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6 Takeaways From Trump’s Address to Congress

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6 Takeaways From Trump’s Address to Congress

President Trump took a defiant victory lap in the House chamber on Tuesday night, using his address to a joint session of Congress to promote the flurry of drastic changes to domestic and foreign policy that his administration has made in just the first six weeks.

Delivering the longest address to Congress in modern presidential history, Mr. Trump reprised many of the themes that animated his campaign for president and spent little time unveiling new policies, as presidents traditionally have done on these occasions. He spoke for roughly one hour 40 minutes.

“We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplish in four years or eight years — and we are just getting started,” he said.

Democrats lodged protests throughout the evening, with one representative getting kicked out and others holding signs in silent opposition. But Mr. Trump argued that it was the Democrats who left him a country besieged by crises and that his administration was working to clean them up.

Here are six takeaways from Mr. Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term.

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One day after Mr. Trump temporarily suspended the delivery of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, he signaled a willingness to reset the relationship. The president said he appreciated a message from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in which he said his country was “ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.”

The new posture comes days after Mr. Trump’s explosive Oval Office meeting with Mr. Zelensky, which resulted in the Ukrainian leader hastily departing the White House without signing a deal for the United States to have access to Ukraine’s revenue for rare earth minerals. In his message, which was posted on social media on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky said he was ready to sign the deal, a top priority for Mr. Trump.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Trump also said he had had “serious” discussions with Russia and they have signaled they also are “ready for peace.”

“It’s time to stop this madness,” he said. “It’s time to halt the killing. It’s time to end the senseless war. If you want to end wars, you have to talk to both sides.”

Mr. Trump widened his trade wars on Tuesday when he instituted sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and China. Despite the markets’ plunging in response to his actions, Mr. Trump said he would not budge, dismissing the reaction as “a little disturbance.” He said more tariffs would go into effect on April 2.

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“Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades, and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said Mr. Trump could announce a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada as soon as Wednesday. But the president made no mention of that in his speech on Tuesday night.

“Whatever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them,” he said. “That’s reciprocal, back and forth.”

Within the first few minutes of Mr. Trump’s speech, Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, stood up and started heckling the president. After Mr. Green ignored multiple warnings from Speaker Mike Johnson, Mr. Johnson ordered the sergeant-at-arms to remove Mr. Green from the chamber.

Mr. Green’s eviction marked the most contentious moment of a combative night, as Democrats organized various protests against the president. Many Democratic lawmakers held up small black signs with phrases that included “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and “False.” Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan held up a whiteboard that said “Start by paying your own taxes” as Mr. Trump talked about tax cuts. A number of Democrats, including Representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, walked out during Mr. Trump’s speech.

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But even as they expressed their dissent, Democrats showed they were still struggling to coalesce around a unified message of opposition to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, has overseen the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to overhaul the federal government with sweeping cuts to the work force and contracts. The speed and the scope of Mr. Musk’s work has caught many in Washington off guard, with Democrats accusing him of violating congressional spending authority and civil service protections.

But Mr. Trump made clear on Tuesday that he wholeheartedly supported Mr. Musk’s radical approach.

“He’s working very hard,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Musk, who nodded and beamed in response. “He didn’t need this. He didn’t need this. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.”

Pointing to Democrats, he said: “Everybody here — even this side appreciates it, I believe. They just don’t want to admit that. Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified.”

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The president spent several minutes listing off a wide range of programs Mr. Musk’s team has cut, bragging that the effort had identified “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.” But even Mr. Musk’s initiative has claimed to have generated only $105 billion in savings, assertions that have not been verified. The New York Times has found that DOGE has erroneously reported savings based on contracts that had already ended and miscalculated numbers.

Mr. Trump also re-upped his attacks on federal workers, vowing to “reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy.”

“Any federal bureaucrat who resists this change will be removed from office immediately,” he said.

Presidents often use addresses to a joint session of Congress to lay out their agenda for the year ahead. But not Mr. Trump. He did not unveil new policies, and devoted little time to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which Mr. Trump has vowed to end.

Mr. Trump also did not address another time-sensitive issue: how to prevent the government from shutting down next week. Even with Republicans controlling the House and the Senate, there are still disagreements about the best ways to proceed on the funding battle.

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The president reiterated that he wanted Congress to allocate more money for immigration enforcement while cutting taxes, but how lawmakers will achieve that remains unclear.

Mr. Trump is always in need of an opponent, and for now, it appears former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is still in his cross hairs. Even after winning the election in November, defeating Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump mentioned his predecessor’s administration more than a dozen times and called Mr. Biden “the worst president in American history.”

He blamed Mr. Biden for a litany of problems, including the high costs of eggs, crime and drugs flooding across the border, and accused him of being weak on China.

At times, Mr. Trump appeared to be giving one of his stump speeches from the campaign trail, as he railed against Mr. Biden’s immigration policies, support of transgender rights and “wokeness.”

“Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad,” Mr. Trump said, without specifying what exactly he was referring to. “It’s gone. It’s gone.”

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Minho Kim and Chris Cameron contributed to this report.

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Video: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees

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Video: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees

new video loaded: How Trump Is Prioritizing White People as Refugees

President Trump has upended the U.S. refugee program to prioritize mainly white Afrikaners. Our White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs reports he is now is now considering doubling the amount he allows into the country.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart, Jon Miller and Whitney Shefte

May 8, 2026

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UFO files spanning decades are released by Defense Department

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UFO files spanning decades are released by Defense Department

An image recorded on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows the shadows of astronauts, along with a highlighted area above the horizon showing “unidentified phenomena,” according to the Defense Department.

NASA/via Defense Department


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NASA/via Defense Department

Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers; recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects floating in mid-air. Those and other reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs — the military’s term for UFOs — are described in a trove of documents released by the Department of Defense on Friday.

In all, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena.

President Trump said via Truth Social that with the documents and other records available to the public, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”

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The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/info, which will house additional files as they’re released on a rolling basis.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Defense Department posting on Facebook as it made the files public.

Friday’s action “is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said.

One document cites unusual phenomena arising during the debriefing of the Apollo 11 technical crew in July of 1969, attributing three observations to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from that lunar mission: “one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser.”

One of the oldest files dates from November 1948. The report from the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence is marked Top Secret, and it notes recurring instances of unidentified objects spotted in the skies over Europe.

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“They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded,” the report states, “and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.”

The report goes on to say that U.S. officers consulted their peers in Sweden’s intelligence service about the objects, and they were told, “these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth.”

That document is seemingly free of redactions. But many details in a more recent entry are obscured, as it relays the account of a woman with deep experience with U.S. military aircraft and drones who reported an inexplicable sighting in September of 2023, in an area where airspace had been closed for testing purposes.

Materials related to that incident include a composite sketch of an ovaloid metallic object floating above a treeline, with a bright light at one end of the object.

“They watched the object for five to ten seconds and then the object just disappeared,” the report states.

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Several people in at least two cars corroborated the sighting, according to the report. It states that the unidentified woman who spoke to the FBI ” would not have reported the object if she had seen it by herself.”

And hinting at the stigma that is seen as a prevalent challenge to collecting and discussing such eyewitness accounts, the report states, “Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”

Some records include venerable witnesses — such as a well-known case in 1955, when a group led by then-Sen. Richard Russell, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time, reported that they saw two strange objects from the window of a train in the former Soviet Union. The group, which included U.S. Army Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway, reported seeing what looked to be “flying disc aircraft.”

The U.S. Air Attache who prepared the report describes the witnesses as “excellent sources.”

That 1955 sighting was described in records previously released by the CIA. But that report, based on a cable received from the U.S. Air Force, seems to have been partially redacted.

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The report of the unidentified object isn’t the only bit of intelligence that the American visitors brought back: the folder also includes descriptions and a diagram of a jet bomber, and accounts of a railroad switching system designed to resolve the differing widths of Russian and Czech train tracks.

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Democratic Candidates and Voters Challenge Tennessee’s New Map

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Democratic Candidates and Voters Challenge Tennessee’s New Map

A coalition of voters and Democratic candidates sued Tennessee officials in federal court late Thursday over its new congressional map, arguing that it was unconstitutional to implement new district lines this close to the state’s August primary.

It was the latest twist in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling last week on the Voting Rights Act that declared congressional districts in Louisiana to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling set off a frenetic scramble in Tennessee and several other Republican-led states to redraw their districts for partisan advantage on the assumption that they are no longer required to preserve Black majority districts.

The Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly muscled through a new congressional map on Thursday that carves up the majority-Black city of Memphis, home to the state’s lone Democratic-held seat.

The lawsuit and its outcome took on heightened stakes after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved map that created four Democratic-leaning districts in the state. If Tennessee’s map holds — and if other Southern states approve new maps that dilute majority-Black seats held by Democrats — Republicans will have established a structural advantage across multiple districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“Changing the rules midstream will create chaos for voters and throw communities into upheaval,” Rachel Campbell, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, which is also part of the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We will fight these racially gerrymandered maps tooth and nail because the future of democracy in Tennessee, across the South, and throughout this nation depends on it.”

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The lawsuit centers on the constitutional right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it argues that both the voters’ and candidates’ constitutional rights were harmed by changes to the congressional map that undermined months of campaigning and voter education based on the old map.

The lawsuit also references a legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle. That principle, stemming from a contested 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez, discourages changes to voting rules and procedures close to elections.

The lawsuit was filed overnight by a cluster of voters, as well as four Democratic candidates: Representative Steve Cohen of Memphis, whose district was divided up among three new Republican-leaning districts; State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who had challenged Mr. Cohen for the Memphis seat; Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, a lead challenger to Representative Andy Ogles in what was once a solely Middle Tennessee seat; and Chaney Mosely, a candidate for a Nashville-area seat.

A second lawsuit is already underway in state court, filed Thursday afternoon by the NAACP Tennessee State Conference.

Spokeswomen for Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, and Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit also names Tre Hargett, the secretary of state, and Mark Goins, the Tennessee coordinator of elections, in their official positions. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

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In their brief filed before the district court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the candidates and voters argue that the sudden shift of the congressional districts just months before the primary “will wreak chaos on the electorate, will cause significant voter confusion” and will affect election officials’ ability to administer the election. They asked the court to stop the implementation of the map before the 2026 election.

Tennessee was the first state to draft and approve a map after the Supreme Court’s ruling raised the bar for challenging district lines under the Voting Rights Act. Within a week, Mr. Lee summoned lawmakers to Nashville for a special session, and Republican leaders had drawn and approved a new map that gives the party an advantage toward electing an entirely Republican congressional delegation.

The map carved up the Ninth Congressional District, where two-thirds of the voting-age population is Black, into thirds, most likely eliminating the state’s lone Democrat-leaning district. It also moved district lines around the Nashville area in an apparent bid to shore up Mr. Ogles.

Candidates now have until noon on May 15 to file papers with the secretary of state’s office. Those who already qualified may remain in the new district with the same number. At least one Republican, State Senator Brent Taylor, has already announced his candidacy for the new Ninth Congressional District.

All four congressional candidates on the suit warned that they would have to “to expend more resources identifying, associating with, and campaigning to voters who live in the newly-enacted district.”

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They also pointed to litigation filed in February 2022 after a new map of State House and State Senate districts that year was challenged, prompting a push to delay the qualifying date from April to May. At the time, Tennessee officials argued against moving the qualifying date. The State Supreme Court agreed.

Seamus Hughes and Katherine Chui contributed research.

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