The White House was quick to fire off a scathing retort to the Democrats’ response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday evening, delivered by newly-elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger.
In a post made to X as Spanberger was discussing the president’s immigration crackdown, the official @RapidResponse47 account wrote that the governor should “spare us the sanctimonious bulls--t.”
“For Spanberger, criminal illegals > Americans‚” the post continued, before going on to accuse Spanberger of “repeatedly undermin[ing] border security” during her time in Congress and terminating Virginia’s agreement with ICE weeks after becoming governor.
The post came after the White House had published a pre-emptive response to Spanberger’s speech earlier in the day, accusing Spanberger, along with “the rest of the Radical Left lunatics in her party” of being “fully against President Trump’s agenda of lowering costs, bringing back manufacturing, and securing our borders.”
The response went on to detail Spanberger’s positions on immigration, law enforcement, inflation and cost-of-living concerns, climate change, gender and diversity initiatives, and her support for a “Democrat takeover of federal elections.”
Trump allies were quick to adopt the administration’s talking points against Spanberger, with the @HouseGOP posting on X during her speech, “FACT CHECK: The brave men and women of ICE are keeping us safe by removing DANGEROUS criminals from our country. Why are Democrats like @GovernorVA Abigail Spanberger trying to stop this?”
Interim Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell also got involved in what was his second meltdown of the day, making multiple furious posts about Spanberger “tanking” her speech. The 59-year-old had earlier exploded in a statement to the Daily Beast’s The Swamp.
“Abigail Spanberger didn’t practice her speech enough - her pace is like a staccato song. Fast and then too slow,” Grenell wrote. “Her articulation is terribly off.”
He also claimed that she was known as a “failure” by her CIA colleagues “because she was unable to grasp the focus of the CIA without partisanship.”
“She was frustrated by the mission of the CIA and the demand to keep politics out of the job - ultimately she left to be an open Democrat activist.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Gov. Spanberger’s office for comment.
Spanberger addressed several of her party’s concerns with Trump’s leadership in her response speech, including affordability and the cost of living for Americans, as well as the president’s widely criticized hardline immigration crackdown.
“Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?” Spanberger asked during her speech, delivered from Colonial Williamsburg. “We all know the answer is no.”
She went on to discuss the role of law enforcement in American society, explaining that “it is a unique responsibility to do the serious work of investigating crimes, comforting victims, and making arrests.”
“It‘s about building trust and that requires an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community,” she continued, before criticizing the president’s oversight of ICE raids in cities like Minnesota.
“Our president has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities, where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans. And they have done it without a warrant.”
“They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies. They have sent children, a little boy in a blue bunny hat, children too far off detention centers and they have killed American citizens in our streets. And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability.”
“Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.”
Spanberger also discussed the Trump administration’s botched handling of the Epstein files, as well as its involvement in “crypto scams” and the president’s plotting to get billionaires to pay for his controversial White House ballroom.
“You have to ask: who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions?” Spanberger asked. “He’s enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.”
“This is not what our founders envisioned, not by a long shot.”
Prior to her election as Virginia’s first female governor last November, which flipped the state from red to blue as part of a series of victories for Democrats around the country, Spanberger served in the House of Representatives from 2019 to 2025.
