How Trump Made Democrats Look ‘Like Absolute Clowns’ in Address to Congress

“America is back,” President Donald Trump declared in his Tuesday address to Congress, making no bones about connecting what he sees as the imminent American revival to his electoral victory in November and the accomplishments of his first six weeks in office.

The president’s triumphant tone, and Democrats’ reactions to it, made Democrats look “like absolute clowns,” Daily Caller Senior Editor Amber Duke told me in this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.”

Since their loss in November, Democrats claim to be doing a lot of soul-searching, but apparently without much success, given that Democrats in Congress refused to even stand for the possibility of an American “golden age” under Trump, much less stand for families of migrant crime victims or a child on his way to beating brain cancer.

Democrats are adrift: The American people see it, and the president seems to delight in it. For Duke, “there were two things that Trump did that I thought were incredibly effective.”

“The first,” Duke said, “was listing specific accomplishments from the administration” just six weeks into Trump’s second term. “Typically, the president comes in the first year, they give this address, they’re talking about the things that are wrong with the country, and what they’re going to do throughout their administration to fix it.”

“Well, Trump’s already been fixing it. He’s already accomplished a lot in his first six weeks, so it sounded like the type of speech that you would hear in year two, year three, even year four,” Duke explained.

Trump brought the receipts, too. Trump “back[ed] it up with data,” Duke said, particularly when it came to “examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE has uncovered,” and issues of border security.

“Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border,” Trump said Tuesday night. “And I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country. And what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded.”

Indeed, Customs and Border Protection data for February 2025 obtained by Axios shows Border Patrol made 8,300 apprehensions of illegal migrants.

Duke credited the administration’s success to “a combination of policy and of posture.”

“A lot of illegal aliens are self-deporting because they don’t want to get caught up in the mass deportation operation,” Duke continued. “And a lot are choosing not to cross the border in the first place because they believe now that the border is secure.”

For Duke, the second key to Trump’s success Tuesday night is what really made Democrats look “like absolute clowns”; namely, “moments in this address that were genuinely emotional and moving.”

Audience members were brought to tears by Trump’s recognition of the families of Jocelyn Nungaray and Laken Riley, both victims of deadly illegal migrant crime, and when Secret Service Director Sean Curran bestowed upon 13-year-old D.J. Daniel the title of honorary Secret Service agent.

“The most effective part out of all of that is, you had Democrats on the other side sitting down, refusing to clap, refusing to honor these ordinary Americans who have been benefited by the president’s policies,” Duke said.

Given the choice between Trump’s action and Democrats’ inaction, viewers of the speech fell squarely on the side of Trump. A snap poll conducted by CBS News/YouGov of those who watched the speech, though skewed heavily Republican, found that 76% of viewers approved of the speech, while only 23% disapproved. Nearly three-quarters of speech viewers said Trump was presidential and entertaining, 71% said he was inspiring, and 62% said he was unifying.

Poll numbers like those seemed at one point unthinkable for Trump. 

Duke suggested that the key to Trump’s current popularity and success could be his biggest setback. “In a lot of ways, Trump has to be thankful for losing in 2020 because Americans needed to see how bad it could get,” she said. 

“Biden, in fact, was worse than anyone could have predicted,” Duke explained. “It was four years of chaos, of weakness on the world stage, of a border invasion, massive inflation, making everyday goods unaffordable.”

“And now that Trump is in office and governing,” she concluded, “it’s like a breath of fresh air.”

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