During his joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump laid out his vision for the next four years and carefully revised the legacy of his first seven weeks in office.
Amid a slew of actions to chill speech and root out political opponents from federal agencies, Trump claimed that his administration had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” Earlier on Tuesday, Trump threatened to cut funding from schools that allow “illegal protests.”
“Our country will be woke no longer,” Trump said to applause after he celebrated orders making English the official language of the U.S. and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. He cheered the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action and his administration’s efforts to “remove the poison of critical race theory from our public schools” and make it the official policy of the U.S. “that there are only two genders.”
In practice, Trump has accomplished those tasks by ending federal environmental protections for minority communities, making it easier for employers to discriminate based on race, stripping money from schools that teach about racial inequality and threatening to upend programs that provide mental health support for homeless children.
“You can’t claim to stand for free speech while threatening schools’ funding to silence anti-war students.”
Since taking office, Trump has signed executive orders to threaten to deport students who take part in pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests and announced a list of schools that will receive visits from the Department of Justice over their handling of campus protests. He has also eliminated civil rights work and diversity and equity initiatives across federal agencies, and made plans to defund schools that teach “discriminatory equity ideology,” which includes teaching basic facts about racism in U.S. history like the idea that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”
“You can’t claim to stand for free speech while threatening schools’ funding to silence anti-war students,” said Tariq Habash, a former staffer in president Joe Biden’s Department of Education who resigned over Biden’s handling of the war on Gaza. Habash is now cofounder and director of the advocacy group A New Policy. “These efforts are not just antidemocratic, they’re illegal and a direct attack on academia, students, and faculty.”
Self-described liberals at universities around the country opened the door for Trump’s attacks on civil rights by making exceptions for freedom of speech on Palestine, said Democratic National Committee delegate Nadia Ahmad. “University leaders across the country are more than happy to carry out Trump’s anti-Palestinian deportation orders while publicly lamenting his attacks on DEI initiatives,” said Ahmad.
“They condemn him in rhetoric, yet eagerly enforce his agenda by silencing and expelling students. Their complicity reveals how shallow institutional commitments to human rights really are. The administration and university leaders, particularly the legal elite, have weaponized civility to declare certain human rights conversations off-limits,” said Ahman, who in August was struck in the head by Biden supporters wielding signs that read “We Love Joe” after she held up a banner at the Democratic National Convention calling on the president to stop arming Israel. “Freedom of speech at universities now only extends as far as supporting the political status quo allows.”
Trump touted his administration’s “swift and unrelenting action” in its first days, during which he moved to dismantle federal agencies and installed his political allies in positions of immense power.
Democrats, facing criticism from supporters for not doing more to block Trump’s agenda, wore pink to draw attention to Trump’s attacks on women’s rights. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., ordered the Sergeant at Arms to remove Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, from the chamber after he interrupted Trump’s remarks about his electoral win.
Shortly before Trump’s address on Tuesday night, news broke of the next phase of Trump’s gutting of the federal work force. The Internal Revenue Service is expected to lay off as much as half of its 90,000-employee staff. The news came after reports that Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump acolyte and advisor who attended the address on Tuesday, is pushing to access personal tax information held by the agency.
Less than two hours after the news of the pending IRS layoffs, Trump told his audience: “America is back.”