Democrats Torched for Their Weak Protest at Trump Speech

Non-MAGA Americans have been clamoring for a legitimate resistance to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s haphazard dismantling of the federal government. So when Democrats appeared before the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night wearing fuschia and waving auction paddles in a mode of protest against the MAGA takeover, the public was a little disappointed.

MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend torched liberal lawmakers for silently flipping paddles that read missives directed at Trump while the president prattled on about endless falsehoods: “False,” “Musk Steals,” “Save Medicaid,” the signs read.

“They are not taking back the House with these visuals,” Sanders-Townsend posted on X.

But the visuals were hardly there. Viewers watching live at home would never have known that Democrats were silently paddling their way through the speech, or that a handful of them had stood up and walked out of the chamber in protest, as TV cameras never bothered to pan to their mute, undisruptive spectacle.

In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away. During Trump’s address, a large collection of Democratic women on the left side of the aisle were seen wearing pink, while men wore blue and yellow ties in quiet opposition to Trump’s agenda.

“Democratic leadership did not do their members any favors by stifling their desires to speak out,” Sanders-Townsend wrote in another post.

Meanwhile, the meaningless show became instant fodder for late-night comedians, who were all too eager to point out that the Republican trifecta in Washington would not be slowed down by some bright attire.

“He barked out one appalling claim after another, but don’t you worry: Democrats are getting ready to fight back with their little paddles,” said The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

“That is how you save democracy: by quietly dissenting,” he continued. “Or bidding on an antique tea set. It was hard to tell what was going on.”

Colbert then brought out his own paddle, which urged Democrats to “Try Doing Something.”

At least one spontaneous protest by a Democratic lawmaker was more profound. Texas Representative Al Green made waves from the onset of Trump’s opening remarks, interrupting the president by yelling, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”

That got Green ousted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the sergeant of arms to remove the 77-year-old from the chamber against a backdrop of jeers from Republicans.

“Some people have questioned why so much muscle was needed to remove one old man with a cane. But it turns out it was for a serious reason: When security searched him, they found that he had smuggled in a spine,” Colbert quipped.

Democrats spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom said Monday that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

The Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s emergency bid to cancel nearly $2 billion in government funding to the United States Agency for International Development.

In a 5–4 vote, the court on Wednesday rejected Trump’s attempt last month to freeze funding to USAID already approved by Congress.

Conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals to shut down the Trump move.

The court did not immediately say when the funding must be released, and the debate will now move back to lower courts.

Upon taking office, Trump and Elon Musk launched an assault on USAID, the largest global provider of foreign aid, gutting funding to the agency, firing thousands of workers, and refusing to pay contractors for work that was already completed.

On February 25, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the government to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done at USAID prior to February 13, enforcing a temporary restraining order he issued earlier in February. The Trump administration was given a deadline of midnight on Wednesday to fulfill his request.

The president then filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed … the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order,” the high court’s ruling reads.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented the decision.

“The District court has made plain its frustrations with the Government, and respondents raise serious concerns about nonpayment for completed work,” Alito wrote in his dissent. But the relief ordered, is quite simply too extreme a response.”

The decision is among the first of many Supreme Court rulings to come as Trump’s attack on the Constitution continues to unfold.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump said, during his address to Congress Tuesday night, that “the days of unelected bureaucrats are over,” referencing his mass purge of federal employees.

Democrats in the chamber immediately laughed, and were quick to stand and point at an unelected bureaucrat in attendance who was given sweeping powers by Trump: Elon Musk. Others pointed out Trump’s blatant hypocrisy on social media.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk has used his pet project, the pseudo–Department of Government Efficiency, to overhaul the federal government and claim that billions of dollars in wasteful spending was being cut. In reality, government spending has gone up, DOGE has had to correct some of its own false numbers, and Musk has personally benefited from the government takeover. The greedy welfare billionaire and world’s richest man has gotten even wealthier as one of the most powerful unelected bureaucrats in history.

The president revealed who’s really running the Department of Government Efficiency, days after his administration offered a cozy alternative in order to salvage the group’s work as it’s interrogated in the courts.

While discussing DOGE in his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, Trump mentioned that the unofficial agency is “headed up by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.”

But that wasn’t the administration’s story last week. In a court declaration filed Monday, the White House asserted that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser” to Trump. That title offers the unelected billionaire “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the administration claimed, and leaves him with no formal responsibilities to run DOGE as either an employee or an administrator, as a mere employee of the White House.

The administration claims the real head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, a low-profile, first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech. Mere weeks before her name came up as the chief of the controversial organization, attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t know her, and even DOGE staffers were unaware that she had been fronting the operation as recently as one day before her role was announced.

The explanation came as Musk faced growing legal scrutiny for his role in dismantling federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees. The Trump administration had argued that Musk was not the head of DOGE in order to defend the group’s work from several lawsuits.

On Friday, confusion over Musk’s role led to a tense back-and-forth between Judge Theodore Chuang and Justice Department attorney Joshua Gardner, with Chuang noting that the administration’s sudden excuse was “highly suspicious” and “raises questions.”

“There’s an affidavit saying he’s a senior adviser of the president,” Chuang said. “But there’s a ‘strange disconnect’ where he has referred to himself in public as affiliated with DOGE and not as a senior adviser to the president—until recently, after these lawsuits were filed.

Trump’s Freudian slip Tuesday night could warrant further interrogations into the nature of Musk’s involvement in DOGE.

In a press conference last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that Gleason’s appointment had been common knowledge for weeks and that the Trump administration had been completely “transparent” about her appointment. (By Wednesday, Gleason’s LinkedIn had not been updated to reflect her new role.)

Democratic resistance to Donald Trump’s agenda was remarkably quiet on Tuesday, barely managing to make it on camera during the president’s official State of the Union address.

While Trump rattled on about all the myriad ways in which his administration is working to undermine and dismantle federal agencies, Representatives Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost stood up to leave the lower chamber. As Crockett approached the door to exit, she took off her jacket and revealed the back of her shirt, which read “RESIST,” reported The Hill’s Mychael Schnell.

Frost, who had also removed his coat, had on a black shirt that read, “No kings live here,” per Courthouse News’s Benjamin Weiss.

A cohort of Democrats stood up and followed them, according to Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman, similarly turning their backs to Trump as they removed their coats to reveal T-shirts that also read, “RESIST.”

Other protests by Democratic lawmakers were more profound. Texas Representative Al Green made waves from the onset of Trump’s opening remarks, interrupting the president by yelling, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” That got him ousted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the sergeant of arms to remove the 77-year-old from the chamber.

Democrats spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom on Monday said that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”