The moderator for the current events discussion group is a great politician. Only after flattering me about past presentations did he ask me to comment on the State of the Union Address. Ego stroked, I agreed. Only later did I realize that no one in their right mind would consent to watch the hour-and-forty-seven-minute State of the Union speech, the longest in recorded history. You had to wring hard to get a few dollops of news out of it, and the views about it are predictable.
There is little new to report. Even if you have seen only a glimpse of Trump in the last months, you had already heard, probably many times, what he said in his address to Congress. According to him, he has turned around the disastrous economy into something wonderful. The worst inflation ever that he inherited (from Biden, of course) is now just about nonexistent. Prices are falling. My attention lapsed for a moment, but he may have said that eggs in some stores are free and at most a dollar a dozen. In Oklahoma and maybe Ohio, but definitely not Oregon, if you buy two Snicker bars at the filling station, the gas is gratis. (Subsequent events make this even more unlikely.) Job creation is better than ever, and manufacturing has rebounded. GDP is astounding as are wages, and the stock market is at an all-time high. Crime, on the other hand, is as low as it was at the Creation more than six thousand years ago. We are respected around the world like never before. We are in a Golden Age, a Golden Age he said, but definitely not in the Age of Aquarius. We have ended discrimination against white Americans, especially white males, by abolishing DEI.
I don’t possibly have room even to summarize what fact-checkers had to say, but to put it kindly, most of the State of the Union was fact-and-evidence-challenged. A rule of thumb: Just because Trump says it does not make it wrong, but that is a good starting point.
And there’s more. The Supreme Court, in what Trump has called a really, really bad decision, struck down tariffs, but customs duties will be brought back, Trump said. To the surprise of many, he was restrained and did not launch the kinds of verbal attacks on the Justices that he did immediately after the tariff decision. Similarly, he did not mention the low IQs of Republicans who sometimes have not agreed with him. He did not create demeaning nicknames for anyone. He did, however, attack Democrats in an unprecedented way. He said: Stand if you agree that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” All Republicans got to their feet, but only a few Democrats did. He then went on to say that Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for their continuing sittingness and that they were crazy and managing to destroy the country–apparently the only time opponents were labeled demented at a State of the Union.
A State of the Union has often been an opportunity to spell out a president’s legislative priorities. There was little of that from Trump. He did propose a new retirement account and suggested that tech companies will be required to build their own power plants for AI data centers, but he did not suggest any legislation to accomplish this. He did, however, tell the legislators to stop insider congressional trading, his one policy position that seemed to have gotten bipartisan cheers. Nevertheless, there was no grand policy proposal. To the disappointment of Republicans, I’m sure, he didn’t even propose another tax cut. But he did lobby for the passage of the SAVE Act, a solution in search of a problem, that would strip states of powers to regulate elections. He said that the only way Democrats can win is to cheat. He seemed to be foreshadowing what may happen next fall: If Democrats win in the midterms, he will claim that they had to have cheated.
Perhaps the speech was as noteworthy for what was not said as much as for what was. There was no mention of ICE, Jeffrey Epstein, plans for Gaza, healthcare, social media, Melania the movie, the Board of Peace, not even the ballroom. There was almost nothing about what once consumed conservatives–our federal debt. However, he announced a new war on fraud under the generalship of JD Vance (not Musk this time) that could supposedly end federal debt. The speech, however, did raise the now standard conservative attack on transgender people, but without any explanation of how this makes life better for our populace. (And, of course, his brief comments on Iran were quickly outpaced by his war.)
This was not just a speech. There was also stagecraft. At the fifteen-minute mark, when attention had already lagged, Trump had the Olympic gold-medal winning men’s hockey team–which did have a thrilling victory–march into the congressional arena. The women’s hockey team, also thrilling victors, were not there. He certainly did not mention that the majority of America’s medals were won by women or that America failed to win the most medals.
Was this address successful? We might like to think our elections are about persuasion. Who has the better policies? Who has the better candidates? But, especially for midterms, when fewer people vote, it is about gerrymandering and about turning out the vote of your side and suppressing the vote of the other side.
While Trump may do things to suppress votes of Democrats, this speech is not one of them, and I doubt that it changed the energy levels of his supporters. Fewer people watched this year’s State of the Union than last year’s. There were no new notable quotable lines to act as battle cries. Instead, it was mostly well-worn, well-known Trumpian tropes. It was less than a week ago and is already largely forgotten. There is much more important news.
