Donald Trump’s primetime address Tuesday night from Capitol Hill — billed as a chronicle of his “Renewal of the American Dream” — comes at a critical juncture early in his second term, as voters who elected him to tackle inflation and improve the economy are beginning to weigh the impact of his agenda.
Trump’s first six weeks in office have unfolded at a frantic pace, with billionaire ally Elon Musk slashing and burning through government departments and agencies while the president issued executive orders targeting culture war hotspots. Trump’s efforts to force a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia erupted into a public rift with Kyiv, with the U.S. freezing aid to Ukraine three years after Russia’s invasion.
Earlier Tuesday, the U.S. plowed forward with the largest set of new tariffs in nearly a century, slapping levies on a broad swath of goods from China, Canada and Mexico.
Now the president must convince voters — and, critically, the lawmakers who represent them — that his scorched earth strategy is not only paying dividends, but is the smart bet despite economic and political headwinds gathering on the horizon.
So far, Trump’s message to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle has boiled down to: Get on board or get out of the way. And it’s largely worked, melting away opposition to deep cuts to the government’s spending and workforce and a dramatic reshaping of U.S. foreign policy.
But that go-it-alone approach could face its limits this week, as he asks Congress to pass more ambitious goals, including extending his 2017 tax cuts, and prevent more immediate problems such as a looming government shutdown.
On Tuesday night, Trump will need to present the case that his policies are working – and build a broad swath of support for a legislative agenda that will need to navigate Republican’s razor-thin congressional majorities. Trump will speak to the largest national audience he has had since his inauguration, amplifying the stakes for a presidency starting to show signs of stress under mounting public concern about the economy.
“I’m going to be fascinated to see if he actually talks about the agenda he ran on, as opposed to talking about the agenda of Project 2025,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres, referring to the conservative policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation but disavowed by Trump’s campaign last year.
Trump thus far has pitched his dizzying series of tariff threats as something of a cure-all for what he says are the country’s economic woes.
In addition to duties on Mexico, Canada and China — the three largest U.S. trading partners — he’s moving to tax imported steel, aluminum and copper in an effort to protect industries critical to national security. Planned levies on automobiles, pharmaceuticals, chips and lumber are meant to boost domestic manufacturing. The president has also announced a system of reciprocal tariffs to end what he calls unfair trading practices.
Yet a growing number of Americans are worried prices will stay high, or even rise, in part due to Trump’s planned tariffs, surveys show. U.S. consumers also pulled back on spending on cars and other goods in January, a retreat that could stoke concerns about the nation’s economic resilience.
He’s chalked up early wins on curbing illegal immigration, an issue that contributed to his win last November. Border encounters precipitously dropped in February compared to the year prior, though detentions have slowed, as Trump deployed military troops and technology to the border, ramped up deportation flights and and expelled some arrested migrants to Guantanamo Bay.
Fractious House Republicans passed a budget plan, which allows Congress to start work on Trump’s legislative priorities. Tech and pharmaceutical companies have announced their intent to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S.
Tariff concerns
Still, voter anxiety about inflation, should it persist, could threaten Republicans’ chances of keeping control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
During the campaign, Trump pledged to tamp down inflation on day one of his presidency but he has yet to detail plans to rein in consumer costs, going beyond efforts to cut taxes and encourage more domestic energy production.
Trump has said his tariffs will rebalance U.S. trading relationships, while imposing few costs on Americans and raking in huge sums of revenue to pay for his tax cuts and reduce the federal deficit. But trade experts and economists have expressed doubts they will accomplish all, or even most of those goals.
DOGE cuts
Musk’s cost-cutting crusade under the banner of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency has gone further in gutting agencies than even some Trump loyalists anticipated, prompting pushback from some of the president’s top officials and angry encounters at Republican lawmakers’ town hall meetings with constituents.
Trump has discounted the skirmishes, saying in a social media post Monday that they are the result of “paid troublemakers” attending the meetings.
The Musk-led effort has the potential to become a political albatross for Trump. The savings from DOGE posted to its website has been riddled with errors, and has also not come close to totaling the $1 trillion in waste, fraud and abuse Trump has said it would find.
Its moves to cull the federal workforce, jettison government contracts and unilaterally slash foreign aid have become a rallying cry for Democrats who have thus far struggled to agree on an anti-Trump message.
Still, Democrats’ disjointed response to Trump’s address has exposed their lingering internal divides. Some Democratic lawmakers plan to skip the address, while others are expected to bring federal workers and others who have been affected by the cuts.
Global conflicts
Trump is poised to tout his efforts to resolve conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, even as resistance from Arab nations to his Gaza forced-relocation plan and an Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have clouded the prospects for breakthroughs on both fronts.
“I think the president will have some concrete things to propose and that will start the discussion of how we get to the end of this war, and that is a conversation that has not been had for three years now,” said Victoria Coates, a national security adviser to Trump during his first term who is now a vice president of the Heritage Foundation.
