The Wednesday read: state of disunion

Trump delivers a joint address to congress and whines that Democrats won't applaud

Good Wednesday, saints! I trust that your Tuesday was fruitful, peaceful and full of joy. Members of Congress had a Tuesday too, and the big question for the Democrats was whether they would attend the felonious president’s planned address to the joint session of congress.

It’s easy to spot the cause of their anxiety. Beyond the fact that he is a literal felon, nothing about Donald Trump’s second presidency is normal, including the fellow reality show cast members, nepo babies, vaccine cranks, Oprah Winfrey Show castoffs, Fox hosts, podcast bros and billionaires he’s stocked his second administration with, not to mention the weirdo billionaire who ruined both Twitter and an increasingly uncool electric car company that they and congressional Republicans all seem to report to. Throw in the rapid-fire fascism the regime and their Project 2025 buddies and six-figure salary doge kids are slapping in place alongside economy-wrecking tariffs and it’s easy to see why some Democrats were questioning the propriety of attending and potentially normalizing thia madness.

In the leadup to Tuesday, members I spoke with were struggling with whether the best option would be to boycott the proceedings, or attend and mount some form of protest. Particularly inside the Congressional Black Caucus, there was a real divide, no real mandate from the top, and genuine debates over what the best strategy would be.

To be (there) or not to be (there)

In the end, several prominent Democrats did skip the speech, including reps Maxine Waters, AOC and the guy the elder caucus chose instead of her to be ranking member of the House oversight committee, Gerry Connolly, along with Senator Patty Murray. Others, like Senator Chris Murphy joined together to do a media rapid response. But among those who did attend, things did get spicy.

The drama began during the Trump walk-in, when Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico took the front row spot once occupied during every presidential joint address by the late Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who always got a presidential greeting. But instead of extending her hand, Stansbury held up a sign in press view that read: This Is Not Normal. And in the latest sign of the Republican Party’s descent into schoolyard bully misogyny, an unnamed Republican (apparently from Texas), snatched the sign and tossed it into the air.

Enter (and exit) Al Green

Minutes into the address, the always vocal Texas Rep. Al Green, who is Black, stood and began interrupting the insurrectionist president, causing Speaker Mike Johnson to eject him, cane in hand, from the gallery, to the hoots of the nearly all white male Republican caucus. The unfortunate optics of an elder Black man being hauled out of the House chamber while mainly white men rowdy it up, apparently was lost on the very intentionally throwback Grand Ole’ Party.

Green was a model of resistance. It’s a little bit troubling that fellow Democrats didn’t stand up right then and walk out with him. One member who did eventually walk out on the address said the atmosphere “felt like a Klan rally.”

I didn’t watch the speech. Instead, I was part of a pretty epic 24 hour streaming marathon called State of the People, organized by political and media veterans Angela Rye, Ashley Allison, Holli Holiday of Win With Black Women and more, and featuring a cavalcade of civil rights, political, organizer, legal, media and comms stars.

In short: it was EPIC. And the contrast between the joyous, hopeful vibes during the 24 hours of policy discussions, strategic insights, community uplift and just great information, and the downcast, downbeat assessments I’ve heard about the congressional Trump Show couldn’t be starker. And I suspect the people who watched the State of the People marathon walked away feeling more, not less, empowered. And anything they needed to know about the latest episode of Maga Eats America can be found in the litany of clips online. Sahil Kapur also did a good rundown here.

Trump did get a few laughs, including when he ludicrously declared: “the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over…” as if Elon Musk isn’t literally running his government and the Republican congress as well.

The unelected bureaucrat who owns Trump, the Republican congress, and America

He also reiterated that he’s sending SOS Lil’ Marco to get him the Panama Canal, that he’s going to devour Ukraine’s rare earth minerals (but only after Zelenskyy says sorry for speaking back when Donald and James David yelled at him in the Oval), and various other things about how terrible pronouns and immigrants are. And he devoted part of his speech and his thoughts afterward to whining that Democrats won’t clap for him …

Damn, this felon is needy…

In short, the speech was exactly what you’d expect. And the polls show it was rather blandly received by everyone except the maga cult.

The real action took place in the outer hallway of the capitol, where Make It Plain radio host Rev. Mark Thompson was serving as onsite correspondent for the State of the People town hall, which served as the closing act of the 24 hour streaming extravaganza.

Thompson conducted live interviews with Rep. Stansbury, a one-two punch combo of Reps Jasmine Crockett in the hallway and Maxine Waters (who boycotted the event) from her office, Maxwell Frost of Florida, Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts, and other members who walked out not long after Green was ejected.

About 20 members walked out in total; a mix of Congressional Black Caucus and a smaller number of Congressional Progressive Caucus members.

Pressley said she had initially not planned to attend the speech, “because Trump is a fascist,” but she decided it was important to hold space for her invited guest; a disabled, laid off federal worker. “He has no respect for the country,” Pressley said, noting Trump’s pardoning of more than a thousand January 6 insurrectionists, including the most violent members of the putsch. “He doesn’t respect us as a co-equal branch of government,” she added. “And if he has contempt fot the people, then we’re going to stand in solidarity with the people.”

“Trump is trying to merge the congressional, legislative and judicial branches,” Los Angeles area congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove said, adding that Republicans “want to take the country back to a 1950s America.”

“DEI is just a code word” for their plans, Kamlager-Dove added, noting that she walked out because, “I couldn’t listen to someone talk about dismantling all that we have built in this country,” including the Social Security safety net. “I could not sit and kowtow to the neo Klan,” she said.

Rep. Lateefah Simon of Oakland, California, who earlier in the evening had delivered the Working Families Party prebuttal to the Trump spoke, said our democracy “is in hospice.”

“We are ‘this close’ to being in a segregated apartheid America again,” she said. “My mother wan’t born in a democracy. “Yours wasn’t either. they couldn’t vote. This democracy could be ripped away in a second.”

Regarding Rep Al Green, she added:

“That brother is the floor every day fighting the good fight. He shook his cain and challenged the leader of the new Klan and (Speaker Johnson) had a Black man remove him: the sergeant at arms. This is a discriminatory body right now that doesn’t see Black men and women as their equals. They’re going to make sure that every head of every department looks like the men who had our uncles and fathers swinging from trees.”

Maxwell Frost said the general consensus among Democrats is that “this is not a normal time.” Trump, he said, “has never shown decorum to us as Black people, so he deserved none in return. “Many of us walked in with a plan of what to do,” he said. Several held signs or wore black shirts with messages written on the backs in white, so that the signs would be visible to Trump when they stood and turned their backs on him. Frost’s shirt read: “No Kings Live Here.” He also held a sign reading: “Musk steals.”

Frost called what’s currently happening in Washington “a billionaire coup” whose purpose is to “take away Medicaid and Medicare that people worked hard for so they can give billionaires a tax cut,” while directing the blame for the inevitable economic fallout on “poor people and immigrants.”

Frost and Crockette both explained the logic behind members attending the speech and then walking out. Had members not attended, Crockette explained, Republican leadership would have filled their seats with GOP staff as seat fillers. By attending and walking out, “we left them with empty seats.”

“I believe … when you don’t have all the power you want, you use all the power you’ve got,” Frost added, saying Democrats should do whatever they can to “delay and interrupt this extreme agenda that the people don’t believe in.”

The problem for Democrats, however, is that their silent protest did not make it to TV, since the cameras in the gallery never turned to show their sign-holding. So only Green’s disruption made air.

Rye asked Rep. Frost if in the end he thought it was worth it to have shown up for the address. “I come from direct action and movement politics,” Frost replied. “It’s all about taking up space and leaving on your own accord. My people sent me here and I believe in taking up space.”

“I showed up to be in solidarity for marginalized people,” he said. “This is how I decided to do my action tonight.”

After the speech, Trump walked the front row to shake hands with his solicitous courtiers in the various branches of the government Elon purchased for him, and greeted some of his key partners in crime — Supreme Court justice Bret Kavanaugh, whom he installed during his first term after a weirdly truncated, heavily White House influenced FBI background investigation of Kavanaugh’s alleged past sexual aggression, and chief justice John Roberts, who helpfully negated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the constitution so Trump could bypass the whole “can’t run for office as an inusrrectionist” thing and make his bid to become president for life. Cameras caught the special moment as Trump thanked Roberts and added: “I won’t forget it.” I’m sure he won’t.

In other news today:

The February jobs numbers — the first that are solely Trump’s, not Biden’s … absolutely suck. Just 77,000 jobs added last month.

And Trump is making Canada and Mexico great again as their citizens rally to their flags as the modern day McKinley launches a truly stupid trade war. Hope the power stays on in the Northeast.

OPM is like NVM on firing all the probationary federal employees…

Nepo Rob’s HHS spokesperson resigns after just weeks on the job after disagreements over … wait for it … the measles outbreak in Texas.

And dontcha hate it when your maga AI bot defends the KKK?

And Trump is officially the most divisive, unpopular president in modern history. So there’s that…

He also might have thanked Roberts too soon. The court n a 5-4 ruling, with the five including Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett (whom Trump also greeted after his speech), that the Trump administration must unfreeze $2 billion in doge-frozen foreign aid. Alito is real mad about it, declaring himself “stunned.” But hey, don’t worry Sam, the Trump gang will probably just ignore the ruling anyway.