Traditionally, college commencement speeches are about the speaker drawing on a lifetime of accomplishment and wisdom to advise the graduating seniors.
That’s not quite how it works when Donald Trump gives a commencement speech.
Trump was the speaker at the University of Alabama’s commencement ceremony this week, and it was a bit different from what my graduation and your graduation were probably like. Esquire called it “a performance of complete lunacy” and “one of the worst things that campus has seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door back in 1963.”
He rambled, talked about tariffs, and said strange things about trans athletes, trophy wives, the creator of Levittown, and retired Alabama football coach Nick Saban.
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He spent a lot of time giving what sounded a lot like his typical rally speeches, including sharing statistics about migrant apprehensions and “fake news.”
quite the uplifting commencement speech from Trump as he rails against “the fake news,” judges, and migrants pic.twitter.com/49Mr3iMlrZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2025
“You can go very far in life with common sense. And I apply that to politics because some of these things—like they had open borders. Let everybody in the whole world flow into our country. That’s not common sense,” Trump said in the speech.
President Trump gave a speech in Alabama today claiming that the U.S. “couldn’t sell cars” in Japan because it was one of several countries that was “tariffing the hell out of us.”
Japan hasn’t imposed tariffs on car imports since 1978.pic.twitter.com/aI39bvBmpP https://t.co/1q3G0Q07XQ— Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@mrjeffu) May 2, 2025
He also went on a bizarre rant about transgender people and the policies he changed.
“They had transgender for everybody. We ended that, if you noticed. Okay? But they had transgenders for everybody. I said, “This is not working. This is not gonna work.” As I said before—it’s so simple—men playing in women’s sports. Did you ever see some of the records? Did you see some of these boxing matches? You know, we have to protect. These women are great athletes. But we have to protect. If you looked at the Olympics, where they had transitions—people going into the boxing—where the women had boxing, and they had a great champion, a female boxer… After one punch, she walked back to the corner and said, “I can’t get hit like that. I’ve never been hit like this before.
Photo courtesy of X screengrab
