Mar 10, 2025 By Oren Spiegler 4 min read

I am glad that I did not remain awake to watch the president’s address to a joint session of Congress on March 5. It would have interfered with my sleep.

A speech that is delivered to the House and Senate at this time of year is traditionally one in which a leader outlines initiatives that he hopes Congress will pass and in which he attempts to foster bi-partisanship. None of that was contained in this unduly long 99-minute hateful, divisive diatribe, the most lengthy such speech in modern history.

This president is on a war footing: furious at those who disagree with him, Democrats, immigrants, Muslims, a media he is attempting to neuter, transgender individuals whom he is attempting to erase from society, and career federal government workers whom he classifies as being part of his fictional “deep state.”

Following the speech, Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who at the ripe old age of 83 is one of the most smart, savvy, and energetic individuals in Congress, noted some of the lies that the president told. Here are a few:

Trump asserted that:

– There are tens of millions of Americans age 100 or over who are receiving Social Security benefits (the fact is that there are only about 100,000 centenarians who are alive in our country);

– “The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.” I suppose he forgot about his de facto co-president Elon Musk, who is carrying out the wishes of Trump and the authors of the notorious Project 2025 manifesto: to destroy the federal government;

– “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment,” this as he seeks to decimate the Environmental Protection Agency and appoints former chemical company executives to prominent positions within it;

– His tariffs are “protecting the soul of our country.” Although the threatened levies have not fully been inflicted yet, inflation is the certain result and multiple companies, including Target Corp. and Dollar Tree, have stated that they are preparing to raise prices on their products pursuant to the imposition of tariffs;

– He “brought back free speech in America.” This whopper disregards: his infantile and unhinged banishing of the respected Associated Press from the White House Press Pool for refusing to accommodate his renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America; the lawsuits he has brought against media companies that have not reported favorably about him.

Trump claimed to honor our heroic law enforcement officers, telling the audience that they will “get the respect they so dearly deserve,” and he called for capital punishment to be inflicted on anyone who murders a police officer. His support for police officers, as we have seen, is conditional. If they are beaten as they defend our democracy and the Capitol, the assailants become the heroes: great patriots, and the officers the villains. The police officers who were severely wounded and those who died in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, including several by suicide, are of no importance to the president.

In a stark contrast to the tone of such speeches throughout history, Trump blamed his predecessor for everything, including the skyrocketing price of eggs that are in short supply, and he claimed that Joe BIden was the worst president in history. The president claimed that his administration is working on getting the price of eggs down. The man who promised that prices would come down ON DAY ONE has in fact been asleep at the switch, more focused on perpetrating a rampage than helping consumers.

As the chaos, disorder, and positions that shift from day to day have been unleashed on the country and the economy with the stock market declining sharply, Trump disassociates himself from what he has wrought. In responding to a question about the decline in the markets, the president said with a straight face that he believed it is the result of “globalists” (whatever that is) who are unhappy with how successful the United States is today.

May God help and rescue our (Dis)United States of America.

Oren Spiegler is a Peters Township resident.