MAGA Blows a Fuse Over Democrats’ Protests During Trump Speech

The MAGA faithful were not happy with how Democrats in Congress reacted to Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday night.

Democrats protested Trump in different ways, whether it was Representative Melanie Stansbury holding up a protest sign as Trump walked into the chamber (which was quickly snatched away), Representative Al Green shouting at the president that he does not have a mandate to cut Medicaid, before being kicked out, or others leaving the chamber mid-speech, wearing T-shirts reading, “No kings live here” and “RESIST.” This was too much for Trump’s devotees.

White House staffers were quick to show their support for Trump on X.

Others in conservative media also attacked Democrats.

It seems that Republicans have short memories. In the past, the GOP has shouted at Democratic presidents during their addresses to Congress, including Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie” at President Obama in 2009 or multiple Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, repeatedly interrupting President Biden in 2023. Since the GOP kowtows to Trump, they think everyone else should, as well.

Donald Trump’s laughable first address to Congress Tuesday night was his least popular ever, garnering one of the least enthusiastic reactions for a president’s first address to the chamber in the last two decades, according to a CNN poll,

Apparently, only 44 percent of viewers had a very positive reaction to the president’s address. Twenty-five percent had a somewhat positive reaction, and 31 percent had a negative reaction.

This is not only a low watermark when compared with the first addresses to Congress delivered by previous presidents, whose speeches are typically a victory lap to lay out their agenda, but it’s also a poor showing when compared to Trump’s previous addresses to Congress in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Former President Joe Biden received a very positive response from 51 percent of viewers on his first address to Congress, while Barack Obama received 68 percent, and George W. Brush received 66 percent.

Trump’s first address during his first administration received a very positive reaction from 57 percent of viewers—a whopping 13 points higher than his very positive reactions now.

And it wasn’t just Democrats who were saying this. CNN’s sample group of viewers was weighted to reflect that more people who agreed with Trump would likely be watching, and was made up of 21 percent Democrats, 44 percent Republicans, and 35 percent independents.

Roughly seven in 10 speech watchers said they had a positive reaction to Trump’s address, according to the CNN poll.

That number is slightly more in line with a CBS poll that Trump shared on Truth Social Wednesday morning, which found that 76 percent of viewers approved of Trump’s address, while 23 percent disapproved.

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.”

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night, Democratic Representative Al Green was removed from the chamber after interrupting the president.

Green reportedly kept yelling at Trump, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” The Houston-area congressman, 77, also waved his cane in the direction of the president. Speaker Mike Johnson warned Green to stop several times—before ordering the sergeant of arms to remove him from the chamber.

Green’s removal is unprecedented in the history of presidential addresses to Congress, as dissenting members of Congress usually aren’t removed from the chamber, even if they’ve shouted at the president. Green, who has already introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, probably won’t mind being the first.

The radical divide in American politics was on full display during Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress from the very moment he stepped into the upper chamber.

As the president passed droves of fawning Republican lawmakers, a small protest by one Democrat was snatched away from her by a member across the aisle.

Representative Melanie Stansbury held up a sheet of paper that read, “This is not normal,” before Texas Representative Lance Gooden ripped it away from the New Mexico Democrat and tossed it in the air.

Democrats have spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s unofficial State of the Union 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.”

But that plan flew in the face of the silent protest top Democrats in Congress had organized. 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.

“There is nothing I can do to make them laugh or smile or applaud,” Trump told the chamber once his speech began, and after Texas Representative Al Green had been booted from the session by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump then went on to argue that he deserved the adoration of Democrats on the basis that he had already made “astronomical achievements” in his time in office.

“This is a time for big dreams and bold action,” Trump continued, underscoring his executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization, and his freeze on hiring federal workers and on delivering foreign aid, among other monumentally disruptive executive actions.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But some of its employees are earning hefty taxpayer-funded paychecks. 

Wired reports that some software engineers and executives who are part of DOGE are drawing six-figure salaries, in some cases from the government agencies they are cutting. For example, Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration who helped lead attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health, is pulling in $167,000 per year. 

In another instance, Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is making a salary of $195,200, the maximum annual salary that a “General Schedule” federal employee can make, including bonuses. And Nate Cavanaugh, 28, whose work for DOGE comprises interviewing GSA employees, makes over $120,500 per year. That’s close to what the average GSA employee, who typically has been with the agency for 13 years, earns per year at $128,565.

When he began recruiting for DOGE in November, Musk described the work as “tedious” and said “compensation is zero,” calling his ideal candidates “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” So far, the pseudo-agency has tapped into vital government systems and fired thousands of employees. 

Now it appears that compensation is far higher than zero for at least a few employees. Despite Musk describing DOGE as “maximum transparent,” spending and salary ranges for the effort have not been made public. A recent report says that DOGE has received about $40 million in funding, and the White House did not respond to Wired’s questions about salary ranges or where DOGE’s funding is coming from in the federal budget.

DOGE’s cuts are ostensibly supposed to be saving taxpayers money, but not only are some of its employees drawing a high salary, government spending has actually gone up since the inauguration. Plus, while DOGE was claiming billions of dollars in savings, it has had to go back and make corrections to many of its claims, showing that its boasts were exaggerated or fraudulent.

The high salaries seem to be part of the many lies coming from Musk and his pet project about how much money DOGE is saving and what it’s actually doing. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise from a greedy welfare billionaire who owes much of his wealth to government funding, and who is enriching himself even more with his and Donald Trump’s government overhaul.