The Senate’s top Democrat warned Wednesday that President Trump’s widely praised address to Congress has no bearing on how Trump is actually governing.
“The president’s speech was detached from the president’s reality,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor. “The president in this speech and so many others talks like a populist, he talks to the working people of America and promises things. But when he governs, it’s nothing like that at all.”
Schumer said Trump is putting forth policies and proposals, including executive actions rolling back Obama-era regulations, that abandon the middle class and working class and instead benefit the wealthy.
Or, Schumer said, Trump is advocating proposals that include a massive infrastructure project that lack any legislative details.
“What we hear in the speech and what the president actually does are contradictory,” Schumer said.
Schumer painted a dark picture of Trump’s brief time in office and predicted more trouble for the administration.
“His first 40 days have been a pretty rough for President Trump,” Schumer said. “It hasn’t worked out very well.”
Trump’s problem, according to Schumer, is “not because he hasn’t given a few good speeches.”
Schumer said Trump is having difficulty “because he is governing from the hard right, it’s because he is governing way off to the extreme. A speech isn’t going to change that.”
