WASHINGTON — The State of the Union Address is traditionally an evening of pomp, ceremony, and a speech by the incumbent President of the United States assuring Americans that all is broadly well in their world.
“The State of the Union is strong!” is the claim that successive presidents have made for generations about the country, no matter the particular vicissitudes it might be facing.
But on Tuesday night, even the seating arrangements in the chamber of the House of Representatives made it evident that the current state of America’s union is so deeply divided, that Donald Trump could not claim with a straight face to be succeeding in any professed efforts to unify the country.
So he didn’t even try.
As more than 80 Democrats boycotted Trump’s speech this year, an unprecedented number for any State of the Union regardless of tensions between the country’s two major parties, those who did show up may have regretted their decision.
By the time the longest speech in State of the Union history was over, they were on the receiving end of a public pummeling by the president, as he made the most animated, disciplined and theatrical appearance of his second term so far.
Trump assailed his opponents over and over again, pugnaciously blaming them for everything that ails the United States even under his stewardship, and warning voters of the dangers of returning them to power in November’s midterms.
The Democrats, he said, are to blame for price rises in America that he is simply cleaning up.
The Democrats are for blame to an open-door immigration policy that left American citizens at the mercy of cold-blooded killers from south of America’s borders, even though it was his masked, thuggish federal agents who gunned down two American citizens in Minneapolis only last month.
The Democrats are the party of tax rises, crime, disorder and anarchic disarray, planning to return America to a Biden-esque era that he defined as “a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home and wars and chaos all over the world”.
“If they ever get elected, they would open up that border again”, Trump warned voters watching the speech from coast-to-coast on TV and online. “The only thing standing between America and a wide open border is Donald J. Trump and Republicans in Congress”, he thundered, implicitly urging voters to back his party’s candidates this November.
Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, shouted back at Trump (Photo: Kenny Holston/Pool via Reuters)The speech will be best remembered for a moment that Democrats should probably have seen coming. Trump challenged every House and Senate lawmaker in the room to “stand up if you agree with this statement: the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens”.
The Republicans all enthusiastically leapt to their feet. The Democrats in the room sat on their hands, with some of them looking as though they wished the earth would swallow them whole.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves for not standing up”, Trump said, pointing at Democrats and goading Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan into shouting angry protests at him.
Omar and Tlaib, both Muslim Americans, are favoured targets of the Republican right, and Trump engineered a moment that saw them raging on nationwide TV.
It was a masterstroke of political theatre, but not the only one up Trump’s sleeve. He excoriated Democrats for refusing to back his efforts to ban children from changing genders without parental approval. “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy”, Trump thundered. “Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it in the nick of time”, he claimed.
He urged Congress to pass laws requiring voters to present identification at polling stations in November. “There’s only one reason” the Democrats oppose the proposed law, he claimed.
“They want to cheat. Their policy is so bad, the only way they can win is if they cheat”, he insisted. Several times during the speech he glanced at the Democrats and witheringly described them as “sick people”.
Trump’s eyes were mostly fixed on America (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)For at least one Democrat, it was all too much. Congresswoman Lauren Underwood of Illinois stalked out of the chamber, telling reporters she “couldn’t take another minute of it”. She missed Trump’s presentation of a variety of medals to military heroes that was designed, in part, to push back at previous evidence of his disdain for the nation’s troops.
She also missed Trump’s threat to take military action against Iran. Despite weeks of talks with the regime in Tehran, Trump claimed “we haven’t heard those secret words ‘we will never have a nuclear weapon’”.
In fact, Iran’s foreign minister said exactly that on social media just hours before the president’s speech, but having assembled the most powerful array of force in the region since the war on Iraq in 2003, Trump gave every indication of being ready to use it.
As far his tariffs, the President called them “country-saving” and “peace-protecting”. But he offered no clarity about the future for trading partners now scrambling to understand what level of duties will apply to their exports following last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that nullified the key aspects of Trump’s trade war.
The court’s opinion was “unfortunate’, though Trump insisted most of his tariffs will remain in place via “tested and alternative legal statutes” that he failed to identify.
Congress, he insisted, will not be consulted, even though his new, across-the-board 15% duty can only remain on the books for 150 days without the legislature’s authorisation.
In brief comments about Europe, he described America’s Nato partners as “friends and allies”, and he pledged new efforts to try and bring peace to Ukraine. China did not merit a single mention in the speech. Nor, to the great relief of European leaders, did Greenland.
Trump’s eyes were mostly fixed on America, the country’s preparations to celebrate 250 years of independence this summer, and his determination that voters should urgently recognise that he has ushered in a new “golden age” of soaring stock markets and retirement accounts. “Everybody’s up, way up”, he insisted, to an audience of American voters who consistently tell pollsters they do not feel that way at all.
No single speech can ever entirely turn around a president’s fortunes, and Trump’s address on Tuesday night certainly did not come close to breaking that rule. But to the consternation of his critics, he was energetic, focused, and delivered a speech littered with falsehoods but pockmarked with memorable, made-for-TV moments.
If – and it’s a very big ‘if’ – he can repeat the exercise on the campaign trail, his party might just have a chance of victory this November. But, Republican lawmakers may equally live to regret the cold February night in Congress when they allowed the ring-master to beguile them all over again.
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