President Trump’s address to Congress

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s address to Congress concluded on Tuesday evening, I listened to what PBS’s post-speech panel had to say about it.

The panel wasn’t exactly chock full of Trump fans. It included New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s penned some scathing things about the president. But even though a few members criticized some of the content of Trump’s speech, they all praised his tone, which they agreed seemed “presidential.”

If you’re a young progressive, a racial justice activist, or someone who’s developed an affinity for the verb “resist” in the past several months, you probably watched the wrong Democratic response to President Trump’s joint session of Congress.

Unless you speak Spanish, that is.

Donald Trump, in his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, did something that he rarely ever does: He spoke in code.

Trump called for the US to change its immigration system to be “merit-based” — one of those terms that is generally understood, in Washington, to refer to a specific policy. It’s political code for changing the composition of people settling in America to favor educated, highly skilled immigrants and reduce family-based immigration, which allows US citizens and permanent residents to bring certain family members to settle permanently in the US.

Donald Trump would like a lot of things to happen.

Donald Trump would like peace in the Middle East. Donald Trump would like Mexico to pay for the wall. Donald Trump would like the press to be nicer to him.

President Trump may have successfully read his teleprompter during his address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday, but his attempt to assuage members of the disability community may have fallen flat.

After mocking a disabled reporter during his presidential campaign (twice), which, according to one poll, people considered one of the most inexcusable acts over the course of his entire campaign, Trump has angered some disability advocates by using a woman with a disability, Megan Crowley, as a vehicle to justify his stance on loosening regulation on the Food and Drug Administration. Crowley who had the rare illness Pompe disease, was saved by an innovative treatment created by a company her father launched in 1999.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (WV), Joe Donnelly (IN), and Heidi Heitkamp (ND) stood and applauded multiple times during President Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday night, breaking with the bulk of the Democratic Party.

The majority of congressional Democrats were visibly critical of Trump’s address. Others laughed, groaned, or even skipped the speech altogether.

President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night address to Congress was an unusually important occasion.

While it wasn’t technically a State of the Union, it served the same purpose: to outline his priorities and policy agenda for the coming year.

The prolonged standing ovation that President Donald Trump led on Tuesday for the widow of a fallen US commando was an effective bit of political theater. It also masked the lingering controversy over the botched raid in Yemen that took the life of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, which has injected a grieving family into a raging political debate about whether the White House erred in signing off on the mission.

Near the end of his high-profile speech to Congress Tuesday, Trump paused to pay tribute to Owens’s widow, Carryn Owens, who was sitting next to the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump.

For one minute and 36 seconds of Donald Trump’s address to Congress, legislators of both parties stood and applauded Carryn Owens, the widow of Navy special operator Senior Chief William Ryan Owens, who was slain in a January raid in Yemen.

“Ryan is looking down right now. You know that,” Trump said. “And he is very happy because I think he just broke a record.”

For the first 39 days of his presidency, Donald Trump advocated a confrontational policy agenda with a confrontational style. In his first address to Congress Tuesday night, the agenda remained confrontational, but Trump tried to make it sound inspiring, nonthreatening, even conventional.

Trump’s speech was designed to mimic that of an ordinary president. The reality TV bad boy — the one who stokes petty feuds, wanders off script, rants about “fake news,” and spreads nonexistent tales of voter fraud — didn’t show up. The man in his place — a politician laying out his agenda in a more traditional way — won him rave reviews from many in the Washington press.

President Donald Trump used a new word in his first major address to Congress: parents.

Trump called for bipartisan support of two of the big campaign promises he pitched to appeal to women and middle-class families — a national child care plan and paid family leave.

Obamacare has permanently shifted America’s health care debate, and Donald Trump’s address to Congress proved it.

In the speech, Trump laid out five principles any Obamacare replacement must meet.

The Donald Trump Show is getting stale, old, and, frankly, a little bit boring.

President Trump’s big speech before Congress on Tuesday night was the epitome of the show. There was the gross hypocrisy of “the time for trivial fights is behind us,” the campy propagandism of creating a Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office, the prepared remarks in all caps calling to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Donald Trump began his speech to a joint session of Congress with many promises — broad promises, such as, “I will not allow the mistakes of recent decades past to define the course of our future.”

But he quickly transitioned to more specific policy promises, which, if fulfilled, would affect the millions of Americans Trump addressed Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump used his first congressional address to deliver a five-point outline of some policies he supports in an Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan.

Trump only briefly explained each, but what he described are in line with what we know House Speaker Paul Ryan and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price support.

President Donald Trump said during his joint address to Congress on Tuesday that he will build “a great, great wall along our southern border” — in part to stop drugs from pouring in at an “unprecedented rate.” “Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately stop,” Trump promised early on in his speech.

A solution is desperately needed. In 2015, mostly due to the opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic, more than 52,000 deaths were linked to drug overdoses — the highest single year of drug overdoses in US history.

President Donald Trump will cap off the first 40 days of his presidency by addressing a joint session of Congress tonight at 9:10 pm Eastern in the Capitol, in his first major speech since his inauguration.

Update: Trump’s address to Congress (full annotated transcript)

A college student with a rare disease was one of President Donald Trump’s special guests at his address to Congress Tuesday night, which happens to be Rare Disease Day.

Megan Crowley was diagnosed with Pompe, a rare and deadly genetic disorder, when she was 15 months old. Doctors gave her six months to live.

During his first address to Congress, President Donald Trump on Tuesday promised to “break the cycle of violence” that plagues America’s cities — a line he’s used many times, but never with all the context it needs.

“The murder rate in 2015 experienced its largest single-year increase in nearly half a century. In Chicago, more than 4,000 people were shot last year alone — and the murder rate so far this year has been even higher,” Trump argued. “This is not acceptable in our society. Every American child should be able to grow up in a safe community, to attend a great school, and to have access to a high-paying job.”

President Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress Tuesday night. Here are his remarks as prepared for delivery, as provided by the White House. Check out our staff’s live annotations at this page.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States, and Citizens of America:

Democratic women in Congress made a bold statement at President Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night by wearing white, a symbol of the suffragist movement.

The effort was led by Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL), chair of the House Democratic Women’s Working Group. That working group includes all 66 Democratic women members and delegates of the US House of Representatives, many of whom participated in the action.

In his first address to Congress on Tuesday, President Donald Trump will reportedly take a different tone from the “American carnage” he described in his inaugural speech. He plans to “lay out an optimistic vision for the nation,” according to an outline given to conservative media outlets like the Resurgent.

According to the outline and released excerpts, the much-anticipated State of the Union–esque speech will echo many of the promises Trump has expressed in the past, including an America-first approach to the economy, trade deals, and immigration, as well as strength in law enforcement.

For his first address to a joint session of Congress, Trump is returning to an old standby of his presidential campaign: “angel moms” and families, whose family members were killed by undocumented immigrants.

Jamiel Shaw Sr., who lost his teenage son in 2008 — and spoke at the Republican National Convention — will join first lady Melania Trump for the president’s speech, along with Jessica Davis and Susan Oliver, whose husbands, California police officers, died in the line of duty in 2014.

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump is scheduled to give a high-profile speech to Congress laying out his budget proposals for the year to come. It’s the equivalent of a State of the Union address in a year when one didn’t happen (as is tradition in a presidential transition year).

Very few details have been released to the press as to what topics and legislative priorities Trump plans to discuss. But five foreign policy issues have already proven important to the early Trump era, and seem critical to watch for: the defense budget, trade, ISIS, the US border with Mexico, and Russia. Here’s what the Trump administration has said and what to listen for in tonight’s speech.

If you want to understand the opposing camps in President Trump’s America, watch his speech to Congress tonight — and then watch the Spanish-language response. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the message that Astrid Silva and Democrats are sending will be unmistakable.

Trump is expected to characterize unauthorized immigrants as violent criminals — he’s invited relatives of people killed by unauthorized immigrants to the speech, and he’s likely to highlight their stories (just as he did on the campaign trail) to make a case for cracking down on “bad hombres.”