New York, March 5: In the customary rebuttal to the President’s address to Congress, the Democrats have warned that US friendships with allies are fraying, while the trade war is threatening the economy.
“Today’s world is deeply interconnected. Migration, cyber threats, AI, environmental destruction, terrorism – one nation cannot face these issues alone. We need friends in all corners – and our safety depends on it,” Senator Elissa Slotkin said in her nationally televised speech on behalf of the Democratic Party after President Donald Trump addressed the joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Invoking another Republican President, she said, “[Ronald] Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity.” But after the way Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated last week at the Oval Office by Trump, she said, “Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.”
“As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War,” she said, accusing him of “cosying up” to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin while “kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth”.
At the global level, she said although the US is not perfect, “I would rather have American leadership over Chinese or Russian leadership any day of the week”. After the President delivers his address to the joint session of Congress, a representative of the other party gives its rebuttal, although it is delivered informally outside the House of Representatives chamber and carried out on national TV. A former Central Intelligence Agency official, Slotkin was elected senator last November from Michigan, which Trump had carried on the presidential ballot.
She represents the centrists in the Democratic Party, a group that is assertive after last year’s debacle. About Trump’s economic policies, she delivered a warning that they could lead to a recession and cost the citizens a lot. “If he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession,” she said.
She said his trade war would hurt manufacturers and farmers and lead to higher prices for all. She said Trump’s proposed tax cuts would only benefit his billionaire friends and the people would be made to pay for them. She had harsh words for Elon Musk, the billionaire heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who is taking a chainsaw to federal spending and workforce.
Slotkin accused Musk and “his gang of 20-year-olds” of getting into people’s tax returns without safeguards against cyberattacks or misuse of personal data. Under the cost-cutting programme, government employees who “protect our nuclear weapons, keep our planes from crashing, and conduct the research that finds the cure for cancer” were fired only to be rehired, she said. “No CEO in America could do that without being summarily fired,” she said.
IANS