(Zero Hedge)—President Donald Trump capped off his first six weeks in office with a 100-minute speech to a joint session of Congress
The March 4 address followed a blitz of more than 100 executive actions that impacted nearly every aspect of government and U.S. relationships with other nations.
Americans largely approved of Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress.
Below, via Lawrence Wilson, Joseph Lord, Travis Gillmore, and Sam Dorman of The Epoch Times, are the highlights of the speech, which began with the statement “America is back” and ended with a call to “renew the unlimited promise of the American dream.”
1. Tax Cuts Promised for All Americans
Trump pledged across-the-board tax cuts, including personal income, corporate, and industry cuts.
After Republicans’ 2017 tax bill failed to make personal income tax cuts permanent, Trump says he is pushing lawmakers to ensure that this Congress does so.
Trump reiterated his campaign proposals to end taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits, and proposed zero interest on loans for American-made vehicles.
Trump encouraged Democrats to join Republicans in backing the legislation, suggesting they would face political consequences otherwise.
“I’m sure you’re going to vote for those tax cuts because, otherwise, I don’t believe the people will ever vote you into office,” he said.
Trump added that these tax cuts—which would total $4.5 trillion over a decade under the current House GOP plan—would be retroactive to Jan. 20, 2025.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) delivers remarks after the House passed the Republican’s budget resolution on the spending bill at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 25, 2025. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
2. Border Closed, Deportations Underway
Trump touted his administration’s efforts to secure the border, having signed 10 executive orders related to halting the flow of illegal immigrants and initiating mass deportation efforts nationwide to remove violent criminals from the country.
“Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border, and I deployed the U.S. military and border patrol to repel the invasion of our country, and what a job they’ve done,” Trump said. “As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded.”
Trump said his rhetoric also helped encourage would-be illegal immigrants to reconsider their plans.
“They heard my words, and they chose not to come,” he said.
The president also highlighted his order designating cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.
President Donald Trump holds a copy of an executive order honoring Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl who was killed by illegal immigrants, as he addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Win McNamee/Getty Images
3. Trump Touts ‘Common Sense Revolution’
Trump also announced a “common sense revolution,” including primarily through rooting out “woke” ideas from the government and federally-funded programs.
He referenced an executive order signed early in his second term declaring that the federal government recognizes only two sexes, based on biological sex at conception and not “gender ideology.”
Trump highlighted his executive order stripping federal funding for schools that allow males to compete in female sports. One order declared that it is the official policy of the United States that Title IX applies to women and not men who identify as transgender females.
The first gallery guest introduced by Trump was Payton McNabb, a female athlete who suffered injuries while playing volleyball against a male player.
Trump also referenced merit-based hiring—rather than hiring to meet diversity quotas—as part of his “common sense revolution” agenda.
Payton McNabb (C), former high school athlete who was injured by a volleyball spike from an opposing male player who identified as a transgender woman, is recognized by President Donald Trump as he speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
4. Tariffs Explained, ‘A Little Disturbance’
Trump said his trade policies will remain centered around tariffs that are designed to boost foreign investment in the United States and balance multi-billion-dollar trade deficits. The goal is to bring trillions of dollars into the president’s new “external revenue service.”
“If you don’t make your product in America,” Trump said, “you will pay a tariff, and in some cases, a rather large one.”
A series of tariffs—including 25 percent fees on goods from Canada and Mexico and 20 percent in addition to those already imposed on China—took effect on March 4, and across-the-board reciprocal tariffs are set to take effect on April 2.
“Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades, and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries,” Trump said.
While critics have suggested the tariffs could cause inflation, the president rejected the notion and said any impact would be temporary.
“There’ll be a little disturbance, like we’re okay with that,” Trump said. “It won’t be much.”
5. DOGE Findings Highlighted
Trump praised the work of Elon Musk in leading the Department of Government Efficiency, which has announced savings of over $105 billion through contract cancellations, staff reductions, and identifying fraud and waste.
Trump listed a number of multi-million dollar projects related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that had been terminated, and a $22 billion plan to provide housing and automobiles for illegal immigrants.
“We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” Trump said, noting that the Government Accounting Office has estimated that up to $500 billion in fraudulent payments are made annually.
“By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families,” Trump said.
White House senior advisor to the president Elon Musk attends President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
6. Promises Balanced Budget
Trump also formalized plans to balance the federal budget during his second term.
“I want to do what has not been done in almost 24 years: Balance the budget,” Trump said. “We are going to balance the federal budget.”
A balanced federal budget is a longtime goal of many Republicans but it is not an issue Trump has historically addressed directly.
On Feb. 7, he first indicated interest in such a plan, writing “Balanced budget!” in all caps in a post on Truth Social.
Balancing the budget would require either substantial spending cuts or substantial increases in government revenues, whether from internal or external sources.
He said part of achieving this would be a “gold card” program under which foreigners or their employers could pay $5 million for a path to citizenship.
7. Victims Spotlighted
Trump also recognized several victims of illegal immigrant crime during his address.
The first was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia who was murdered by a Tren de Aragua gang member in February 2024.
Describing Riley as “brilliant” and “the best in her class,” Trump touted his signing of the Laken Riley Act—the first signature of his second term—which requires federal detention of illegal immigrants accused of certain crimes.
Trump then announced that a 34,000-acre national wildlife refuge near Houston will be renamed after 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, also allegedly killed by Tren de Aragua gang members.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
“The death of this beautiful 12-year-old girl and the agony of her mother and family touched our entire nation greatly,” Trump said.
Family members of both victims were in attendance at the speech.
Allyson and Lauren Phillips, the mother and sister of Laken Riley, listen as President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
8. Direct Appeal to Greenlanders
Trump directly appealed to the people of Greenland to join the United States, which he said would benefit them and improve the security of the United States and the world.
“We strongly support your right to determine your own future,” Trump said. “And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.”
Trump previously offered to buy Greenland from Denmark, which oversees it as an autonomous territory. The offer was snubbed by the Danes.
“We will keep you safe, we will make you rich, and together, we will take Greenland to heights,” Trump said.
The president said the island is important to national security.
“We’re working with everybody involved to try and get it, but we need it really for international world security,” Trump said. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.”
9. Letter From Zelenskyy
The president described a letter he received from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier in the day, suggesting the note could indicate the nations are closer to reaching a mineral deal.
Zelenskyy’s letter said that “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer,” according to Trump.
The U.S.–Ukraine minerals deal fell apart after a tense exchange between Trump and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Feb. 28. Trump also paused all U.S. aid to Ukraine on March 3.
President Donald Trump greets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House in Washington on Feb. 28, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
The note informed U.S. leaders that Ukraine is prepared to agree to a minerals deal that would see 50 percent of some natural resource revenues go to repay America for the approximately $175 billion appropriated to support Ukrainian defense efforts.
Trump has repeatedly called for an end to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
“I appreciate that he sent this letter,” Trump said. “Simultaneously, we’ve had serious discussions with Russia and have received strong signals that they are ready for peace. Wouldn’t that be beautiful?”
10. New Shipbuilding Office
Trump said a new White House Office of Shipbuilding is meant to counter China’s strides in the shipbuilding sector.
“We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon,” Trump said. “It will have a huge impact.”
Historically a leader in the shipbuilding industry, the United States has seen its dominance wane in recent years, and China now accounts for more than 50 percent of global orders, according to U.N. Conference on Trade and Development data.
The president said tax incentives will help “resurrect” the industry and are meant to revitalize commercial and military ship production and bolster national security efforts.
11. Arrest of Top Terrorist Responsible for Abbey Gate
Trump made a surprise announcement that the top terrorist responsible for killing 13 U.S. service members during the bombing at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 is now in custody.
A sign with photos and names of the 13 service members killed in a terrorist attack at Abbey Gate is displayed during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 9, 2024. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
“America is once again standing strong against the forces of radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said. “Tonight, I am pleased to announce that we have just apprehended the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity, and he is, right now, on his way here to face the swift sword of American justice.”
The Abbey Gate bombing was allegedly carried out by a suicide bomber, affiliated with ISIS, who detonated an explosive vest at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
U.S. officials have identified the senior member of the ISIS terror group based in Afghanistan as Muhammad Sharifullah.
Sharifullah was turned over to U.S. authorities by Pakistan and was being brought to the United States for prosecution, Trump said.
12. Democrats Respond
Congressional Democrats criticized Trump from both within and outside of the House chamber where he spoke. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was escorted out of the chamber after standing up and yelling during Trump’s speech.
Green rose to speak and shook his cane toward the president about four minutes into the speech, but his words were quickly drowned out by chants of “USA! USA!” from Republican lawmakers.
He later said that he was “making it clear to the president that he had no mandate to cut Medicaid.”
Trump has said he won’t touch Medicaid.
Other Democrats protested with signs that read “Save Medicaid” and “Musk Steals.” Some congresswomen wore pink jackets as a statement about the purportedly harmful impact of Trump’s policies on women.
Following Trump’s speech, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) gave a speech from her home state criticizing the president’s actions. “President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends,” she said.
Rep. Herb Conaway (D-N.J.) on NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, pushed back on the idea of a golden age for America, stating that inflation has increased alongside the price of eggs and coffee. He also took aim at Trump’s tariffs, which he called “nothing but a tax on the American people.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
