is bringing relentless private-sector efficiency into the government.

“No CEO in America could do that without being summarily fired,” she said.

New York Times News Service