Democrats failed to come up with a coherent, effective strategy for protesting President Donald Trump‘s speech Tuesday to a joint session of Congress, historian Douglas Brinkley said.
“President Trump did what he needed to do,” Brinkley told CNN of Trump’s rambling, record-breaking 99-minute address. “Trump seemed relaxed. He had, I think, a better night than the Democrats. They were just, I guess, everybody left to their own.”
During the speech, the president blamed his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, for everything from the war in Ukraine to “wokeness” to spiraling prices of consumer goods, and took credit for closing the border and gutting the federal government.
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The Democratic response was mixed.
Some Democrats stayed in their districts and held town halls, some booed loudly, some held up signs during the speech, some walked out, and one—Rep. Al Green (D-TX)—stood up, shouted and gestured with his cane. When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told him to sit down, he refused, and was then escorted out of the chamber.
Brinkley, a widely published historian and professor at Rice University in Houston, pointed out that MAGA Republicans jeered Biden during his State of the Union addresses, but said the escorting out was different because, although it was a “fiery moment” for Green, it didn’t “help the Democratic party.”
“It might create a university press biography about Al Green that never would have been written, because it is a moment in history, but it’s not something that the Democrats can score points on,” he said.
But he did identify one bright spot for Democrats during the night: Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-MI) official rebuttal, which he described in far more glowing terms than Trump’s just-good-enough speech.
“Slotkin pulled a rabbit out of her hat,” he said. “That was a very brilliant, relaxed response. Andy Beshear and her should be the [party] voices, I think, coming from the heartland of America.”
