It was like a Creme Egg with a razor blade concealed inside: gooey until it started to cut. In form and much of its content, Donald Trump’s second State of the Union address was a notional call for unity in an age of polarisation.
It was time, the President told both houses of Congress, to “reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution — and embrace the boundless potential of co-operation, compromise, and the common good”.
He urged the legislature to stand “not as two parties but as one nation”. He even managed to extract a moment of passable shtick with the impressive bloc of white-clad women on the Democrat side, many of them recently elected in the mid-terms, as they stood to celebrate higher rates of female employment.
Yet their very presence as a quasi-uniformed resistance — and their mostly appalled expressions during his speech — exposed the emptiness of Trump’s often schmaltzy rhetoric. So too did the smug presence of Brett Kavanaugh, attending his first State of the Union since his hugely controversial confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. To hear this President extol the virtues of unity is like hearing a serial arsonist with a petrol bomb give a lecture on fire safety.
Indeed, the speech itself — for all its pretensions to comity and compromise — was profoundly divisive. Clearly referring to the scrutiny of his administration by congressional committees and to Robert Mueller’s inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, he presented America with the following choice: “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. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”
In other words: holding the presidency to account is unpatriotic and bad for prosperity. Even by Trump’s exacting standards this was an especially contemptible attempt to reduce every issue to loyalty and treachery.
On immigration, and his cherished border wall with Mexico, which triggered the recent 35-day partial government shutdown , he spoke of “compromise”. But what compromise is possible with a demagogue who frames this most sensitive of questions in such reprehensible language?
Yet again he repeated the lie that illegal immigrants are responsible for a crime wave (in fact, undocumented newcomers are appreciably less likely to offend than native-born US citizens).
Worse, he presented the issue of border control as a parable of “the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class ... Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls... Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration — reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals that are so crowded you can’t get in, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net.”
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This is one of the oldest tricks of autocratic populism: the vilification of immigrants as an intrusive burden upon the majority of ordinary people, empowered by an elite that does not care about citizens struggling to get by. A passing acquaintance with mid-20th century history is instructive on the perils of such political poison.
How ironic, then, that Trump chose to invoke so conspicuously the memory of D-Day and — much more contentiously — the commemoration of the Holocaust.
"Democrats are quite wrong to imagine that what America craves after Trump is full-blooded socialism"
It was inspiring indeed to watch Judah Samet, a survivor of Dachau who also narrowly escaped death in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre last October, as he stood to acknowledge the tribute of both houses of Congress on his 81st birthday. But Trump was an impostor at this joyful scene. This, do not forget, is the President who hailed the “very fine people” who marched through Charlottesville in August 2017 — many of them chanting: “Jews will not replace us.”
Even now, Trump’s narcissism is something to behold. He can still take one’s breath away — as when he claimed that “if I had not been elected President of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea with potentially millions of people killed”.
Such idiocy is inherently dangerous — he is, after all, commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military force — but also a political elephant trap. It is easy to dismiss Trump the buffoon and to assume — as many Democrats seem to — that the pendulum of reason will now inevitably swing back their way.
But this is a foolish assumption. What Trump did in this speech was to nurture his electoral base (immigration, a proposed ban on late-term abortion, an “America first” foreign policy), while seeking a sufficiency of additional votes with emphasis upon the economy, the cost of medication, parental leave, and the fight against HIV. It is not unity he seeks, but a second victory.
“Tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”: thus, in practice, did he launch his 2020 campaign.
There is tremendous energy, verve and optimism in the new cohort of Democrat politicians elected in the mid-terms — a spirit personified by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But she and her peers are quite wrong to imagine that what America craves after Trump is full-blooded socialism and intersectional identity politics.
The President knows this and is planning to campaign accordingly, as he signalled in this State of the Union address. He is a fraud, a bigot, a liar and a disgrace to his office. But unless the Democrats quickly raise their game and clear their vision he is also heading for re-election.