RI lawmakers react to State of the Union

Several attempts were made by President Donald Trump to reach across the aisle Tuesday in his State of the Union address in front of a joint session of Congress.

Mr. Trump touched on several topics including costly prescription drugs, the record number women in Congress, and a renewed call to build a border wall on what the President called the dangerous southern border.

After the speech, members of the Rhode Island Congressional delegation is weighing-in on President Trump’s speech.

“The President’s speech was long self-absorbed, and divorced from reality,” said congressman David Cicilline. “The American people deserve better.”

Cicilline told ABC 6 that although the President’s speech was focused on unity, it was not accomplished.

“I think he’s really lost the ability to bring the country together,” Cicilline said. “I think that’s going to be the responsibility of Congress to work together.”

Congressman Jim Langevin is also reacting to the speech.

” His policies of division do not live up to his rhetoric of unity,” Langevin wrote in a statement. “The President took 800,000 federal workers hostage in this misguided gambit. He has threatened to do it again when government funding runs out next Friday. This is simply unacceptable.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse applauded the President’s honoring of military, and law enforcement and is eager to work with Mr. Trump on several issues, but also criticized him on border security, and federal investigations against him.

“It’s hard to listen to a man with such a demonstrated inability, to tell the truth — or even keep his word with members of either party — try to sell us on the idea that he’s now ready for bipartisanship and unity, that he’s poised to bring us together,” Whitehouse said. “Trump’s fantasies about his wall, his deafening silence on climate change, and his Nixonian attack on Department of Justice investigators did not help.”