Schiff: “Tonight [Trump] will claim credit for successes he did not achieve and deny responsibility for crises that he created. And he will tell us America has never been greater. But the American people deserve the truth.”
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) delivered a prebuttal address on the Senate floor ahead of the State of the Union, calling out how President Trump has not just failed to improve the state of our union, but has actively degraded it.
In his remarks, Schiff enumerated ten ways the president has torn down our nation: denigrating our allies and alliances; undermining truth, science, education, and expertise; sabotaging climate and energy stability; making America less safe at home; politicizing and weaponizing government institutions; cutting funding to health and research institutions; eroding the rule of law; destroying health care; driving economic instability and the affordability crisis; and deepening division and social breakdown. Schiff pushed Americans not to accept this path of our failing nation, arguing that we have power to organize, vote, and speak the truth, and the power to fight for a more perfect union.
“It depends on you. On me. Every single one of us. The work is hard. The progress is slow. The discouragement is real. But so is the possibility. So is the promise. So is the extraordinary, improbable, beautiful experiment that is America – if we have the courage to believe in it again, and the determination to make it real. The pursuit of a more perfect union has to continue. It must. And it continues with us,” said Senator Schiff.
Watch his full speech HERE. Download remarks HERE.
On how President Trump has divided our nation:
[…] He has taken a diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious country – which has always been diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious – and instead of trying to unite it, he has done more than anyone else in our history to break it apart. He governs through fear and scapegoating. Immigrants are “invaders.” Vulnerable kids are a “lie.” Political opponents are “enemies from within.” The media is “fake news.” Anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor […] The basic trust that allows democracy to function – the assumption that even when we disagree, we share certain values and commitments – is coming apart. I’ve been in public service long enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans could team up with each other, without suffering political attack. When we could disagree without questioning each other’s patriotism or humanity. When we could make progress, on matters big and small.
On channeling our collective power to hold the President accountable:
[…] Tonight, the President will try to convince you that everything is fine. I’m asking you to trust your own eyes. To trust your own experience. To trust the evidence. And then I’m asking you to trust something else: Your own power. The power to organize. To vote. To speak truth. To run for office. To hold leaders accountable. The power to look at what we’ve lost and decide we’re going to fight with everything we have to get it back. Because a more perfect union doesn’t depend on any one person or President – as much as he may want it to.
On how Trump has drove up everyday costs:
[..] The President promised to bring down inflation. Instead, his tariffs have made it worse. And it’s not just the tariffs. The tax cuts to rich people and corporations have exploded the deficit. Regulatory rollbacks have boosted corporate profits while creating long-term risks. Attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence have undermined the nation’s economy and driven prices higher. Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs — we have lost them. He promised to bring down inflation — it has gone up. He promised to reduce the trade deficit — it has reached a record high. Americans literally cannot afford three more years of this.
Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Tonight, just down the hall, the President will stand before Congress and the American people.
He will paint a picture of strength, prosperity, and national renewal. He will claim credit for successes he did not achieve and deny responsibility for crises that he created. And he will tell us that America has never been greater.
But the American people deserve the truth. And the truth is that over the past year, we have not moved closer to forming “a more perfect union” – tragically it is quite the opposite. Our disunion has only grown. Our founders understood something when they chose the words: “A more perfect union…” They didn’t contemplate achieving perfection. They envisioned something more realistic, more achievable — the pursuit of a more perfect union. A constant effort to push the country forward. A grinding, slow, and sometimes painful process. They recognized that America is not a finished product but a beautiful, ongoing experiment in self-governance that requires hard work and constant perseverance.
For 250 years, through wars and depressions, through slavery and Jim Crow, through periods of bitter division and hard-won reconciliation, Americans have honored our founder’s intention. And moved the nation forward. We have stumbled. We have fallen short. And at times we have failed to live up to our promise.
But we have always — eventually – bent the arc of our own national story towards justice, towards fairness, towards a more perfect union.
And yet, from the moment he inflicted himself on our public life, Donald Trump has done everything possible to reverse that progress. By design it appears, by virtue of the product of some defect of character, perhaps, but in every way he can, in every moment he can, he has sought to divide us.
Today, in fewer words than the President will use tonight, I want to talk about some of the ways that President Trump has not just failed to advance our union — but done so much to bring about our disunion.
Denigrating Our Allies and Alliances
Now, I’ve served in our Capitol for over two decades.
And I have visited the capitals of our friends and some of our adversaries across the world.
I have seen firsthand that—notwithstanding our possession of the strongest and most courageous military in the world—America’s greatest strategic asset isn’t the might of our arms, or the size of our aircraft carriers.
It is the strength of the alliances around the world.
The web of partnerships we built after World War II – NATO, our Pacific alliances, our hemispheric relationships – they are force multipliers. They help us keep the peace.
They are the reason that a nation of 340 million people can project power and values across a globe of more than 8 billion.
Yet, tragically, President Trump has systematically taken apart the advantage these allies give us.
He has insulted the leaders of Canada, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — our closest democratic allies — not to mention countries like Denmark.
He has questioned whether America would defend NATO members under Article 5, the collective defense provision that has kept most of Europe peaceful for 75 years.
He has treated longstanding security commitments as protection rackets, demanding payment as if our allies were vassal states rather than partners.
And he has done all this while praising Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other dictators.
The result?
Our allies don’t trust us. And our most powerful adversaries don’t fear us.
And that makes every American less safe.
When the next crisis comes – and it will come, and it may even be caused by this president – we will find ourselves isolated in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
This weakens and endangers our union.
Undermining Truth, Science, Education, and Expertise
But the power of our union isn’t just about the strength of our military or ties abroad. It is also about the strength of our intellect here at home.
I find myself thinking about an exchange from the television series on Chernobyl.
A scientist tells a Soviet bureaucrat, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
This administration has run up a debt to the truth that will take generations to repay.
Over the last several years, the President of the United States has suggested that people inject bleach to cure COVID-19, that windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a hoax invented by China, that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism. The list goes on and on.
And over this past year, we have seen systematic attacks on scientists at the CDC, NOAA, the EPA, and the NIH – career professionals driven from public service for the apparent crime of publishing findings the President doesn’t like.
DOGE-d for speaking truth to power. For respecting facts and science, or simply, seemingly, and perversely in this cruelest of administrations — fired for the apparent “fun” of it.
We have seen university researchers lose federal funding not because their work lacks merit, but because their conclusions contradict preferred political narratives.
We have seen attacks on vaccines and changes to our public health system that have caused needless outbreaks of disease. This President has most assuredly not Made America Great Again, but he has managed to Make Measles Great Again.
And when experts gently try to correct these falsehoods, they are attacked, doxxed, and threatened.
This is part of a deliberate cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy.
When you undermine expertise, when you treat all opinions as equally valid regardless of evidence, when you replace scientists with sycophants – you make people vulnerable to con artists and demagogues.
You make democracy itself impossible, because democracy requires an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing truth from lies.
The debt to the truth will come due.
And when it does, our country will pay an enormous price.
Slowing Renewable Energy and Speeding Climate Change
Just more than a year ago, Los Angeles County faced one of the most destructive disasters in the nation’s history.
Entire neighborhoods – torched and torn apart by wildfires the magnitude of which we have not seen on the suburban streets of the Southland.
This loss – of loved ones, of homes and businesses, of precious memories — all gone in mere moments, still weighs heavy upon us.
Since then, I have talked to survivors of those fires who have gone on to rebuild, only to see their insurance coverage dropped – with worsening drought and prolonged dry seasons, insurance companies are refusing to cover the same homes and businesses they covered just a few years ago.
They are seeing, what we are seeing, that this may not be the last of these tragedies in our hills in our lifetimes.
This is the climate crisis in human terms. And this administration’s response has been to make it catastrophically worse.
President Trump has rolled back fuel efficiency standards, withdrawn from international climate agreements, opened pristine federal lands to more drilling, and—as we saw with last week’s repeal of what’s known as the “endangerment finding” —gutted the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions.
A New York Times headline last month actually read: “E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.” It sounds like parody, but sadly these destructive efforts are real.
All of this while summers grow hotter, some winters grow colder, wildfires rage, hurricanes intensify, and insurance markets collapse.
The President calls this “energy dominance.”
But dominance over what? The laws of physics? The carbon cycle?
Here’s what is actually happening:
We’re sacrificing long-term prosperity for short-term profit.
We’re driving up costs for American families through higher insurance premiums, higher food prices, and higher disaster recovery expenses.
We’re ceding global leadership in clean energy and technology – the defining economic opportunity of the 21st century – to China and to Europe.
And we’re doing it all while pretending that the house isn’t on fire.
Angelinos know better.
So do millions of Americans living through droughts, floods, and heat waves that would have been impossible a generation ago. The climate doesn’t care about your politics.
The debt comes due whether you believe it or not.
Making Our Communities Less Safe
Our changing climate is not the only threat our communities face in Donald Trump’s America.
In the aftermath of January 6th, 2021, there was a brief moment when Americans of all political persuasions condemned political violence.
The attack on the Capitol was so brazen, so shocking, that even some of the President’s allies momentarily found their moral bearings and said, “Count me out.”
That moment has clearly passed.
We now have a President who has pardoned January 6th rioters, calling them “patriots” and brought them into his administration, including one caught shouting “kill ‘em” at police officers that day.
We have an administration that treats white nationalist extremism as a core competency in the hiring process.
And an administration that focuses federal law enforcement resources not on violent offenders, but on prosecuting political opponents, unleashing masked ICE on innocent people and deporting children and grandmothers.
At the same time, we have seen the gutting of public health infrastructure that was built over decades to protect Americans from pandemics.
We have seen emergency preparedness budgets slashed and the people who ran them driven out of government.
The message is clear: If you’re a violent extremist who supports the President, you get a pardon. But if you’re a public health official who takes your job seriously, you get a pink slip.
This makes Americans less safe from terrorism, from disease, from domestic threats that don’t care about party affiliation.
Security and attacks against police officers aren’t partisan issues — or at least they shouldn’t be.
But when the President treats loyalty as more important than competence, when he treats protection as something selectively offered to supporters rather than universally provided to the people— he fundamentally misunderstands the first duty of government.
And the need to protect the public is certainly not the only thing he misunderstands.
Politicizing and Weaponizing Government Institutions
From the birth of our nation, our Founders were obsessed with preventing tyranny and the emergence of another king, another despot.
They created checks and balances, separation of powers, an independent judiciary.
They understood that the greatest threat to liberty wasn’t foreign invasion – it was the concentration of power in the hands of one person or faction.
This President has systematically dismantled these safeguards in his second term.
The Justice Department is supposed to be independent, pursuing justice without fear or favor.
But under this administration, it has become an instrument of presidential revenge, a sword and shield for the president, launching investigations of critics and dropping cases against allies.
His Justice Department, and I say “his” because it no longer represents the public or justice, and is run by his former criminal defense lawyers represents only his personal interests, sought to indict two of my Senate colleagues for stating the plain truth that members of the military may refuse an illegal order, indeed they have a duty to do so.
Their oath, after all, is to the Constitution, not to the person of the president.
It is difficult to overstate what an abuse of power the pursuit of that indictment represents; the effort to jail one’s opposition is a hallmark of a dictatorship, not democracy.
Career civil servants from all across the federal government – people who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations with professionalism and integrity – are being purged for insufficient loyalty to the person of the president.
Inspectors General who uncover wrongdoing and expose corruption are fired. Whistleblowers intimidated.
We are witnessing the conversion of the federal government from a public trust into a personal fiefdom.
And here’s the thing that should terrify every American, regardless of party.
Once these norms are broken, they are immensely difficult to restore.
Once you establish that a President can use the Justice Department to punish enemies, every future President will face that temptation. Pressure, even.
Once you establish that civil servants must demonstrate personal loyalty rather than professional competence, you’ve replaced the rule of law with the rule of one.
The Founders warned us about this. Their pursuit of a more perfect union was dependent upon a calculated departure from consolidated power.
Now we are living the fears of our Founders. And seeing that threat expand rapidly.
Triggering a Brain Drain
With the President’s weaponization of our institutions comes a parallel, equally disturbing trend.
America has always had a secret weapon in global competition:
We attract the best and the brightest from around the world.
Nobel Prize winners, startup founders, groundbreaking researchers – they come here because America offers something unique:
Freedom, funding, and the belief in science. The ultimate intellectual melting pot. That’s being attacked on a daily basis.
This administration has slashed funding for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy’s research programs.
It has attacked universities as “indoctrination centers.”
It has made it harder for foreign students to get visas or stay after graduation and start a business.
I’ve spoken with researchers at Caltech, UCLA, Stanford, you name it – world-class institutions in my state.
They tell me the same story: Graduate students from abroad are choosing to study in Europe or Canada. Even China. Postdocs are leaving.
Even American-born scientists are considering opportunities elsewhere, because they can’t count on research funding, because they’re tired of political attacks, because they don’t want to work in an environment where basic facts are treated with partisan hostility.
America is now for the first time losing the race for talent.
And in a knowledge economy, talent is everything.
China isn’t attacking its scientists.
Europe isn’t defunding its research universities.
They’re doing the opposite – because they understand what this administration apparently doesn’t: The future belongs to nations that invest in intellectual and creative talent, not to the nations that drive it away.
When the next breakthrough treatments, the next transformative technologies, the next generation of innovation comes from Shanghai or Berlin instead of San Francisco or Boston, we will know why and who is responsible.
Attacking the Rule of Law
In 1783 George Washington wrote: “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences… reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”
Washington understood that the rule of law – the principle that no one, not even the President, is above the law – is fundamentally what separates democracy from despotism.
President Trump has spent his whole career evading the rule of law.
He has refused to comply with congressional subpoenas.
He has ignored court orders.
He has pardoned co-conspirators and dangled pardons in brazen attempts at witness tampering.
He has attacked judges who rule against him as “biased” or “partisan.”
He has called for the prosecution of political opponents without evidence.
He has treated the justice system not as a neutral arbiter but as a weapon to be captured and wielded.
And increasingly, he’s succeeding.
We have seen this partisan and dangerous Supreme Court grant presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution.
We have seen judges appointed based on loyalty rather than jurisprudence.
We have seen the normalization of conduct that, in any previous administration, would have been utterly disqualifying.
After two and a half centuries of American life, we came to believe that the rule of law was so well entrenched in this country as to be sacrosanct. Beyond reproach or repeal.
We were wrong.
It depends on norms, on shame even, on the willingness of the people in power to accept limits on that power.
When those restraints disappear, when corruption becomes routine and impunity becomes expected – the republic is in deep danger.
Cutting off Access to Health Care
The health of our democracy is at risk. But so to is the health of our nation.
Let me tell you about a constituent of mine. Her name is Catherine. She wrote to me last November.
She shared that as a retired teacher, earlier in her career, when she was working, she had trouble getting health insurance – because she had a pre-existing condition that made insurance unobtainable for her, until we passed the Affordable Care Act.
The ACA changed that. It literally saved her life.
Now, the President is trying to dismantle the ACA again. The big ugly bill [failed to extend] its tax credits and took a trillion dollars from Medicaid to give rich in the country a tax cut.
He’s systematically attacked the health care system Americans rely on, to give more tax breaks for large corporations.
And all the while, he’s driving up costs — all so he can claim the system is broken and he can privatize it.
It is not hard to see.
This is the pattern with this administration:
Promise relief, deliver crisis.
Promise lower costs, but drive them up.
Promise to protect people, then cut their care.
But those broken promises will also mean shattered families, deeper uncertainty, and an America that is sicker and poorer.
This is what is happening to Catherine right now. She is on a fixed income, roughly $45,000 a year – with a house payment and two kids in college.
Because of the Big Ugly Bill’s failure to extend the ACA tax credits, her premium has gone up $800 this year. $800 a month, nearly $10,000 a over the course of the year. Almost a quarter of her annual income.
She has relied on the goodwill of her neighbors, and of her local hospital.
But her words still ring in my ear.
“I am not going to make do. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Making the Economy Work for the Rich and Only the Rich
In Trump’s America, the economy of opportunity is only for those on the inside – the billionaires and big corporations that can afford to donate to Donald Trump’s ballroom, buy his meme coins, or pay a million dollars to stand at his side while he takes the oath of office or celebrates the 250th anniversary of the nation.
And the rest? Let them eat the cost of mounting tariffs.
Remember when President Trump said trade wars were going to be “easy to win”?
How’s that working out for us?
Tariffs – which are taxes on American consumers, not on foreign countries – have driven up the cost of everything from groceries to electronics.
Retaliatory tariffs from other countries have devastated American farmers and manufacturers. And he is fighting a court decision that should force him to pay those taxes back to the people. Business investment has stalled because no one knows what the rules will be from one month to the next.
The President promised to bring down inflation.
Instead, his tariffs have made it worse.
And it’s not just the tariffs.
The tax cuts to rich people and corporations have exploded the deficit.
Regulatory rollbacks have boosted corporate profits while creating long-term risks.
Attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence have undermined the nation’s economy and driven prices higher.
Trump promised to bring back manufacturing jobs — we have lost them. He promised to bring down inflation — it has gone up. He promised to reduce the trade deficit — it has reached a record high.
Americans literally cannot afford three more years of this.
Tearing the Country Apart
Which brings me to the heart of the matter.
He has taken a diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious country – which has always been diverse, complicated, and sometimes fractious – and instead of trying to unite it, he has done more than anyone else in our history to break it apart.
He governs through fear and scapegoating.
Immigrants are “invaders.”
Vulnerable kids are a “lie.”
Political opponents are “enemies from within.”
The media is “fake news.”
Anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor.
Think about what that has meant for all of us. What it’s meant for you.
There are family members who are no longer speaking to one another.
Friendships that have ended.
Communities are turning inward, and turning on each other.
The basic trust that allows democracy to function – the assumption that even when we disagree, we share certain values and commitments – is coming apart.
I’ve been in public service long enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans could team up with each other, without suffering political attack.
When we could disagree without questioning each other’s patriotism or humanity.
When we could make progress, on matters big and small.
That world has grown really small indeed, in no small part because of this President.
The great tragedy, of course, is that America has real challenges that require real solutions.
The cost of everyday life. Housing and health care. Education and energy costs. Infrastructure and the imminent challenges of the climate crisis.
These are hard problems, and reasonable people can disagree with how to solve them.
But we can’t solve them – or prepare for the problems of the future – if we can’t talk to each other.
We can’t solve them if we treat politics as warfare rather than negotiation.
We can’t solve them if the President of the United States purports to love America but spends all his time attacking Americans.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. Lincoln said that.
It was true then. It is true now.
So, tonight President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. He will claim that
America is strong, prosperous, and united.
But sadly, he has made us weaker abroad, more divided at home, less trusted, less prosperous, less safe, and less free than when he took office.
The state of our union now is not strong, thanks to him.
It’s fragile.
Deeply, deeply fragile.
But we cannot forget that fragility is not the same as frailty.
We’ve been broken before and found ways to mend ourselves.
We’ve lost our way before and found, somehow, the courage to chart a new course.
We have forgotten our highest ideals before –and yet always, eventually remember who we are.
We cannot think of “a more perfect union” as a destination.
“A more perfect union” is a direction.
It’s the choice we make, generation after generation, to see each other not as enemies but as friends.
As partners in the boldest experiment in democracy that the world has known.
It’s the work of building longer bridges instead of higher walls – between parties, between communities, between the America we are and the America we could be.
It’s the recognition that our nation’s diversity isn’t our weakness – it’s the very source of our strength, our creativity, our resilience.
A more perfect union means families who don’t go bankrupt because someone got sick.
It means kids who can breathe clean air and inherit a livable planet.
It means immigrants being welcomed for their contributions, not vilified for their origins.
It means learning from our history and charting a more equitable course for the future.
It means justice that applies equally to the powerful and the powerless.
It means scientists free to pursue truth without fear.
It means alliances that multiply our influence instead of isolation that diminishes it.
It means an America where disagreement doesn’t mean demonization, where debate doesn’t mean destruction, where we can be fierce advocates for our beliefs while still recognizing the humanity in those who disagree.
None of that is easy. And if the last ten years of American life are any evidence – none of that is guaranteed.
The Constitution gives us the tools, but we have to do the job.
The Founders lit the flame, but we have to keep it burning.
They started the work, and we must continue it.
Tonight, the President will try to convince you that everything is fine.
I’m asking you to trust your own eyes. To trust your own experience. To trust the evidence.
And then I’m asking you to trust something else: Your own power. The power to organize. To vote. To speak truth. To run for office. To hold leaders accountable. The power to look at what we’ve lost and decide we’re going to fight with everything we have to get it back.
Because a more perfect union doesn’t depend on any one person or President – as much as he may want it to.
It depends on teachers who refuse to teach lies.
It depends on students who refuse to abandon their dreams.
It depends on journalists who refuse to stop asking questions.
On scientists who refuse to abandon facts.
On neighbors who refuse to turn against each other.
On Americans who refuse to accept that this is as good as it gets.
It depends on you. On me. Every single one of us.
The work is hard. The progress is slow. The discouragement is real.
But so is the possibility.
So is the promise.
So is the extraordinary, improbable, beautiful experiment that is America – if we have the courage to believe in it again, and the determination to make it real.
The pursuit of a more perfect union has to continue. It must.
And it continues with us.
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