With jobs and pride coming back, United States President Joe Biden declared the “soul” of the country as strong in his State of the Union address before the US Congress in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.
“Jobs are coming back. Pride is coming back”. “This is my view of a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” Biden said in his 1 hour and 12 minutes SOTU marred by Republican heckling and mocking.
At the core of the speech was a full throated call for Made-in-America nationalism and populist policies to rebuild the US industrial heartland — the kind of rhetoric that once helped his predecessor Donald Trump lead Republican gains in previously Democratic working class strongholds, Agence France-Presse reports.
Biden touted unemployment figures, now at a half-century low, and the stabilizing of inflation, as he promised to fight for the “forgotten” people of the economy.
For decades, “manufacturing jobs moved overseas, factories closed down,” Biden said, according to AFP.
“I ran for president to fundamentally change things to make sure our economy works for everyone, so we can all feel that pride,” he said.
Biden also called for reforms to policing and gun ownership laws in the wake of recent mass shootings and death of a black man from police beatings in Memphis, Tennessee.
To stress his call, Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old man who disarmed the gunman in a January mass shooting in California, was in the audience as First Lady Jill Biden’s guest.
Row Vaughn and Rodney Wells — the parents of Tyre Nichols, a man whose death after a prolonged police beating in Memphis, Tennessee, shocked the nation.