DrWebTrump pushes back on criticism of economy in contentious prime-time speech – The Washington Post
Trump pushes back on criticism of economy in contentious prime-time speech
Updated, December 17, 2025 at 10:28 p.m. EST51 min ago
President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on Dec. 17. (Doug Mills / AFP/ Getty Images)1 min
President Donald Trump delivered a sharply political televised speech Wednesday evening focused heavily on the economy, an effort to reverse declining public opinion numbers and the view even among some supporters that he has not lived up to key campaign promises.
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Trump’s prime-time speech echoes themes from his campaign rallies
Facing internal White House strife, a slowing economy and tension overseas, President Donald Trump turned to a familiar routine Wednesday in his prime-time address: the campaign.
Trump zigzagged from the economy to immigration, and from transgender rights to global trade to his new war on drugs, in an 18-minute distillation of the stump speeches he gave on his way to a second term.
Trump, though, has been president again for nearly a year.
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Trump also touted his efforts to lower health costs through his “Most Favored Nation” pricing deals with pharmaceutical companies.
It’s true that some of the deals — like Trump’s work to lower the price of GLP-1 drugs — have been striking. But drug costs represent just one relatively small component of America’s high health costs.
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Trump’s many distortions on the Affordable Care Act
Trump in his speech tonight riffed on a favorite target: the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health law passed by Democrats that he has spent much of his political career vowing to repeal.
“The current Unaffordable Care Act was created to make insurance companies rich,” Trump said. “It was bad health care at much too high a cost.”
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Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, covering the speech on his “War Room” online talk show, pointed out that this address was seen by prime time network TV viewers, not just the president’s base.
Bannon posed the question: “Was this too intense for a broadcast audience?”
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Trump said “100 percent” of new jobs in his second administration have gone to U.S.-born workers. Economists say that is not true.
A quirk in federal survey calculations is muddying the data on foreign- vs. U.S.-born workers in the labor force. Officials at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau warn against using that data to draw conclusions about population counts — or comparing it with figures from previous years. Doing so would be “a multiple-count data felony,” Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Commerce Department economist, told The Washington Post in August.
Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/17/trump-address-nation-2026-agenda/
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