Donald Trump and his grotesquely deformed facsimile of a Presidential address to Congress
With his approval rating the lowest of any incoming United States president in recorded history, and an increasing number of Americans concluding that he can’t so much as get out of the bed without saying or doing something embarrassing in the process, the bar was set so low for Donald Trump’s speech to Congress tonight that all he had to do to clear it was not set his podium on fire. And yet his speech was so uniquely inept – even for him – that I think he may have found a new way to make himself even less popular.
Trump started off in safe territory. He reiterated a number of his campaign promises, and for the first twenty minutes it sounded like he was giving a leftover stump speech from the campaign. Those were the kind of speeches that caused him to lose the popular vote by three million votes and enter office with a 40% approval rating, but at least it he was comfortable delivering it. Of course we all knew he’d veer off track eventually, and many of us expected him to do so by falling into his usual immature and silly rhetoric. But instead, about halfway through his speech, he did the opposite: he tried to mimic what he thinks a president is supposed to sound like.
That’s when it became clear that Donald Trump has no idea what a president is supposed to sound like, or why popular leaders are inspiring and revered. It was suddenly like he was trying to speak a foreign language he didn’t understand, by offensively making random noises that he thought sounded like the language. He tried to do that thing where presidents point to “average Americans” in the audience who are evidence that we’ve gone great things or that we need to make things better. But he didn’t seem to understand the point of it.
First he used a disabled college age woman as the basis for making a lie-filled attack on the FDA, seemingly blaming the agency for her disability. Then he inexplicably decided to bring attention to his own botched Yemen raid, the one which we all know by now that he arrogantly ordered without consulting anyone, and that he didn’t even bother to show up to the Situation Room for. Any rational president would be hoping the American public would simply forget about it. But instead Donald Trump trotted out the widow of the Navy SEAL he had just gotten killed in the Yemen raid. And this was just hours after he had blamed the Generals for getting him killed.
Then Trump just sort of made everyone stare at the crying widow, for an interminable length of time, because he seemed to think the applause was for himself instead of for her and her fallen husband. The poor woman clearly didn’t want the camera on her anymore, and yet Trump refused to resume his speech, because he was enjoying a protracted moment that he couldn’t figure out had become the most humiliating of her life. It was exploitative to the point of being grotesque. It was all because he still can’t admit to himself that his Yemen raid was a failure. And there’s never been anything like that moment in presidential history.
In my lifetime I’ve watched any number of presidents give speeches to congress. I’ve seen Barack Obama fill each of his annual addresses with policy, bringing more energy to some of them than others. I’ve seen the first George Bush give a desperate speech full of empty promises in the final year of his first term, needing a home run to salvage any chance at reelection, earnestly swinging and missing to the point that I felt bad for him. I’ve seen Ronald Reagan give soaring but empty oratories that had no meaning but could at least make you feel good about America for the night. And I’ve seen George W. Bush give eight years of arrogant speeches to congress which demonstrated that he thought he was eight times smarter than he really was.
But for all those speeches and their ups and downs, I have never seen anything like the grotesquely deformed facsimile of a presidential address that Donald Trump tried to conjure up tonight while addressing Congress. If he’d given a typical Trump speech, it wouldn’t have helped his cause. But this was somehow worse. It was him finally trying to prove he can be presidential, and instead proving to any still-undecided folks out there that he’ll never figure it out.
Trump needed a grand slam tonight in order to stop his presidency from continuing to fall apart. Instead he was a guy tentatively running around the bases after he’d already struck out, high fiving the people on the wrong team, spiking a football into home plate, fully oblivious to what the parameters of the game even were, and giving a stately middle finger to the crowd to signal that they’re number one. On a night like this, there has simply never been such a grotesque display of failure to understand the presidency in my lifetime. Help us investigate Trump-Russia!
