What Trump Said in His Response to State of the Union

He wasn't happy Biden arrived late, 'shouted' the entire speech, acted 'angry and crazy'
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 8, 2024 12:30 AM CST
What Trump Said in His Response to State of the Union
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a Super Tuesday election night party Tuesday, March 5, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.   (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Donald Trump had promised to "correct, in rapid response, any and all inaccurate Statements" made by President Biden during his State of the Union address Thursday night, which he did on his Truth Social platform. The platform experienced some outages as the SOTU was happening, which Forbes refers to as "major glitches," but Newsweek described the technical difficulties as brief and said the site appeared to be running fine after the beginning of the speech. Either way, the Biden campaign took notice, posting a screenshot showing the Truth Social page buffering and captioned it, "Sad." Among Trump's complaints:

  • Biden's arrival time. Trump criticized Biden for arriving "very substantially late" to the address. The speech started at 9:26pm, 26 minutes after it was scheduled to begin. NBC News reports House Speaker Mike Johnson also appeared to take issue with this, and at one point "tapped his watch as if to say: 'OK, time to leave'" when Biden looked at him. Johnson missed the beginning of the GOP rebuttal as a result of the delay.
  • Biden's delivery. Trump said the entire speech was "shouted."

  • Biden's tone. Trump declared the speech "angry" and "polarizing" and said Biden appeared "crazy." "That may be the Angriest, Least Compassionate, and Worst State of the Union Speech ever made," he wrote.
  • Biden's content. Two examples, and there were more where these came from: In Trump's opinion, Biden didn't say enough about immigration. And in response to Biden's criticism of Trump's attitude toward Putin, Trump blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Biden ("Putin only invaded Ukraine, because he has no respect for Biden").
(See 5 points from Katie Britt's Republican rebuttal here.)

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