To call Donald Trump’s Tuesday night State of the Union address “chaotic” is giving it too much credit. That term implies some sort of manic energy. And “rambling” doesn’t capture the way in which the speech sandwiched a lot of general nastiness between two slices of generic calls for “unity,” by which Trump was clear that he meant everyone doing just as he wants. The best way to describe the speech is simply “atrocious”: listlessly delivered, horribly written, and above all free of any meaningful content.
If a State of the Union speech is supposed to be where the White House declares its vision for the coming year and beyond, what Trump demonstrated most convincingly is that he’s blind. A speech from Barack Obama or Bill Clinton might be full of lofty goals. Even Stacey Abram’s brief response carried with it a sharply packaged list of possibilities. But Trump’s speech was a hair’s breadth from being absolutely empty. Trump did mention curing AIDS and childhood cancer—and seemed to take a good deal of undeserved credit for progress made in those areas—but those are so generally agreed-on that endorsing them is like endorsing air. Or at least, they have been … since Republicans stopped referring to AIDS as “gay cancer” and declaring that it was God’s revenge on the lustful. If they have actually stopped.
Trump’s speech opened by referencing the achievements of forces fighting in World War II and the accomplishments of those who landed on the Moon. But despite these lofty touchstones, Trump provided no goals to match. In fact, for all his callbacks to America’s efforts in Europe, the only mention the continent earned in the center of his speech was slaps for being “freeloaders” on drug pricing and for not paying “their fair share” on defense. And the best Trump could muster on space was to refer to the upcoming resumption of manned launches from the Kennedy Space Center, a program in place since well before Trump took office.
After opening with flat, dishwatery talk of unity, delivered with the enthusiasm of a fourth-grader delivering a report on a book he did not read, Trump gained a slight bit of energy when it came to what was by far the largest part of the speech: Trump bragging on Trump. In a pattern far more akin to a rally than a speech, Trump delivered a line, waited for the applause, delivered another, and waited again. Trump’s surrogates are fond of telling how he can stand up night after night and make speeches greater than an hour, but that seems a mean feat when it consists of nothing but tossing out a few words and making “adore me” hand signs.
Other than demands for praise, the center of Trump’s speech was filled with nastiness. He didn’t claim just that Democrats were for open borders, but that they were cowards, shivering behind “walls and guards” while leaving ordinary people to face the flood of criminals coming across the border. He didn’t call Democrats just baby-killers for supporting a woman’s right to choose, but he called them “gleeful” baby killers, ready to “execute” a child already born. And when it came to investigations … that was where Trump delivered the most impactful line of the night.
In the midst of his deliver-a-sentence-wait-for-applause litany, Trump declared that unless investigations end, he will not cooperate on the operation of the government.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations.”
To be clear in getting his point across, he repeated it.
“If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”
Several observers have noted the similarity to Richard Nixon calling for an end to investigations in his 1974 State of the Union address, but there’s a critical difference. By making a dichotomy between investigations and legislation, Trump is doing what even Nixon did not—turning the request that investigations end into a threat.
Most of Trump’s speech was … a Trump speech. There were the exaggerated claims of immigrant violence, absolute lies about the origin and nature of MS-13, and deliberate conflating of “the southern border” and drugs. There was also some space devoted to building ICE into heroes, a section that notably did not include stories of its agents arresting parents at children’s school bus stops, or prying families apart at hospitals.
Toward the end of the speech, Trump looped around to make his big surprise reveal that a Holocaust survivor on hand was one of those rescued in part by one of the soldiers on hand. But while it was a heartwarming story, Trump treated this twist as if it somehow vindicated the points of his speech. It didn’t. It had nothing to do with anything about it. But then, the same could be said of much of the speech, which was so chopped together from disconnected parts that a sentence that began with abortion ended up wandering past a call to faith before bumbling into NATO funding.
And if Trump’s opening slice of “unity” was hollow, the closing bit was absolutely airless, mixing words evocative of “This Land is Your Land” with snippets of old speeches. Because being a white supremacist has apparently robbed Stephen Miller of the ability to craft anything new. And that was Trump’s speech—not a single stirring metaphor, not a sentence that landed with anything like a touch of grace, not a single idea that wasn’t somewhere on the ugly side of trite.
But he did seem to enjoy it when people clapped.
