The speech, deconstructed

How well did Donald Trump do with his 82-minute State of the Union speech on Tuesday night? The National Post’s Nick Faris asked four experts in political oration to assess the highlights

SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM THE STATE OF THE UNION

Trump sounded like Ronald Reagan at the outset of his speech, said McGill history professor Gil Troy, though he noted Reagan was more adept at rising above partisan politics.

Trump turned alliterative here to promote cross-party solidarity, a staple of nearly every State of the Union address, said Robert Danisch, a University of Waterloo professor of political rhetoric. “That was his attempt to be like other presidents.”

Trump’s entire speech was framed “in such a way that everything is tied to the good things that have happened during the two years he’s been president,” said Karlyn Campbell, author of Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. “He wants to be sure that as a result of this speech, nobody will think it’s appropriate to go after him.”

Troy called this the line of the night, one that perfectly encompasses Trump’s megalomania and paranoid sense of being persecuted: “It’s so delightfully simplistic. It’s so third-grade rhymey. It’s so self-protective and self-promoting.”

“More Americans are killed each day by other Americans than they are by illegal immigrants. It’s not even close,” Danisch said. Here, Trump’s speechwriter puts a positive spin on Trump’s commitment to defend the border “to make Americans feel close enough to one another that they can forget that fact.”

The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda. It is the agenda of the American people.

We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution — and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good.

An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only things that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations.

If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!

Tonight, I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country.

Not one more American life should be lost because our nation failed to control its very dangerous border. In the last two years, our brave ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of criminal aliens, including those charged or convicted of nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 killings.

In the past, most of the people in this room voted for a wall — but the proper wall never got built. I’ll get it built.

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.

I began this evening by honouring three soldiers who fought on D-Day in the Second World War. One of them was Herman Zeitchik. But there is more to Herman’s story. A year after he stormed the beaches of Normandy, Herman was one of those American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau.

Almost 75 years later, Herman and Joshua (Kaufman, who survived the Holocaust at Dachau), are both together in the gallery tonight — seated side-by-side, here in the home of American freedom.

Here tonight, we have legislators from across this magnificent republic. You have come from the rocky shores of Maine and the volcanic peaks of Hawaii; from the snowy woods of Wisconsin and the red deserts of Arizona; from the green farms of Kentucky and the golden beaches of California. Together, we represent the most extraordinary nation in all of history.

“Trump said things that are either outright lies or distortions, or he used numbers in what I think most people would consider to be misleading ways,” said Renan Levine, a University of Toronto political science professor. Among the examples: many of the ICE arrests Trump cited were for non-violent immigration offences.

Trump seemed most authentic when he set out militant, aggressive policy stances that he knows the Democrats oppose, said Danisch.

“I don’t think any U.S. president has ever said the word ‘socialism,’” Danisch said. Trump did so to parallel the negative perception of socialism in impoverished Venezuela with the push on the American left for progressive economic policies, a rhetorical device known as semiotic tying.

Trump repeatedly referenced D-Day,

Dachau and U.S. military heroism to appeal to Americans’ pride in their history, Campbell said — and to implicitly associate himself with that history, even though he avoided the draft during the Vietnam War.

Trump speeches often celebrate individual Americans, from the Dachau liberator to the unjustly imprisoned drug offender whose sentence he just commuted. “I think he expects there’s going to be a kind of rainbow effect: that if he talks in those terms about those people, we’ll see him as a good guy,” Campbell said.

“I feel like every time Trump reaches for something a little bit more poetic” — a turn of phrase that seems presidential — “it’s kind of empty,” Danisch said. “It didn’t sound particularly inspiring.”