WASHINGTON (AP) — A US president’s speech to Congress — even without the formal gloss of a State of the Union address — is typically a time for a call to national unity and predictable claims about the country being strong.

But that wasn’t President Donald Trump’s plan. His speech on Tuesday night was relentlessly partisan, boasting about his election victory and criticizing Democrats for failing to recognize his accomplishments.

The hard edge reflected Trump’s steamroller approach to his second term, brushing aside opposition and demanding loyalty throughout the federal government.

Here are key takeaways from the speech:

Trump set a tone of division almost from his first words, calling his predecessor Joe Biden the worst president in history and chiding Democrats as so stinting in their praise of him they would not even grant him perfunctory applause.

He placed himself alongside the country’s first president, George Washington, when discussing what he said were the flood of early achievements of his second term.

He was speaking to a house divided. Republicans stood and cheered. For Democrats, it was silence, with occasional shouts of protest, with the only applause when he announced that Ukraine wanted to restart peace negotiations.

Trump leaned hard into cultural flashpoints — his opposition to affirmative action, diversity programs and transgender rights.

He inflated the scale of his victory in November, the margin of which was actually among the smallest in American history. The tenor was more that of a campaign speech than an address to Congress.

In a stunning breach of protocol and a measure of the fractious politics, one Democrat, Rep. Al Green of Texas, stood up and shouted at Trump, gesturing toward the president with his cane. He refused to sit when asked by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who ordered him removed.

Trump described Democrats as a lost cause. “There is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy,” he said.

Trump has been unsparing in his criticism of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

But towards the end of his address, Trump read from a letter from Zelensky he had received earlier in the........

© The Times of Israel