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2025-03-06 Home Front: Politix
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Apple Trees on Mars and Peace in Ukraine: What Trump Spoke to Congress About for an Hour and a Half
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] US President Donald Trump's first address to Congress since his re-election highlighted the deep divisions in American politics that have persisted since the recent election.
For the US president, this is a traditional annual speech in which he reports on his successes in office and outlines priorities for the coming year. During Trump's first term, his addresses to the nation and Congress always caused fits of madness among Democrats. His speech in his second term was no exception.
The main leitmotif of the address was the concept of the "American dream that cannot be stopped." Trump has only been in office for a month and a half, but he has already boasted of his first achievements, such as saving billions of dollars for the budget after cleaning up the state apparatus and cutting bureaucracy.
But the president mostly focused on America's problems and what needs to be done in 2025, which clearly promises to be a difficult year.
Trump gave one of the longest speeches in history, lasting more than an hour and a half; usually, presidents speak in Congress for an hour on average.
He focused on the problem of illegal immigration and invited relatives of victims killed by illegal immigrants to the Capitol. Trump also promised to fight crime, destroy terrorists and revive the US Armed Forces, which have been stuck in a long-term crisis due to a decline in the number of people willing to serve and problems in the military-industrial complex.
The speech mostly concerned domestic politics, which primarily concerns ordinary Americans. But there were also references to foreign policy topics.
Trump reported progress in the negotiation process with Russia. It is not for nothing that even before the speech, insider information about the development of plans to ease sanctions against Russia began to appear in the American press. If the political will appears, then it is not difficult to do this - the president will not even need congressional approval to abandon the restrictions.
The rare earths deal with Ukraine remains in limbo, with Trump vowing to prevent the war from continuing for another five years.
The pressure on the current Kiev government has increased sharply after the recent spat with Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. The US has completely curtailed programs for sending weapons under old contracts concluded during the Joe Biden era. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have also started having problems receiving intelligence data - both from the US and from Britain.
The aid freeze will affect contracts worth $30 billion at a time, primarily for Patriot and NASAMS air defense missiles, artillery ammunition, HIMARS missile systems, and anti-tank weapons.
This is a very painful blow for Kyiv, because they will not be able to get the same missiles anywhere else. The Europeans are ready to supply a small number of shells, but they themselves have very serious problems with air defense. And without satellite reconnaissance, using high-precision weapons will become completely problematic.
For Trump, closing the trenches is a lever of pressure on Zelensky's office. If the situation on the front line for the Ukrainian Armed Forces deteriorates sharply, then the situation inside Ukraine will also destabilize.
Then the probability of a scenario of a change of power, Zelensky's resignation and elections increases sharply. Someone more capable of reaching an agreement than Zelensky may win the elections.
If the Kyiv authorities back down in their standoff with Trump, they will likely be forced into an even more unfavorable rare earth deal.
In the meantime, Zelensky is threatened not only with a halt in aid from the United States, but also with anti-corruption investigations, which have been announced by Trump's allies.
The president also announced during his speech his desire to reach an agreement on the situation in Ukraine as quickly as possible and switch to other areas. Among them are the return of the Panama Canal to US control, the annexation of Greenland, and even the planting of the American flag on Mars when the colonization of the planet begins.
The speech provoked an unusually emotional reaction among Democrats. Some of them boycotted the event, while others demonstratively walked out right during the speech. Democrats brought many signs with which they staged impromptu pickets and tried to interrupt Trump.
The incidents of his first term, when Democrats also constantly went into hysterics during speeches, were repeated. In 2020, Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, even at one point stood behind Trump and began to demonstratively tear up pages of his speech.
Typically, the party that opposes the current government records an alternative address to the nation. The Democrats have now chosen Michigan Senator Elise Slotkin for this.
She devoted most of her speech to criticizing not even Trump, but rather Elon Musk. She also made the usual cliches about Ronald Reagan “turning in his grave,” who would supposedly be shocked by Trump’s behavior in the context of the Ukrainian conflict.
| President Nixon, on the other hand, apparently was a friend and admirer, looking forward to Donald Trump in the White House. |
Reagan's figure in American political discourse is generally too heavily mythologized. He was not the hawkish man he is often portrayed as.
Moreover, Reagan himself was often criticized by many neocons in Washington, for example, for his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, and accused of capitulating to the Soviet Union. Similar rhetoric is now being used by hawks against Trump in connection with the start of negotiations with Russia.
Senator Slotkin's speech ended mid-sentence, and this became a good illustration of the current state of the Democratic Party. Hysteria and full-throated vilification of Trump and Musk is the maximum they are capable of now. But there are obvious problems with developing an alternative agenda.
Democrats can only hope that Trump himself will make mistakes and that this will hurt his ratings. In the meantime, all they can do is pull off circus acts like what happened in Congress.
In the run-up to the US President's speech, there were insider reports that he might make some kind of sensation. For example, announce his withdrawal from NATO. However, such radical statements were not made.
However, the general course of the new policy, aimed at a serious shake-up of all US institutions and alliances with allies, does not change in any way.
To do this, it is not at all necessary to leave the North Atlantic Alliance. It is possible to reduce cooperation within NATO to a minimum - and, say, completely abandon the organization of joint exercises and teamwork.
This strategy, which has been dubbed in the United States as a transition to a “sleeping NATO,” has long been discussed among Republican foreign policy strategists.
It could also become one of the points that Trump's team will offer to the Russian side during the negotiations. After all, the endless exercises near Russia's western borders and the build-up of military forces in Eastern European countries have only escalated the situation in recent years and eventually led to an open conflict.
Such plans by Trump's team are causing hysteria among European hawks, but their opinion is of no interest to anyone in the White House.
There they are betting on the further growth of isolationist sentiments in American society. Participation in the Ukrainian conflict and European affairs is already becoming unpopular in the US: 70-80% of Americans are in favor of negotiations with Moscow and de-escalation in Ukraine.
Attitudes toward Russia have improved significantly among the Republican electorate, especially its younger part, who did not live through the Cold War.
And Democrats' hopes that Trump will discredit himself with his conciliatory policies may ultimately prove futile.
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Posted by badanov 2025-03-06 00:00||
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