Five moments from Biden’s State of the Union speech

The president of USA, Joe Bidencalled Congress this Thursday for a crucial State of the Union speech eight months before the elections to the White House, in a staging that the president controlled. These are the 5 moments that marked his speech.

The return of the “women in white”

Five years after a sea of ​​Democratic congressmen in strict white overshadowed the speech of the then president, Donald Trump, in 2019 to highlight feminine power, about 70 repeated the outfit today.

On this occasion they did not intend to eclipse the president, from their same party, but rather to make public their defense of reproductive rights in front of their Republican colleagues and the judges of the Supreme Court, who in the last year have promoted the greatest regression in access to the abortion.

And others in black…

Another smaller group of Democratic legislators opted for black, almost in mourning, for the war in Gaza. They are the most progressive of the party, framed in the ‘Squad’ or ‘Squadron’, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar or Cory Bush.

Tlaib – who is the only legislator of Palestinian origin -, Bush and Lee also wore kufiya and spent almost the entire speech sitting, without applauding their president, in contrast to the rest of their Democratic colleagues who enthusiastically attended Biden’s speech.

When the president spoke about the war in Gaza, the legislators displayed signs with the text “Stop Sending Bombs” either “Stop sending bombs”before Tlaib, widely criticized for her defense of Palestine, burst into tears.

The return of the George Santos soap opera

When many had already forgotten about him, George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in December of last year, took advantage of his privileges as a former legislator to appear unexpectedly for the speech.

Santos, who built his political career on lies and alleged crimes, walked around the chamber in his silver shoes, greeting the few friends he left behind without anyone knowing with certainty why.

The doubts were cleared up with Biden’s speech already underway, the moment that Santos took advantage of to announce on his networks that he will run again in the 2024 elections, in which he will try to dethrone one of his opponents in the party: Nick LaLota.

MTG plays in another league

The president of the House of Representatives, Republican Mike Johnson, had asked his members for decorum during the speech, but far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump’s faithful ally, wanted to be the protagonist of the State of the Union.

Against event protocol, Greene donned the signature red ““Make America Great Again” signed by Trump and faced his entry with both the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Biden himself.

Biden, who confronted her, was given a pin with the name Laken Riley, a young woman murdered a few days ago in Georgia at the hands of a migrant. During the speech she interrupted him by shouting “say her name”, while her colleagues looked the other way.

He interrupted the president again when he was talking about taxation, shouting “tell Hunter to pay his taxes,” in reference to the president’s controversial son, who is accused of tax evasion.

The most combative moment

Although Biden spoke about the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, abortion or the economic model, among other controversial topics, the one that aroused the most passion among all was migration, which is currently marking the electoral campaign between Biden and Trump. .

The president was applauded and booed in equal parts, on one side, and the other from the chamber, while he boasted of having agreed “the toughest set of border security reforms this country has ever seen.”

Many of the Republicans began to leave the chamber at that moment, in which Biden confronted them for having sunk that legislative project, while the conservatives’ envoy to that negotiation, Senator James Lankford, nodded.

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