Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger gave a crisp and pointed rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, focusing on what she called the president’s failure to deliver costs, safety and humanity to the American people.
“We did not hear the truth from our president,” Spanberger said in the 12-minute speech on Tuesday night, asking voters to reflect on how Trump’s agenda has directly affected their lives. “So let’s speak plainly and honestly,” she said. “Is the president working for you?”
Democratic party leaders have repeatedly sought to return policy discussion to kitchen-table economic issues of affordability. More than half of Americans wanted Trump to focus on the economy in his address, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday, while a Harris poll commissioned by the Guardian in December suggested that almost half of Americans believe their financial security is getting worse.
“Small businesses have suffered,” Spanberger said of Trump’s tariff regime, struck down by the supreme court last week. “Farmers have suffered – some losing entire markets. Everyday Americans are paying the price. … Democrats across the country are laser-focused on affordability.”
Virginia’s newly elected Democratic governor won her own victory in November as a product of this focus on economic issues, implying a retreat from the culture-war contests Trump exults in. After eight years under former Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, Spanberger defeated the Republican nominee by about 527,000 votes, the largest raw-vote margin in Virginia history and a 15-point landslide.
“Our campaign earned votes from Democrats, Republicans, independents and everyone in between, because they knew as citizens, they could demand more,” she said, speaking from historic Williamsburg after the president’s almost two-hour address. “That they could vote for what they believe matters, and that they didn’t need to be constrained by a party or political affiliation.”
She also highlighted the Democratic majority in the state legislature. In her first weeks in office, Spanberger called for a package of reforms to subsidize energy-efficiency projects for homeowners and reduce energy costs for low-income Virginians, to protect and expand affordable housing, to make evictions more difficult and to provide state assistance for healthcare insurance premiums in the wake of Congress’s failure to restore federal subsidies.
Responding to the State of the Union is both an honor and a challenge, with high-profile misses over the years from both parties. The platoon of responses from Democrats in 2018 from the US representative Joe Kennedy, the senator Bernie Sanders and others left viewers without a clear sense of purpose from Democratic leaders. The former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s response in 2009 to Barack Obama’s first address to Congress deeply damaged his public image.
Spanberger chose colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum depicting 18th-century Virginia life, as a symbolic backdrop for her comments. British colonists in Virginia first declared their desire for independence at a meeting in Williamsburg. Later, George Mason introduced the Virginia Declaration of Rights there, principles limiting the power of government that deeply influenced the Bill of Rights in the US constitution.
“Our president has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans, and they have done it without a warrant,” Spanberger said, focusing on the constitutionality of Trump’s agenda.
“They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies. They have sent children – a little boy in a blue bunny hat – children to far-off detention centers, and they have killed American citizens in our streets, and they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability. Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.”
As Spanberger offered comments in English, the US senator Alex Padilla of California offered a response in Spanish, echoing her themes.
“The truth is that the State of our Union does not feel strong for everyone. Not when the costs of rent, food and electricity keep rising,” Padilla said in Spanish. “Not when Republicans raise our medical costs to fund tax cuts for billionaires. And definitely not when federal agents – armed and masked – terrorize our communities by targeting people because of the color of their skin or for speaking Spanish — including immigrants with legal status and citizens.”
Spanberger and Padilla both noted the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which Trump ignored in his speech. The rising authoritarianism of the Trump administration could also be seen in how it treated a US senator who questioned its actions, Padilla said.
“Last year, many of you saw when federal agents pushed me to the ground and handcuffed me for demanding answers from this administration over its military occupation in Los Angeles,” Padilla said in Spanish, referring to an incident at a press conference led by Kristi Noem in June 2025. “They may have knocked me down for a moment, but I got right back up. As our parents taught us: if you fall seven times, get up eight. I am still here. Standing. Still fighting. And I know you are still standing and still fighting, too.”
Spanberger also brought attention to the price activists have paid for confronting ICE.
“We see it in the determination of students organizing school walkouts all across the country, whose voices are becoming so powerful that the governor of Texas seeks to silence them,” she said. “We see it in the bravery of Americans in Minnesota standing up for their communities, from peacefully protesting in sub-zero temperatures to carpooling children to school so that their immigrant parents are not ripped away from them in the parking lot.”
Spanberger, who served in the US House for six years and was a CIA case officer before that, went beyond the domestic message and critiqued Trump’s approach to foreign policy and the deep rift between the US and its allies on matters of national security.
“As the president spoke of his perceived successes tonight, he continues to cede economic power and technological strength to Russia, bow down to China, bow down to a Russian dictator and make plans for war with Iran,” Spanberger said.
“Here’s the truth. Over the last year, through Doge mass firings and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions, our president has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.”
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