Calm Trump pitches for US centre
Congress address lacks details
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has cast aside the dark rhetoric of carnage and conflict that defined the start of his administration and left in its place a recitation of familiar campaign promises with few details on how he’d turn them into reality.
His first address to Congress featured an Obamacare repeal, a $1 trillion (R13.1 trillion) infrastructure plan, an immigration crackdown and a defence build-up. Designed to win the nation’s centre, Trump’s remarks sprinkled patriotism and optimism over a politically divisive platform, and his calm and collected delivery won immediate applause among political pundits.
Yet governing requires Trump to provide direction, and there the speech fell far short of what many voters, lawmakers and investors said they wanted to hear. It’s unlikely to overcome the infighting and confusion that have stalled his legislative priorities on Capitol Hill.
Republicans indicated after the speech they were fine with being left to sort out the details. House Homeland Security chairman Mike McCaul said the president presented himself in a more visionary and inclusive way and said it’s up to Congress to fill in the blanks on his agenda.
During the speech, Trump offered an ambiguous opening on immigration, saying “real and positive immigration reform is possible”. That followed a lunch conversation in which he told network television anchors “the time is right” for a compromise immigration bill.
Still, he hewed to the tough rhetoric of his campaign, promising to kick off construction of his “great, great wall” on the southern border and recognising families he had invited as his guests whose relatives had been killed by immigrants who entered the country illegally.
On health care, Trump told lawmakers they should repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. But beyond vague guidelines – an endorsement of tax credits, protections for those with pre-existing conditions, and changes to Medicaid funding – he delivered little in the way of specifics.
That’s little solace to Republicans on Capitol Hill struggling to craft a package that could garner support within their own party, and nervous about Trump’s commitment to an effort certain to prove politically challenging.
And yet that was perhaps the most detail offered by the president on any particular policy. Trump skipped over his desire to loosen financial industry regulation, offered little insight into whether he’d support Republican tax proposals to cut rates and impose a tax on imported goods, and didn’t detail the budget cuts his administration is proposing to pay for higher military spending.
He also didn’t talk about how his broad policy strokes would fit within the $4 trillion federal budget without ballooning the deficit.
The response from financial markets was muted, with the dollar and US stocks futures easing slightly during the speech.
The address was “inspiring” to independent voters and a “chance to change the trajectory”, said Tom Davis, a former Republican member of Congress from Virginia who has headed the party’s national congressional campaign apparatus.
But “you have to translate this poetry into the prose of legislation”, Davis said. “He has to get the House Republicans together and make some pretty tough decisions – and they need to do it pretty quickly.”
Trump’s light-on-details speech was a marked contrast from the first congressional addresses of recent predecessors.
Barack Obama had already signed his $787 billion stimulus bill into law at the same point in his presidency.
When he spoke to Congress, Obama detailed specific elements of a budget the White House delivered later that week. That included proposals that later became signature accomplishments of the former president’s first term.