President Donald Trump delivered a rare 20-minute primetime speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday night.
The address included relatively little news but did frame up how the White House would like to sell its record on the economy and other issues amid increasingly dire political indicators.
Here are some takeaways from the address.
In case there was any doubt, Trump made clear his message will continue to feature a heavy dose of the B-word: Biden.
Trump repeatedly compared his economic and inflation numbers to his predecessor. Former President Joe Biden’s numbers were significantly worse, in large part due to the Covid-19 pandemic which caused economic turmoil and inflation to spike around the world.
Trump got to the point right away, beginning his speech thusly: “Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.”
“This [high inflation] happened during a Democrat administration,” Trump added, “and it’s when we first began hearing the word affordability.”
He mentioned Biden more than half a dozen times by name throughout the short speech – in keeping with his recent focus.
It’s a strategy that makes sense on its face; perhaps Americans will give Trump more berth if they come to believe he was truly dealt such a bad hand.
But it looks like a really tough sell right now. After all, a recent Fox News poll showed about twice as many registered voters said Trump is more responsible for the current economic conditions (62%) than said the same of Biden (32%). And the data suggest Trump’s economic numbers are close to where Biden was at his lowest points.
Trump’s advisers very much seem to want him to spend more time actually addressing Americans’ affordability concerns, rather than just trying to convince people that things are great (which the vast majority don’t buy).
But Trump has also indicated he’s not terribly interested in heeding their advice. The topic seems to bore him.
Wednesday night’s scripted address was probably closer to what those advisers had in mind, in that it wasn’t overwhelmingly Trump’s happy talk. But it also seemed like, yet again, Trump’s heart wasn’t really in it. And Trump’s delivery was a mess.
The president rattled off the speech at what felt like a lightning-quick pace for him. He seemed like he was shouting, with the sound sometimes becoming distorted. And he repeatedly stumbled over his lines on the teleprompter.
At one point, as Trump was rolling out new $1,776 dividends for military members, he initially read the number of service members (1.45 million) as “more than one thousand, four hundred fifty thousand.”
After the speech, Trump asked White House chief of staff Susie Wiles how he did on timing – as if he had been on the clock and needed to squeeze it all in. That’s certainly how the address felt.
Wiles confirmed: “I told you 20 minutes, and you were 20 minutes on the dot.”
It’s always remarkable how, even when Trump is reading a script, that script winds up featuring claims that would never get past an amateur fact-checker.
And this speech was certainly no exception, as CNN’s Daniel Dale writes.
Even inside the first minute of his speech, Trump falsely claimed that he came into office with inflation the “worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” (Inflation at the time was around 3%; that is far from the worst in history.) He then claimed the Biden administration let nearly 12,000 murderers cross the border. (False.) And he claimed he was “elected in a landslide” in 2024. (He didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote, and his electoral-vote margin was on the low side, historically.)
Trump went on to repeat a series of claims he makes regularly, including that he somehow reduced drug prices by hundreds of percentage points, which isn’t possible.
He also vastly overstated the amount of crime and illegal immigration under Biden, as well as his own record for ending wars.
Very little of what Trump said was particularly newsworthy. Indeed, much of it would be completely familiar to anybody who watches him speak off the cuff in the Oval Office or watches his rallies.
To the extent the speech carried any real bona fide news, it was those dividend checks for service members and a vague Trump promise to announce “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” … at some point in the new year.
Which leads to the question: Why was this even a primetime address?
There’s certainly something to be said for getting the networks to air your remarks and reaching lots of Americans. But, as noted, Trump’s delivery didn’t make for particularly compelling viewing. It was a blitzkrieg of words and numbers that would have been hard for anybody to penetrate and probably wasn’t terribly confidence-inspiring for a president who’s not in a good spot politically.
And in the end, the very fact that the White House decided to put this laundry list of talking points on primetime seems to betray how nervous it is about its political standing and its economic messaging.
Indeed, in his exchange with Wiles after the address, Trump said Wiles had told him he had to give the speech.
