Trump’s main point: ‘I’m still here, suckers’
Doublespeak dominated speech, says Lisa Van Dusen.
The astonishing thing about Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night was not that Donald Trump was delivering the State of the Union at all. It was that Donald Trump was delivering the State of the Union for the second time.
Because aside from all the other, smaller, more incremental metrics by which Trump’s disruptive presidency can be measured, it has, above all, been a triumph of normalization. From the moment the former game show host, real estate huckster and — in the immortal and endlessly target-rattling words of transplanted Ottawan Graydon Carter — short-fingered vulgarian preened down the escalator at Trump Tower and into the nightmares of millions, every hour of every day that has accrued to his tenure has been a victory for America’s rivals and democracy’s discreditors.
With his disruptive presidency heading into its third year as a daily source of dystopian, norm-obliterating shock content, 17 ongoing investigations into the activities of Trump, his family and his associates and the damage to America’s global influence inflicted by its own commander-in-chief reaching epic proportions, the real message of Trump’s speech Tuesday night was, “That’s right, suckers: I’m still here.”
In politics as in real estate, there’s a lot to be said for location, location, location. And Donald Trump’s unlikely presence in the rostrum of the United States House of Representatives is a breathtaking coup for interests who measure power based on their ability to deliver outcomes that would otherwise be inconceivable. For the characters who’ve brought us an array of disruptive dumpster fires from Trump’s relentless assault on truth and reason to the rolling bollocks of Brexit, literally fooling America by having a fool deliver the State of the Union not once but twice is the 2019 narrative-warfare equivalent of the bricks-and-mortar explosion scene in a Roland Emmerich D.C. disaster movie.
His tenure has been a (win) for America’s rivals and democracy’s discreditors.
For the second State of the Union in a row, Trump portrayed himself Tuesday as a calm, rational and thoughtful guy — a reasonable facsimile of a normal president and archetype-adjacent rendition of leadership not just rarely seen in his daily perambulations through the White House and rantings on Twitter, but never seen. The same man whose combative ignorance has defined Washington’s political and policy output for the past two years called for bipartisanship and collaboration in a blast of cognitive dissonance-inducing kumbaya-ism so disingenuous that its effectiveness as an expression of American values was upstaged by the expression of American values on Nancy Pelosi’s face as she visibly restrained herself from emitting a blood-curdling argh by discreetly biting her lip, chewing her cheek and possibly creatively visualizing the man in front of her as any other president in history, naked.
“If there is going to be peace and legislation,” Trump finally intoned in a loopy, rhyming, buried-lead threat, “there cannot be war and investigation.”
As befits the Orwellian doublespeak delivery device that he is, Trump spent the final stretch of his second state of the union sounding like someone running against Donald Trump. The same man who has done more to imperil the post-war, democracy-led international order secured for humanity by the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy than any other world leader evoked their sacrifice with a straight face before issuing a call to unity. “Our biggest victories are still to come. We have not yet begun to dream. We must choose whether we are defined by our differences — or whether we dare to transcend them.”
The better State of the Union story was how Democrat Stacey Abrams broke the curse of the SOTU response. Abrams, who came very close in November to being the first African-American woman governor of Georgia, spoke for the America Trump pretended to represent in the last 10 minutes of his speech: honest, real, righteous and fed up with being misrepresented by its own president.
Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, a writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.