WASHINGTON — Tensions between President Donald Trump and Democrats reached a peak during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, with the two sides clashing over his remarks about immigration and allegations of fraud.
Democratic lawmakers shouted at Trump as he talked about illegal immigration and a fraud investigation into the Somali community in Minnesota.
He declared that Democrats should be "ashamed."
"You should be ashamed!” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., shouted back at Trump.
“Liar!” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., yelled at one point.
Tlaib and Omar grew louder in their responses and heckling of Trump as his speech progressed. Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., could also be seen shouting at Trump.
“You have killed Americans!" Omar and Tlaib yelled. Later, they left the House chamber.
Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., meanwhile, held a sign with photos of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti — two U.S. citizens who were killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January.
And all of that erupted after Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was ejected — for the second straight year — from Trump's address to Congress. Green was booted from the House floor after he waved a sign that read “Black People Aren’t Apes!” It was a reference to a video Trump posted on social media this month that depicted former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. Trump removed the video, amid widespread bipartisan condemnation, but said he wouldn't apologize.
The walkouts, the charged heckling, the boycotts and the symbolism of carefully selected guests marked a forceful pushback against a president wildly unpopular with Democrats. Democratic lawmakers were relentlessly mocked last year, including by rank-and-file party members, when they sat in the chamber and quietly held up signs with expressions of protest.
On Tuesday, it was one thumb in the eye of Trump after another. More than a dozen House Democrats invited survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be their guests, centering on a topic Trump has been loath to speak about and has explicitly asked the country to move on from.
"How about those Epstein files?" Tlaib yelled at Trump during his speech.
Other Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, wore pins calling on the Trump administration to release all of the files.
And as Trump delivered a speech of record-breaking length, the Democratic gallery was partially empty. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers attended or spoke at alternative events. There was a "People's State of the Union" outdoors on the frigid National Mall, while other Democrats hosted a "State of the Swamp" at the National Press Club near the White House, featuring rebuttals from lawmakers and actor Robert De Niro, among others.
The official Democratic response came from Colonial Williamsburg, where Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger hit Trump hard across the board and predicted that voters would reject his administration’s “chaos” in November.
“He’s enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented,” she said. “There’s the cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital. This is not what our founders envisioned, not by a long shot.”
Concerns over Trump's deportation tactics drove much of the Democratic pushback Tuesday, and Spanberger's was no different.
"Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities," she said.
Despite having recently told NBC News his administration could use a "softer touch" with its immigration efforts after the killings of Pretti and Good, Trump revealed no such recalibration Tuesday.
Instead, he intensified his remarks about illegal immigration, blaming past Democratic administrations and relaying in graphic detail brutal murders by undocumented people. He spoke of Lizbeth Medina, a 16-year-old who was stabbed to death by a "previously arrested illegal alien who broke in and brutally extinguished the brightest light in her family’s life."
"Her heartbroken mother is in the gallery to remind everyone in this chamber exactly why we are deporting illegal alien criminals from our country — we want them out of here," Trump said.
In early January, Trump pointed to an ongoing fraud investigation in Minneapolis as his justification for surging 3,000 immigration officers into the state.
Trump said Tuesday, “Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception.”
At the People's State of the Union event, Democrats were having none of it. They railed against Trump's immigration enforcement policies and pushed for accountability related to the Epstein files. They highlighted affordability issues and other Democratic priorities. A few hundred people gathered on the National Mall for the program, while tens of thousands tuned in online.
“It’s more important for me to be here with the people who are impacted by his policies than sit there and let him gaslight me for two hours," Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told NBC News.
“The state of our union is people being afraid to go to the grocery store or drop their kids off at school because they’re seeing their neighbors being disappeared,” she said. “The state of our union is that no one can afford groceries or housing or child care.”
Those who skipped Trump's speech largely said they couldn't sit through what they expected would be a pack of lies.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., said she knew “we would not hear an accurate state of our union” from Trump.
At the People’s State of the Union event, Ansari said that “it’s no longer about ideology, it’s about whether or not you believe in the United States of America, whether or not you believe in our Constitution, whether or not you believe in law and order and whether or not you believe in good versus evil.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said he didn’t want to sit and “pretend that everything’s normal” — though he conceded that “unfortunately, much like driving by an accident, I’ll have to at least look at” Trump’s speech.
