Trump touts year of achievements
Analysis: Proposal for bipartisan approach likely to come up short
President Trump spoke all the right words at his State of the Union address Tuesday, calling for a second-year reset toward a more bipartisan approach to government. But don’t look for it to happen.
“I call on all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people,” he said, later adding that he was “extending an open hand to work with members of both parties” on issues like immigration, infrastructure repairs and other problems facing the nation.
That appeal echoed one Trump made in February, when he told a joint session of Congress that “Democrats and Republicans should
“My highest loyalty, ... my constant concern is for America’s children, America’s struggling workers, and America’s forgotten communities.”
President Trump
get together and unite for the good of the country.”
Trump, a billionaire businessman used to having subordinates jump at his every command, may even have believed it back then. But a year of nonstop battles with Democrats, assorted interest groups and even members of his own party have provided him with a graduate-level seminar on the limits of presidential power.
“If you’re looking to promote bipartisanship, you have to realize you’ve already won the election and have your own policies,” said Joe Tuman, a professor of political communication at San Francisco State University and a former speechwriter. “There’s no need to dismiss the other side.”
Time after time, though, Trump seemed to go out of his way to belittle Democrats and their concerns, talking about how he and the Republicans have “repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare” and that he wasn’t going to “repeat the mistakes of past administrations” when it comes to dealing with North Korea and other international enemies, like Iran.
Trump didn’t offer Democrats many carrots in his speech, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior analyst at the University of Southern California school of public policy.
“A large part of the speech was a rehash of Donald Trump’s greatest hits,” she said. For Democrats, the message was “my way or the highway, and it was all your fault.”
But there was probably little Trump could have said — and even less that he would actually do — that could have persuaded Democrats to cooperate with the president.
California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s running for governor, echoed the thoughts of many Democrats when it comes to any idea of working with Trump.
“There’s nothing new Trump can say tonight to change the truth we already know about him,” Newsom said in a fundraising message sent out 90 minutes before the president’s speech. “He’s unfit and has no business being at that podium in the first place.”
Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee was one of a number of Democrats who didn’t even show up for the address.
“I cannot in good faith attend the State of the Union,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead of listening to President Trump manufacture accomplishments ... I will join principled activists to strategize the next phase of resistance.”
For much of the speech, Democrats sat silent and stone-faced, grinding their teeth as GOP members of Congress repeatedly jumped to their feet to cheer.
Trump spent plenty of time talking about the tax plan Republicans pushed through Congress and the economic success he argued that it has already brought the nation.
The tax cuts “provide tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses, to lower tax rates for hardworking Americans,” he said. “There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.”
The president also pushed hard for his immigration plan, which he called “a down-themiddle compromise” that should be “supported by both parties as a fair compromise.” He didn’t mention, however, that it’s already been rejected by Democratic leaders.
His call for elected officials to defend Americans and their communities because “Americans are dreamers, too” probably raised hackles among Democrats who have fought Trump over a solution that protects “Dreamers” — undocumented residents who came to the United States as children — from deportation.
Not that there wasn’t something in the speech for Democrats. Trump called for prison reform, “to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance at life,” and of the need to cut the price of prescription drugs and provide guaranteed family leave for workers.
But those proposals were little more than lines in a speech, with no details beyond the suggestion that they were things that Congress should handle.
It was the low-key, “teleprompter” Trump who was on display Tuesday night, seldom straying from his prepared text or going on the stream-of-consciousness rants and attacks that often mark his campaign-style speeches. Instead, he stayed on point, sometimes to a fault.
The hour-and-20-minute speech felt almost a half hour too long, Tuman said, largely because of the many guests he invited in an effort to put a human face on his talking points.
From a 12-year-old Redding boy who started an effort to put flags on the graves of veterans to an Army sergeant who rescued a wounded comrade, Trump had a “human prop” to illustrate almost every part of his speech.
Less, probably, would have been more, Tuman said.
The visitors, each introduced and recognized by applause, “seemed to get in the way of (Trump’s) narrative,” he said. “It hurt the message he was working to get out.”
The speech itself wasn’t a problem, added Jeffe.
“Stylistically, it was a very good job,” she said.
But despite Trump’s stated effort to pull the nation and its bitterly divided political parties together, the problems and disputes that were there the day before the president’s speech are likely to still be there the day after.
That could be a problem for Trump, especially with the prospect of a Democratic takeover of the House and even possibly the Senate looming in the November midterm elections.
“I don’t know how many Democrats felt they were included” in Trump’s vision of the nation’s future, Tuman said. “And if the Democrats take back the House, they could have long memories about this.
“Trump could have done himself a world of good by inviting more bonds with the Democrats,” he said.