About halfway into his record-setting 107-minute address, Trump challenged every member of Congress to stand if they agreed with the principle that America should first protect its citizens rather than “illegal aliens.” While the Republicans stood, clapped and hooted, Trump leaned over the lectern and glowered at the unanimously seated and stone-faced Democrats. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” he told them. The Democrats, he declared later in his speech, were “pro-crime.” They were “sick people.”
A few House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, openly jeered the president. Another, Representative Al Green of Texas, was escorted from the chamber by Capitol security officials for holding up a sign that read, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” (in reference to the president’s Truth Social post that month of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes). More notable, however, were the empty seats: Roughly half the Democrats in both the House and the Senate chose to boycott the address.
That so many members of Congress refused to take part in their one annual public event counted as yet another first of the Trump era. “I went because I’m an institutionalist,” Representative Terri Sewell, an eight-term Democrat from Alabama, later told me. “This body can still be a powerful voice for good. That’s the reason why I did it. But it’s increasingly harder to stomach, to be honest.”
The Republican members, for their part, dutifully issued statements praising Trump’s address. “Last night, President Trump highlighted the wins of his administration and the Republican-led Congress for the American people,” began the news release of Representative Dave Joyce, a seven-term congressman from Ohio and an appropriations subcommittee chairman. But Joyce offered a more somber assessment a few months later, when I asked him if he felt that Congress had assumed an overly submissive posture toward Trump.
“I think we have, unfortunately,” Joyce replied. He recalled the first State of the Union address he attended, in 2014, just after President Barack Obama had threatened to use his pen to sign executive orders and take other executive actions to pass his agenda if Congress failed to do so. “I was sitting next to a Democrat, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ But we’re just as bad. We continually cede power to the executive. The president blows things up, and then we just go home,” Joyce said. On occasions when Trump has expressed displeasure over a legislative matter — as he did over the release of the Epstein files and the failure to pass voter restrictions — Republican congressional leaders have complied by going into recess rather than holding votes they knew would anger the president.