Donald Trump, about to celebrate the first anniversary of his return to power, used his Christmas address to the nation to take stock in a combative tone and stuck in the past. Far from focusing on a detailed defense of its management, the … The president built his intervention on a frontal attack against his predecessor, Joe Biden, a strategy which, after eleven months in the White House, This is unusual in political termsbut this once again marked the axis of his message.
The speech was preceded by expectations regarding possible foreign policy announcements, powered by comments from analyst Tucker Carlson and for rumors in Washington about Venezuela. None of this came to fruition. Tcroup avoided any direct reference to the pulse with Caracas, to the military escalation in the Caribbean or to international pressure, confirming that its intervention was intended for internal consumption and not for the projection of messages abroad.
From the start, Trump presented his second term as a national rescue operation and spoke with a tone more typical of a campaign than of institutional balance. “Eleven months ago I inherited a disaster and I am fixing it”he said, drawing a sharp line between a past he attributes entirely to Biden and a present he attributes exclusively to himself. In its history, the United States had been governed for four years by a political elite focused on protecting illegal immigrants, criminals, lobbies and foreign powers who it believed were taking advantage of the country like never before. Faced with this scenario, he presented himself as the leader who reversed the situation in a few months, going “from worst to best”.
Immigration once again took center stage, in keeping with Trump’s political DNA. He assured that in the last seven months, “not a single illegal immigrant” has entered the United States and boasted of having achieved something that, according to him, everyone considered impossible. He recalled that Biden had championed the need for legislative reform to close the border and used it as a political weapon. “We didn’t need new laws, we needed a new president”said. According to his version, he inherited “the worst border in the world” and transformed it into “the strongest in the history” of the country.
Trump has built his political identity around immigration for years and did so again in this speech, even as polls continue to reflect divided public opinion on his handling of this issue. The president did not enter into the debate on his turn immigration policynow focused on the interior of the country, with a notable increase in arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants already residing in the United States.
Throughout the intervention, Biden appeared as a constant antagonist. Trump listed what he described as a catalog of legacy grievances, from “open” borders and crime to diversity policies to “catastrophic” trade deals and a federal government that he described as “sick and corrupt”. The tone was deliberately dark when discussing the period 2021-2025, presented as a step outside of the country’s democratic normality.
On the other hand, the president described his return to power as a total break. He claimed to have increased security in cities, cited Washington as an example of recovery and linked his immigration policy to a direct improvement in public safety. He also said his government had hit hard on drug cartels and criminal networks, integrating that message into a broader narrative of restoring order and authority.
This balance, however, comes in an uncomfortable context for the White House. Trump closes the year under the pressure of inflation that has not yet yielded to the promised pace and remains around 3%, a figure lower than past peaks but still high by the standards that the president himself has set as a benchmark for success.
Added to this is the controversy surrounding the management of Jeffrey Epstein’s files, the full publication of which was announced then postponed, fueling criticism from both the opposition and sectors linked to Trumpism. According to the official schedule, these documents are expected to be made public this Friday, an episode that once again threatens to shift media and political attention just as the president attempts to impose his own narrative of economic control and institutional order.
On the economic front, Trump insisted he had succeeded in reducing inflation and lowering prices, relying on graphs and figures posted by the White House on social media during his speech. He tried to establish the idea that the cost of living began to fall clearly under his mandate, a perception which does not always coincide with the daily experience of many voters, but which constitutes one of the pillars of his speech, with a tone which was more reminiscent of an electoral demand than a management report.
The shutdown maintained that same national record. Trump spoke of national pride, recovery and a country he said was respected again. There were no major announcements or strategic turning points. The message was reduced to a simple equation: Biden as the origin of all evil and Trump as the corrector of the lost course.
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