The president’s speech to Congress covered tariffs, Ukraine and cuts to the federal work force but did little to address the perils that accompany the abrupt shifts he has engineered.
In the days immediately preceding his address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Trump took a chain saw to government agencies, initiated a trade war, cut off arms to Ukraine and sided with a brutal authoritarian, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
But a visitor arriving from a distant planet who listened to Mr. Trump’s address before an audience of enthusiastic Republicans and dejected, powerless and angry Democrats would not have sensed the scale and intensity of the disruption of the past 44 days and the deep concerns it has produced.
While Mr. Trump resurrected familiar arguments from his campaign rallies to justify his actions — citing waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy, the dangers posed by migrants entering the country illegally, the unfairness of the global trading system and the need to bring a bloody war to an end — something was missing.
He never made the case for why the potential benefits of the disruption he has triggered — “nothing but swift and unrelenting action,” he called it, quite accurately — was worth the very real costs at home and abroad. He never addressed the fears of investors who have been hitting the “sell” button amid an escalating trade war, or of allies reaching for their panic buttons as Washington aligns itself with Moscow. He never talked about why he was inflicting more economic pain on his allies than his adversaries.
“They’ll be a little disturbance,” was the closest he came to acknowledging the reaction to his moves, in that case speaking of his steep tariffs.
When he briefly turned to the war in Ukraine toward the end of his more than 100-minute speech, it was chiefly to ask the question: “Do you want to keep it going for another five years?”