USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Long speech gives short shift to big challenges
Like Sunday’s snoozer of a Super Bowl, Tuesday’s State of the Union address was a nationally televised spectacle of pomp and ceremony that failed to live up to the hype and featured lots of punting.
As advertised, President Donald Trump used his speech to make an appeal for unity and cooperation, one that’s likely to dissipate as soon as he switches back from teleprompter to Twitter. He touted his economic accomplishments. And he pushed again for his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, though he stopped short of declaring a national emergency.
Two things were unique about this State of the Union: It was delayed a week by the government shutdown, and Democrat Nancy Pelosi replaced Republican Paul Ryan in the speaker’s chair over the president’s shoulder.
Otherwise, the annual address to Congress was notable primarily for its strange brew of soaring rhetoric, poignant tributes, trolling of Democrats, misleading statements, abrupt transitions and false choices (“peace and legislation” vs. “war and investigation”).
As expected, a big chunk of the speech — some 14 minutes — was devoted to painting a bleak picture of illegal immigration (at a time when border apprehensions remain well below their levels of past decades).
As we’ve noted before, Trump’s wall proposal is unlikely to have much impact on the flow of illegal immigrants or drugs across the border. But the $5.7 billion he asked for is also a fairly minor amount to be bickering over in the context of a $4.4 trillion federal budget. Were it not for the unpopularity of both Trump and his signature campaign pledge, Democrats likely would have agreed long ago to some kind of border security deal.
This makes the fight raging between the two parties a little bit like children fighting over a gum wrapper. Someday, historians and today’s young people will look back at this spat, and this speech, and wonder why two big issues facing the nation went unaddressed:
❚ Red ink. The national debt has doubled in the past decade, from a little more than $10 trillion to slightly under $22 trillion, or nearly $70,000 per person. Thanks to Republican tax cuts and — to a lesser degree — to bipartisan spending hikes, a bad situation has gotten worse with annual deficits now heading toward $1 trillion at a time when government should be saving up. The big driver of this debt is spending on retirement. Benefits paid to seniors, a third of federal spending in 2005, will rise to 50 percent in about a decade. Yet the speech contained nary a word about fiscal responsibility.
❚ Climate change. On Wednesday, scientists announced that the global temperature in 2018 was the fourthhottest on record, and the past five years have been the five warmest since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. The latest estimates from scientists are that the world’s nations have roughly 12 years to make significant cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions or cause dramatic, unprecedented and irreversible damage to the planet. Trump is not merely dawdling but is carrying the torch for the climate change deniers and celebrating fossil fuel production.
The long (82-minute) speech also gave short shrift to gun violence, the opioid crisis, suicide and other factors contributing to a stunning decline in life expectancy in the USA.
If Trump could act presidential more than one night a year, and the two parties stood for something more than gaining partisan advantage, these would be some of the topics we would hear more about in a State of the Union address. Instead, we have the sounds of the nation’s biggest challenges being kicked down the road.