Trump’s Speech Vowed a New “Golden Age,” But His Policies Drive Us Into the Dust

On Tuesday evening, hours after the Dow Jones stock index had closed — falling several hundred points for the second day straight in response to the U.S. imposing high tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China — Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress and declared a new “golden age of America.”

In two days, global stock markets have shed trillions of dollars in value, far more than the U.S. could ever possibly hope to reap through tariffs. Trump being Trump, he doubled down on an action that threatens to wreak havoc on the global economy, to send the market into a tailspin — and to dramatically raise unemployment across the three countries of North America.

Come April 2, he announced, the U.S. will impose what he called “reciprocal tariffs” on countries around the world, thus likely setting off a cascading chain of negative market reactions and escalating tariff battles around the world. Trump singled out for mention the countries of the European Union, South Korea, India, and several others.

And, while he acknowledged there might be economic pain, he made light of that and essentially told farmers, who stand to be hit particularly hard by the tariff wars, to simply buckle up and enjoy the bumpy ride. Let’s see how those farmers, most of them Trump voters (upward of three-quarters of voters in farming counties went for Trump in 2024) appreciate that advice.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal has reported the deputy secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce as saying “this could be the start of a downward spiral that puts us in 1930s trade-war territory,” warning that Trump’s tariffs on imports could trigger a Great Depression-magnitude crash.

GOP members of Congress responded to Trump’s inane claims about the economy by leaping to their feet and chanting, “USA, USA” and “Trump, Trump, Trump,” ignoring the fact that banking, the auto industry and high-tech stock have all been particularly hammered this week. Democrats sat stony-faced.

The speech, a State of the Union in all but name, ran long, as Trump’s speeches have a tendency to do. For nearly two hours, the MAGA man blasted forth a mélange of outright lies, distortions based around kernels of truth, irrelevant anecdotes and shameless insults. He also went off on a truly cringeworthy self-pity party, repeatedly lambasting the Democrats — most of whom were sitting silently in the chamber and holding up placards with such phrases as “false” and “save Medicaid” — for being unwilling to applaud him.

Trump’s a showman. He may whine like a damaged kitten, but he also knows when to be faux-generous; witness his call-out to the 13-year-old cancer survivor who had always wanted to be a cop, and whom Trump appointed, live on camera, as a Secret Service special agent; or his equally theatrical announcement to a young man in uniform that his dream of getting into West Point had come true and he had been accepted. Both youths went wide-eyed with excitement, thus furthering the narrative of Trump as the beneficent strongman.

But cut out the reality TV antics, and what was left was a combination of recycled GOP tropes dating back to the Reagan era, and to Barry Goldwater before him — government is bad; the Panama Canal should belong to the U.S. again; oil is good; taxes are horrible; rich people are good, poor people are bad — layered with a veneer of Trump-patented, Gov. George Wallace-influenced, bigotries and imperial braggadocio.

Trump’s tariffs and imports could trigger a Great Depression-magnitude crash.

In those nearly two hours, the president repeatedly smeared undocumented immigrants as “criminals” and “savages.” He implied Democrats are weak on crime, whereas Republicans want to empower the police to be not just tough on crime, but also deliberately rough on law-breakers (excepting, of course, the ones from January 6, 2021). He asserted that transgender Americans must be rooted out of every institution, from women’s sports to the U.S. military, snarling: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone — and we feel so much better for it.”

In Trump’s telling, Elon Musk (fascist salutes notwithstanding) is a true American hero for rooting out vast nests of corruption in USAID. No mention, of course, of the defunding of polio vaccination efforts, TB treatments globally, or HIV drugs that millions of African patients rely on. No mention, either, of the cessation of campaigns to control malaria and Ebola outbreaks, or of the millions of people he put at risk of dying of starvation because of the abrupt end to U.S. anti-hunger programs. (You know things are egregious in this arena when even a Supreme Court as conservative as this one decides, as it did this morning, that the Trump administration has overstepped its bounds by refusing to honor USAID contracts for work already completed.)

Trump also repeated Musk’s tired canard that many millions of Social Security recipients are decades older than 100, including some who are over 160. In reality, the Social Security Administration uses an old computing program, COBOL, which does not have a built-in default date but might interpret 75 as 1875 instead of 1975, due to incorrect coding or legacy data handling practices. Had Musk spent a bit more time thinking before talking, he would likely have realized that what his hacker-squad has uncovered isn’t fraud on an epic scale, it’s simply the programming kinks of a six-decade-old computer program. But Musk, like Trump, seems never keen to parse his statements for accuracy. Say it enough times and the most flagrant lie eventually acquires a patina of reality.

Some other tidbits from the speech: Trump really, really wants to grab Greenland for the United States. “We need it … for international world security,” he claimed. “And … one way or the other, we’re going to get it.” Greenland’s prime minister has already rejected Trump’s imperial ambitions. His plan, of course, will also be unwelcome news to the European Union, which has pledged to protect the borders of its members — a group that includes Denmark, a NATO member which governs Greenland.

Trump also really, really doesn’t like Ukrainians, arguing that the military assistance they have secured from the U.S. in recent years is “like taking candy from a baby.” He’s none too fond of the European Union, which he accused of exploiting the U.S. on tariffs and of continuing to buy vast amounts of Russian oil and gas, even while the U.S. was spending money to arm Ukraine in its fight.

But he does have rather a soft spot for Russia, whose leaders he said had sent his team “strong signals that they are ready for peace. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”

Arguably, though, the biggest takeaway of the night was just how messianic Trump has become. Jaw-droppingly, he asserted that the opening month of his presidency was more successful than that of George Washington. Later, as his lengthy oration dragged to a conclusion, he announced that during the assassination attempt against him in July, he “was saved by God to make America great again.” He continued: “It’s our turn to take America’s destiny into our own hands. … This will be our greatest era; with God’s help over the next four years.” He built to a Musk-ian crescendo: “We are going to … plant the American flag on the planet Mars, and even far beyond. … My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future, because the golden age of America has only just begun.”

Trump’s vision is, of course, a fever dream, tinted with the hues of a superhero cartoon narrative. In six weeks, Trump has frayed many of the U.S.’s closest alliances; has, to the mystification of those allies, reoriented the country toward Russia and North Korea in its United Nations votes; has poisoned the well of friendship with the U.S.’s neighbors to the north and south; and has eviscerated the livelihoods of many tens of thousands of hard-working public servants. Trump’s tariff wars will hurt U.S. consumers and many U.S. companies. And the damage to stock portfolios caused by his policies will hit the retirement accounts of tens of millions of elderly Americans and middle-aged Americans hoping to be able to save up for what’s stacking up to be an increasingly insecure future. His assault on anything remotely to do with promoting a cleaner, greener economy will condemn the world to intensifying climate change. The president has failed to instantly reduce inflation, and his tariff policies will almost certainly lead to an acceleration of price increases. And far from growing the economy, federal data suggest a sharp economic contraction this quarter.

That combination of economic contraction and inflation is known as stagflation, the dreaded duo that bedeviled western economies in the 1970s. If and when it arrives, ushered in to the GOP’s endless, unthinking chants of “USA, USA,” it will come stamped “Made in America” and “Brought to you by President Donald J. Trump.”