President’s State of the Union
Plea for bipartisanship rings hollow from Trump
President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to sell his policy of negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That made sense: He gave a higher profile to something that hasn’t received a lot of media attention, which pressured Congress, including Republicans, to get behind a policy they might not want to support. That’s competent presidenting.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for the positive. Like last year, Trump’s speech was far more focused on the folks in the gallery -- some heroes, some victims -- than on policies. If you blinked, you missed infrastructure, which once again just seems to be an idea he talks about, not something he plans to enact. But he did worse when he actually tried to get specific. He engaged in some soaring rhetoric about child cancer, putting the spotlight on a wonderful little girl in the gallery to illustrate the point. and then asked Congress for all of $500 million over the next 10 years to find a cure for the disease. That’s the equivalent of telling your date that you’re going to a fine French restaurant and ending up at Jack-in-the-Box.
And then there were the recycled ideas, including school choice and parental leave, that he mentioned last year, filed away for safekeeping, and pulled out again this time.
On his biggest issue, the border wall, he just reran the same rhetoric that failed to convince anyone who didn’t already agree with him during the shutdown — without hinting about what he’s going to do if he doesn’t get what he wants from Congress. Trump is probably at his best when he’s riffing on familiar material, as he does at his rallies, and when he’s in sync with his audience. Reading prepared stuff from a teleprompter is a skill he still hasn’t really mastered. Trump failed to find the natural flow of the text, often obliterating transitions. He sometimes managed to swallow the applause lines so badly that Republican members of Congress primed to cheer them waited a beat or two before reacting.
As usual in a Trump speech, there were an unusual number of whoppers. He continues to lie like the stereotypical usedcar salesman, with outlandish, unsupportable falsehoods, rather than like a politician, with clever exaggerations and spin.
At any rate: most of that stuff doesn’t matter very much. What does matter is that it was another wasted opportunity from a president who has wasted plenty of them.