Democrats dismiss call for unity as disingenuous

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said President Donald Trump had “abandoned not just our people but our values.” Sen. Kamala Harris, a presidential candidate, dismissed his “insecure appeals to unity.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered her criticism with exasperated looks and pointed applause behind the president's back.

Emboldened by Trump's poor polling and the coming presidential campaign, Democrats firmly rejected his call for a bipartisan reset in his State of the Union address Tuesday, responding with fierce criticism and a dramatically different vision for the country.

The Democratic response, at times stoic and at others defiant, amounted to a statement of strength by a party that recently took back control of the House and forced Trump to back down during a 35-day partial government shutdown he had hoped would pressure Congress to fund a new wall on the southern border.

Even before Trump began speaking, Democrats had started offering their rebuttal. The party warned in a Tuesday afternoon tweet that the president's speech would “be filled with blatant lies and broken promises.” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted Trump was going to just take his annual break from “364 days of the year dividing us and sowing a state of disunion.”

It was a marked contrast in tone to Trump's. He delivered a speech that offered few new policies or routes to compromise but nonetheless repeatedly called on Democrats to work with him. They rejected those appeals.

“The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people but our values,” said Abrams, the former Georgia state House minority leader who delivered the official Democratic response. “We know bipartisanship could craft a 21stcentury immigration plan, but this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart.”

As Trump spoke, near- ly a dozen declared and potential Democratic presidential candidates watched from the gallery, often unmoved during his applause lines. All of them have made clear that they believe themselves to be better suited for bringing the country together. Unable to speak at the event, they made their views known with their invites to the chamber.

Harris, D-calif., brought a recent victim of the California wildfires, who had been furloughed by the shutdown. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-ore., brought a young girl from Guatemala who had been separated at the border from her mother under a rescinded Trump policy. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., brought a transgender Navy officer who could be banned from serving under a Trump order.

A few minutes into the presidential address, House Democrats offered a real-time fact check of Trump, who had arrived at the Capitol aiming to reintroduce himself as a postpartisan dealmaker.

“The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda,” Trump said, before listing major policy areas like health-care prices, infrastructure and immigration. “There is a new opportunity in American politics, if only we have the courage to seize it.”

As Republicans stood to applaud, the new House majority members remained in their seats, hands at their sides. The president's words, an offer that the White House had telegraphed with promises of “comity,” would not come to pass. The nation's political leadership, poisoned by years of fierce disagreement, was beyond all that.

The worldviews of the two sides were so different, so poisoned by ill will, as to make the annual ritual of a prime-time address seem extraordinary. In a room familiar with the occasional distance between words and reality, Trump's outreach sometimes appeared less like an olive branch and more like the setup for another round of recriminations over which party is to blame for political dysfunction.

Democrats, led by Pelosi, had arrived in the chamber confident of their political position and determined to transmit their disapproval of the president and their belief that many of his words carried little meaning.

When Trump declared that the “state of our union is strong,” Republicans stood and broke into “USA” chants that most Democrats did not join. Pelosi sat behind Trump and shook her head, as if in disappointment.

When Trump decried “ridiculous partisan investigations” the new Democratic House has launched, Pelosi sighed in a pantomime of exasperation. When he called for rejecting the politics of “revenge, resistance and retribution” and embracing compromise, she stood, pointed at him and applauded loudly, as if to indict him for doing what

WASHINGTON – The annual State of the Union address is a chance for the president to deliver his vision and policy priorities – and sometimes exaggerate or outright misstate his accomplishments and the reasons for taking policy actions.

Here’s a look at what President Donald Trump got right and what he got wrong Tuesday night.

What Trump said: “In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom – a boom that has rarely been seen before. There’s been nothing like it.”

The facts: Economic growth accelerated last year as the Republican tax cuts took effect, putting the economy on track to top 3 percent annual growth for the first time since 2005. The partial government shutdown delayed the fourthquarter data to confirm that.

The best year during the Obama administration was 2.9 percent in 2015. Experts said the U.S. economy was better in the late 1960s and 1990s.

But the initial stimulus from the tax cuts, which included slashing the corporate rate, began to fade in the second half of 2018. After expanding at a 4.2 percent annual rate in the second quarter last year, growth slowed to 3.4 percent in the third quarter and the consensus fourth-quarter forecast is about 2.6 percent.

The Federal Reserve is projecting 2.3 percent growth this year and 2 percent growth in 2020. Some economists are more pessimistic and said a recession could hit in 2020.

ENERGY What Trump said: “We

he now decried.

The only true moment of bipartisan celebration came when Trump praised the record number of women have unleashed a revolution in American energy – the United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas in the world. And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy.”

The facts: The U.S. is the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas. But the nation actually imports more energy than it exports – and has done so since 1953.

This could change soon but hasn’t yet. According to a recent Energy Department forecast, the country is expected to be a net exporter of coal, oil and natural gas by 2020.

What Trump said: “In the past, most of the people in this room voted for a wall – but the proper wall never got built. I’ll get it built.”

The facts: Customs and Border Protection spent about $2.3 billion between fiscal 2007 and 2015 to increase barriers on the border from 119 miles to 654 miles, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Congress has appropriated nearly $1 billion in the last two years for about 50 miles of replacement fencing in California, New Mexico and Texas. Last year, lawmakers gave Trump more than $640 million for 25 miles of new levee fencing and other “to be determined” barriers.

Trump’s impasse with Congress over his demand for $5.7 billion to build about 230 more miles of walls along the border led him to force a partial shutdown of government that lasted 35 days, the longest in U.S. history.

So far, no new miles of border barrier have been completed under Trump.

serving in Congress. Then both sides of the chamber joined in chanting “USA.” “That's great,” Trump said.