Donald Trump began his speech to a joint session of Congress with many promises — broad promises, such as, “I will not allow the mistakes of recent decades past to define the course of our future.”
22 promises Trump made in his speech to Congress, in one chart
The speech largely focused on things he wants to keep out of the country.
But he quickly transitioned to more specific policy promises, which, if fulfilled, would affect the millions of Americans Trump addressed Tuesday night.
While he weaved in and out of various topics, the promises can be organized into six basic categories. For simplicity sake, I included promises in which he said he “will” accomplish some goal, and excluded ones where he said something “should” be done.
Here’s the list:
As far as content goes, there wasn’t anything surprising in the speech. Echoing many of the promises he made during his campaign and in recent weeks, Trump vowed to:
- Help the middle class with tax cuts and jobs
- Stop the drug epidemic
- Ramp up immigration enforcement, including building a wall
- Heavily fund infrastructure
- Repeal Obamacare and replace it with a plan that doesn’t have an individual mandate
- Increase funding for defense to fight ISIS, and increase funding for veterans
Outside of health care and infrastructure promises, Trump’s speech focused little on domestic issues and largely talked about spending a large amount of money to keep undesirable things out of the country: namely, undocumented immigrants, refugees, and drugs.
It’s almost the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson’s first State of the Union speech in 1964, during which he announced his “war on poverty,” including a host of domestic programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
Johnson, of course, made good on a lot of his promises. Now the work starts for Trump to do the same.
