By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) – Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democrats’ response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday with pointed attacks on his economic record and aggressive deportations of immigrants.
Spanberger, who was sworn in last month as Virginia’s first woman governor, focused largely on the high prices that consumers have to pay after Trump promised voters in 2024 that he would make life more affordable for Americans.
It was a preview of the Democrats’ central campaign issue that they plan to use in their effort to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in November’s midterm elections.
The president spent the first part of his speech praising the economic turnaround that he said he had accomplished, contending that his aggressive use of tariffs on foreign goods was a centerpiece of an economic comeback.
Spanberger, a moderate who has flipped Republican-held seats to Democratic control in the U.S. House and Virginia governorship, painted a bleaker picture.
Farmers, she said, are suffering under the weight of tariffs that triggered retaliation from foreign countries that had been strong markets for American soybeans and other commodities. She also said the levies had raised the prices of fertilizers and other inputs needed for U.S. crops.
“Farmers have suffered, some losing entire markets,” she said.
Speaking in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the House of Burgesses that predates the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and its 250th anniversary, which Trump repeatedly referred to, Spanberger accused the president of using his office to enrich himself instead of looking out for the voters who will go to the polls later this year.
With public opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans do not support the Trump administration’s immigrant deportation tactics, Spanberger said it has been dispatching poorly trained federal agents into U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, where they have detained American citizens and have done so without judicial warrants.
“They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies,” she said. “They have sent children, a little boy in a blue bunny hat, to far-off detention centers and they have killed American citizens in our streets.”
(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone and Thomas Derpinghaus)
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