About Last Night | Power Line

It was a good night for our side:

* The President had no difficulty going for close to two hours. Unlike Biden’s speeches, there was no suspense over whether he could remain vertical. To be fair, though, the speech wasn’t all that long. It just took a while to deliver because it was interrupted so often by applause.

* Trump talked a great deal about his achievements in his first six weeks in office. That was unique. Presidents don’t usually have so many accomplishments in so short a time.

* The President stuck mainly to his most familiar and most popular issues. He talked a lot about the border, essentially taking a victory lap. He spent a good deal of time on men in women’s sports; one of the guests in the gallery was the young woman who suffered a brain injury when spiked by a man in a volleyball game. He gave a full-throated defense of tariffs, focused on impressive amounts of investment taking place in the U.S.–something that his critics usually ignore when they talk about the issue. Maybe I am off base here, but I think the commentariat worries a lot more about tariffs than the voters do.

* The price of eggs featured, naturally. For some reason, eggs have become symbolic of the country’s malaise under Joe Biden.

* Speaking of Biden, Trump broke with tradition by attacking his predecessor, whom he described as the worst president in our history. That is the kind of thing I usually wouldn’t like. On the other hand, Biden criminally prosecuted Trump and tried to have him imprisoned. That is what really broke with tradition.

* Trump didn’t get to foreign policy until near the end of his speech, by which time I suspect most viewers had gone to bed. On Ukraine–another subject that I think concerns commentators more than most voters–he read aloud the letter he got yesterday from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I wrote about the letter, which Zelenky also posted on X, here. It vindicates Trump’s reaction to Zelensky’s Oval Office grandstanding.

* What probably struck most viewers of the speech more than anything else was the Democrats’ bad behavior. They obviously came in intending to make a demonstration, which they did only a few moments into Trump’s speech, with no plausible excuse. That was a gift. It gave Speaker Mike Johnson the opportunity to demand proper decorum and to have the most obnoxious Democrat, Al Green, expelled from the chamber. Green looked sinister as he shouted unintelligibly and waved his cane in a threatening manner. I have no idea why any of the Democrats considered their outburst a good idea. I can only assume that they were trying to placate their hysterical base, which demands that they fight the president more vigorously.

* Things didn’t get any better as the evening wore on. The Democrats waved black placards that said “Musk steals,” which makes no sense. A number of them wore pink, for reasons I don’t know. Periodically through the speech, they would get up and walk out. By the end, the Democrats’ section of the House was mostly empty. At no time did they applaud anything, even Trump’s most popular and least controversial initiatives. The overwhelming impression that came through, along with bad manners, was irrelevance.

So it was a successful night for the forces of good.