Kennedy pre-buts Trump: Bullies no match for a united people

Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) will blast President Trump as a bully whose administration has sought to tear at the fabric of American institutions in his rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Excerpts of the Massachusetts Democrat’s rebuttal released ahead of Trump’s speech preview a scathing criticism of the Trump administration while appealing to the “Americans who feel forgotten and forsaken,” much in the same way that the president angled his campaign toward the country’s “forgotten men and women.”

“It would be easy to dismiss the past year as chaos. Partisanship. Politics,” Kennedy will say, according to the prepared remarks.

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“But it’s far bigger than that. This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us — they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.”

The excerpts from Kennedy’s rebuttal were released shortly after the White House came out with a preview of Trump’s State of the Union address, in which he is expected to present an optimistic picture of the country and extend a call for bipartisanship. 

In contrast with Trump’s expected message, however, Kennedy’s rebuttal will focus on the fact that many Americans “have spent the past year anxious, angry, afraid” under the Trump administration. 

“We all feel the fault lines of a fractured country,” Kennedy will say, according to the excerpts of his remarks.