Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress

My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.

The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.

Please become a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary and other goodies. Tomorrow I’ll take a look back at the first week of COVID and a news conference I attended in Mendocino County, California.

Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.

I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.

Probably the most significant issue I want to discuss is the purpose of Trump’s address. A Facebook friend who is horrified by Trump was urging everyone to watch so they could see Trump’s lying, bullying performance for themselves. I responded that there was no reason for anyone to inflict that on themselves if they didn’t want to, and catching up with news coverage the next morning would be sufficient.

I’ll stand by that. The nonpartisan website PolitiFact found that Trump lied repeatedly on matters such as Social Security, government waste (not) found by DOGE, undocumented immigration, the cost of the Paris climate agreement, and military assistance to Ukraine. Other claims were rated as “mostly false” or “half true.” But how would someone who hasn’t been paying close attention know that Trump was lying in real time unless they had a scorecard?

The Social Security lie about benefits being paid to non-existent people more than 140 years old was especially telling. As Fatima Hussein reported in The Associated Press recently, those biblical ages were spit out by COBOL, an ancient computer language still used by the Social Security Administration. The problem is well-known, and no, checks are not being sent to Methuselah and his family.

So why bring it up? One likely interpretation is that Trump is laying the groundwork for cuts to Social Security in order to pay for tax cuts aimed at further enriching his billionaire supporters.

As for the viewers at home, they were mostly Trump supporters anyway. A post-speech instant poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 76% of those watching approved while 23% disapproved. But that came with a caution: “The viewership was heavily Republican — historically a president’s party draws more of their own partisans.”

In other words, epistemic closure was achieved. Trump lied for more than an hour and a half to an audience comprising mostly those who already supported him, and whose tendency to get most of their information from Fox News and other right-wing outlets renders them hermetically sealed off from contrary sources.

MAGA today can wallow in the ridiculousness of New York Post columnist Mike Goodwin, who wrote of Democrats, “Calling them a clown show is an insult to clowns. They earned their trip to the political wilderness and Tuesday proved they are not yet ready to emerge as a constructive opposition party.” So much for the Murdoch rag’s brief flirtation with sanity.

The other point I want to make is how Democrats behaved, and how they should have behaved. With a few exceptions, they sat there silently. The most notable of those exceptions was Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat, who looked like a character out of the late 1800s with his ponytail and his gold-tipped cane (that’s praise, in case you were wondering). He stood, shouted and waved his cane at the podium until Mike Johnson ordered him to be removed — rather different from the treatment that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., received last year after she heckled Biden.

It was a nice bit of theater, and it was obviously a rehearsed moment. I thought other Democrats might take turns doing the same, and I’m conflicted over whether they should have. Whatever road the party takes to building its battered brand, I suspect it’s not going to be by acting as Republicans. They’re stuck with being the normal-adult alternative to the evil craziness around them. They should be unstinting in their opposition, but acting like lunatics gives appalled voters nowhere to turn. I’m not saying that Green acted like a lunatic; far from it. But it’s probably a good thing that others didn’t emulate him.

Which brings me to the Democratic response, delivered by freshman Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. I thought it was effective, leaning on traditional themes of patriotism and bipartisanship that may seem out of sync with the moment but that are no doubt appealing to moderate voters who are horrified by the first month of the Trump presidency. It was short, and if you missed it you can watch it here. These responses are nearly always embarrassingly awful no matter which party is delivering them, but Slotkin’s was simple and refreshingly free of emoting.

Never Trump conservative Tom Nichols of The Atlantic didn’t like it, writing (gift link), “It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.” I disagree, much as I would have liked to see Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York up there instead. Don’t get me wrong — AOC, the most accomplished communicator the Democrats have, would have risen to the moment.

But the voters that Democrats need right now want reassurance, not a lightning rod. Slotkin’s speech meant very little in the moment. I regard it as a small building block that will pay dividends over time.