President Biden's 2024 State of the Union address

President Joe Biden's State of the Union address struck many GOP members of Congress as too political. Some Republicans jeered and interrupted Biden during his speech.

Here's how some Republican lawmakers responded:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Fox News that instead of taking responsibility for his record as president, Biden “tried to lay blame.”

Asked about the border portion of Biden’s speech, Johnson said, “He has executive authority, we all know. He could solve that problem right now. He’ s been able to do that for three years, but he won’t.”

Social media users picked up on Johnson's facial expressions during the speech – shaking his head, rolling his eyes as he sat right behind Biden.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune released a video attacking Biden, arguing the US must “reverse course.”

Sen. Dan Sullivan sharply criticized Biden’s address as “the most partisan State of Union I've been in,” pointing to Biden’s many references to former President Donald Trump.

Sen. Mitt Romney told CNN Biden showed “he has energy and voice” during his address, but he criticized the partisanship in the speech — and on display on the House floor.

Rep. Garrett Graves said that Biden’s address won’t allay concerns from many voters about the president’s mental acuity. 

Rep. Bill Huizenga said he wished Republicans wouldn't yell during the speech.

The post was updated with more Republican reactions to the Biden address.

Delivering the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama said, “We have the worst inflation in 40 years.” 

Facts First: This claim is false. Britt could have accurately said, in past tense, that inflation was at a 40-year high when it hit its Biden-era peak of 9.1% in June 2022. But inflation has declined sharply since that June 2022 peak, and the most recent available rate, for January 2024, was 3.1%. The Biden presidency aside, that rate was exceeded as recently as 2011 – far less than 40 years ago.  

 Like Britt, former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly ignored the decline in inflation since June 2022 to criticize Biden in the present tense. 

 President Joe Biden claimed during his State of the Union address that the average federal tax rate for billionaires is 8.2%. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the alternative calculation itself; the administration economists who came up with it explained it in detail on the White House website in 2021. Biden, however, has tended to cite it without any context about what it is and isn’t, leaving open the impression that he was talking about what these billionaire families pay under current law.  

So what do the wealthiest billionaire families pay under current law? It’s not publicly known, but experts say it’s more than 8%. 

“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in 2023. Gleckman said that in 2019, University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman “estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3,” numbers Biden has used in some previous speeches, “or even 8 percent.” 

 In February 2024, Gleckman provided additional calculations from the Tax Policy Center. The center found that the top 0.1% of households paid an average effective federal tax rate of about 30.3% in 2020, including an average income tax rate of 24.3%. 

A 56% majority of Americans who watched President Biden’s State of the Union address say that his economic policies will move the US in the right direction, according to a CNN Poll of speech watchers conducted by SSRS, with 44% saying that his policies will move things in the wrong direction.

That’s an improvement from a survey conducted in the days before the speech, when 55% of those same people said Biden’s economic proposals would move things in the wrong direction. 

Following last year’s State of the Union, however, a larger 66% majority of those who watched that speech said Biden’s economic policies would move the US in the right direction; in 2022, that number was 62%, and following Biden's 2021 presidential address, it was 72%.

Positive marks from speech watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences. 

About the poll: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 529 US adults who said they watched the State of the Union on Thursday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.6 percentage points

While delivering the official Republican response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt said that just after taking office in 2021, Biden "suspended all deportations."  

"President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time. But minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations," she said.

Facts First: This needs context. Hours after taking office, Biden did call for a 100-day pause on deportations, but not "all deportations."   

The moratorium excluded individuals suspected of terrorism or espionage, among other groups. But, more importantly, the suspension never took effect. A federal judge in Texas immediately blocked the action and it was never revived. 

In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said that the gap between the amount of goods the US imports from China and the amount it exports to China was the narrowest in more than 10 years. 

“Our trade deficit with China is down to the lowest point in over a decade," Biden said. "We’re standing up against China’s unfair economic practices." 

Facts First: What Biden said is true but needs context. The US trade deficit with China in 2023 was $279 billion, the US Commerce Department reported earlier this year. That was the lowest it has been since 2010.  

But the reason for the narrowing trade gap isn't because of any Biden administration policy. Inflation has driven American consumers away from discretionary purchases, such as electronics – stuff that is primarily made in China. Instead, they're buying more non-discretionary items, such as groceries. 

On top of that, the Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese goods, which Biden's administration left in place, have made Chinese goods less popular for Americans, because of the added cost. 

That's why, for the first time in two decades, the United States imported more goods from a country other than China: Mexico exported more goods to the US than any other country last year.  

 President Joe Biden once again during his State of the Union address touted the impact that the temporary enhancement to the child tax credit – a key provision in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act – had on reducing the poverty rate among children. He called on Congress to bring back the now-expired beefed-up credit. 

“In fact, the child tax credit I passed during the pandemic cut taxes for millions of working families and cut child poverty in half,” he said. 

The American Rescue Plan Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress in March 2021, increased the size of the credit for certain families, enabled many more parents to claim it and distributed half of it on a monthly basis. 

 That sent child poverty – as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure – to a record low 5.2% in 2021, down from 9.7% in 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which began in 2009, takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses. 

But in 2022, child poverty soared to 12.4%, roughly comparable to where it was before the pandemic in 2019. It was the largest jump in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure began. 

More than six in 10 Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a smaller 35% reacting very positively. 

That pattern of widespread but tempered positivity follows the trend of the reception of Biden’s speech in previous years. Last year, 72% of speech-watchers reacted positively, with 34% saying their reaction was very positive. In 2022, 71% had a positive reaction, with 41% very positive. 

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract friendly audiences. In CNN speech reaction polls dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive. The 34% who reacted very positively to Biden’s speech in 2023 was the lowest in CNN’s speech reaction polls dating back to 1998. 

Over the past two decades, members of the president’s party have been overrepresented in the pool of speech watchers. The pool of people who watched Biden speak was about 7 percentage points more Democratic than the general public.

State of the Union addresses rarely lead to significant shifts in presidential approval among the American public, particularly in recent years. The most recent president to see a post-address approval rating shift of more than 3 percentage points was Barack Obama, following his initial speech to Congress in 2009.

How this poll was conducted: The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 529 US adults who said they watched the State of the Union on Thursday and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.

In his State of the Union address Thursday night, President Joe Biden said, “A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses, and each one is a little act of hope.” 

Facts First: Biden’s claim is accurate based on federal data, though there is an important nuance to note.

More than 16.3 million business applications had been filed during the Biden presidency as of February 17, official federal data show, the most over any period of the same length since the data series began in the mid-2000s. It’s worth noting that not all business applications turn into actual businesses. However, so-called “high propensity” business applications — those thought to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with employees — have also set records under Biden.  

The spike in overall business applications began in the second half of 2020 under President Donald Trump and accelerated under Biden in 2021. The number of applications then remained high in 2022 and then narrowly set a new record in 2023. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment of disruption to start their own enterprises, Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden and interest rates were particularly low until the series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.