Interviewing Donald Trump over the decades, I would sometimes do a lightning round of questions at the end. It was always his favorite part. He relished giving short bursts of opinion on a range of political and cultural topics.
Now he has turned his entire presidency into a lightning round, putting out a breathless stream of executive orders, slapping tariffs around the globe, siccing Elon Musk on the federal government to rip it apart from the inside out, blowing up alliances as he pulls Vladimir Putin close. Trump’s energy, his output and the sheer volume of words he has uttered in the first six weeks of his presidency are stunning.
He spilled many more words on Tuesday night during his address to a joint session of Congress, talking for 100 minutes, the longest presidential address to Congress ever.
Again, it played like a lightning round. He was Action Jackson, racing through pledges to cut regulations, getting rid of seemingly silly or superfluous foreign aid programs, leaving the World Health Organization. He sped through boasts about economic success, even though the Atlanta Fed says the economy will contract this quarter. He dashed through sketchy claims, painting electric cars as evil, predicting that tariffs will lead to a car boom and asserting that there are nearly 20 million centenarians — some pushing 150 — who are getting Social Security. (Data shows that only 89,000 people over 98 received Social Security payments in December 2024.)
He sounded like a Bob Barker-style game show host, tossing out prizes in a rapid-fire style to his guests in the gallery. Congratulations, you’re going to West Point! Congratulations, you’re in the Secret Service now!
He was loud, confidant and forceful and, for his supporters, enormously effective. G.O.P. lawmakers were jubilant, even though many are unnerved by his tariff infatuation — markets plummeted over the past week — and his disgusting embrace of Putin.
Democrats could only combat this dominant Trump by refusing to applaud or stand, waving little paddles with messages like “Musk steals” and “False,” wearing hot pink or, in the case of Representative Al Green, getting thrown out.
They’re going to need a bigger boat.
When I interviewed Trump during the 2016 race, I wondered if the profane and rambunctious former reality show star could ever be presidential. He replied that he could do it if he wanted, pointing to the fact that he could get along at fancy dinners with the society matrons of Palm Beach.
But it turned out that Trump did not need to alter his behavior to be president. He simply altered the presidency to match his personality.
He has mocked Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” at political rallies, and he mocked her as “Pocahontas” again to her face in his formal address to Congress.
He sprayed the air with exaggerations and untruths at his rallies, and he didn’t feel the need to add any fact-checking as president. “A manifesto of mistruths,” proclaimed Nancy Pelosi after the speech.
He blithely ignores blatant contradictions in what he’s saying and doing. He praised police officers, saying they would get the respect “they so dearly deserve” and calling for the death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer. This, even though he sided with the insurrectionists, pardoning nearly 1,600 “patriots,” as he calls them, in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, where police officers got hurt trying to fight off the violent Trump mob.
He declared in the House chamber that “the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” ignoring the irony of Musk — the most powerful chainsaw-wielding unelected government official in history — basking in the first lady’s box. (At long last, wearing a suit.)
Giving a shout-out to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump said, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment.” But Trump has been eliminating regulations that would accomplish that. He wants to make deep cuts in the E.P.A., and two of his top appointees at the agency are former chemical executives.
He honored a child who he said had probably gotten cancer from chemicals, even though he is slashing scientific and public health research.
He hailed his tariff hikes as “protecting the soul of our country,” saying, “I love the farmer — who will now be selling into our home market, the U.S.A.” But many farmers make money selling abroad, so they may not appreciate Trump’s sanguine exclamation, “Have a lot of fun. I love you, too.”
Trump crowed that he “brought back free speech in America.” Meanwhile, some of his executive orders have mandated that the government ax selected “woke” words and phrases, and he has threatened that schools that tolerate certain types of protest will lose federal funding.
He has also barred The Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news service won’t bend the knee and call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
It seems unsavory to brag about free speech when his administration has been conjuring Joseph McCarthy by asking government employees to name names. The administration set up a hotline to get snitches to tell on colleagues promoting D.E.I. And the head of the F.B.I.’s New York field office was forced out this week when he interfered with Trump’s revenge rampage, urging employees to “dig in” and refuse to name names of agents who had worked on Jan. 6 cases.
Other presidents might have tried to heal divisions after an acrimonious election, but not Trump. He knows that trolling the Democrats, ratcheting up divisions and stoking the culture war got him to the Oval, and he never gives up what gets him to No. 1.
In his address, Trump relentlessly trashed his predecessor, blaming him for everything, even the price of eggs. Ignoring the decorum that once marked presidential addresses, he dismissed Joe Biden as “the worst president in American history.”
As usual, he took all the credit and gave everyone else the blame.
“We have Marco Rubio in charge,” Trump said. He added, as his secretary of state looked on, “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”
Trump has not been focused on his campaign promise to lower prices. But at the Capitol, he finally raised the issue. “The egg prices, out of control. We’re working hard to get it back down.” Then he swiftly passed the buck to his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins. “Secretary, do a good job on that.”
He offered a softer tone on Ukraine, citing a message from Volodymyr Zelensky urging peace and saying he was ready to sign the minerals deal. Now that Trump has forced the Ukrainian president to grovel, now that he has humiliated the war hero in public and put his own swollen ego above America’s longstanding foreign policy principles, he may give Zelensky another chance.
His new imperialist attitude was on display, a sharp contrast to his old rants about how awful George W. Bush was for his failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. About Greenland, Trump said, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” He also vowed, “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it.”
The thrust of Trump’s speech was, of course, to glorify himself, to claim sanctification bestowed on him by God when he escaped assassination. The main point was to brag that he is the best of the best. It is the same way he once boasted that the rolls in the restaurant at Trump Tower were “the best rolls in the city.”
The first month of his presidency, he said, was “the most successful in the history of the nation. And what makes it even more impressive is, do you know who No. 2 is? George Washington. How about that?”
Trump has remade the presidency, just as he has remade the Republican Party, in his own image. The first presidential address of his new term mirrored all his old rallies: It was an ode to himself.
