Keller: Here's what Trump's address to Congress was missing
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
If you somehow missed all of the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump's address to Congress Tuesday night was your chance to play catch-up.
The president used the first address to Congress of his second term to replay all the greatest hits from his victory. There were the odes to patriotism, military strength and fighting crime that you might also have heard at a Kamala Harris campaign rally, but plenty of hot buttons pressed that were anathema to the Democrats - denunciations of wokeness, of accommodations to the transgendered, and of course, undocumented immigrants.
And the partisanship was unvarnished. Former President Joe Biden was repeatedly trashed by Trump, called the "worst president ever" and blamed, falsely, for the soaring price of eggs. He ad-libbed a gratuitous reference to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas."
As their Republican counterparts whooped it up, Democrats sat sullenly, some waving signs reading "that's a lie" in response to egregious Trump whoppers like his widely-debunked claim that hundreds of thousands of Social Security checks have been sent to long-dead people. Early on, Democratic Congressman Al Green of Texas was ejected from the chamber for heckling the speech (a step not taken when a handful of Republicans did the same to Biden).
Front and center for it all was Trump's co-star in these early weeks, Elon Musk, introduced by the president as the "head" of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which contradicts recent White House claims that he is not actually in charge of the controversial cost-cutting project. Musk beamed as he drew rousing applause from the Republicans on several occasions.
But the celebration seemed to cool a bit when Trump finally, over an hour into the speech, addressed the trade war he has ignited with steep tariffs on imports from China and two of our closest allies, Canada and Mexico. And he made late and short work of the situation with Ukraine, reciting President Zelenskyy's make-up note and ignoring the now-infamous Oval Office dust-up of last week.
Democratic response to Trump speech
In the Democratic rebuttal, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) talked up the difference between "responsible" and "reckless" change, and parroted the party line that Trump is looking out for the rich at the expense of everyone else.
"Do his plans actually help Americans get ahead? Not even close," she said. But truth be told, the Democrats were a footnote during and after the president's speech. The GOP controls two of the three branches of government; Supreme Court skeptics might argue they've got a lock on all three.
We'll see how many people beyond friends, family and politics-addicted partisans stayed up late on a school night to listen to either speech. But the takeaway is clear and unsurprising.
Trump speech - what was missing
In Trump's first address to Congress as president, in February 2017, he called for "unity" and said at one point: "Solving these and so many other pressing problems will require us to work past the differences of party."
That rhetorical nod to something beyond rank partisanship was missing from this speech.
Also missing - reassurance to rattled citizens watching their retirement savings melt away as the markets tank in reaction to the Trump tariffs, and any kind of explanation of why he's been parroting Vladimir Putin's talking points.
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