Can you talk a country to death?
In the longest address ever delivered by a president of the United States to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump attempted on Tuesday night to prove that yes, you can.
But contrary to what it may have felt like to viewers trying to remain conscious throughout Trump’s tsunami of lies, bluster, and weird little asides, the threat to the nation’s health was not that the speech was so soul-crushingly stultifying. Indeed, the fact that it was so boring actually served to obscure the profoundly dangerous agenda Trump was promoting and the destructive nature of the actions his administration has already taken.
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This is not an unusual tactic among despots. Not only do they love to hear themselves speak, but they speak in ways designed to desensitize a populace to the threat they pose. Putin, Hitler, Kim Jong Un, any leader of the Chinese Communist Party, name your autocrat and you have likely heard them drone on and on until they have somehow turned their outrageous ideas, propaganda, tedious stories, and narcissistic self-references into an anesthetic cocktail so powerful that it would numb people to their intended outrages.
While the U.S. president clearly took a page out of the book of these leaders he so admires (perhaps literally given that his first wife said he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand), he deserves some credit for adding a Trumpian twist to his test of American attention spans. Drawing on his TV experience, he offered up an approach to selling his autocratic agenda that might be called game-show authoritarianism.
During the speech, he did not just spin his usual bulls--t into a truly breathtakingly ambitious and intricate Bayeux Tapestry of lies. He also tried to candy-coat his malignant intentions by regularly turning to carefully curated members of the audience and telling their stories in ways that combined elements of This Is Your Life, The Price Is Right and the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Previous presidents have given shoutouts to people sitting with their first ladies and assorted friends in the balcony of the House chamber. But never did any call out so many human props and then offer some of them real-time rewards for being willing to appear on TV as a member of Team Trump. A kid suffering from cancer was made a member of the Secret Service—a moving distraction from the fact that Trump has frozen funding for cancer research.
A cop was heralded for his heroism and Trump announced a proposal to give cop killers the death penalty—a chutzpah-rich sleight of hand to draw attention away from the fact that Trump himself incited a riot in the very building in which he was speaking and then pardoned the criminals who attacked the police. Another human prop was offered admission to West Point, others had initiatives named after them. (Sitting near them all, Melancholia Trump, the president’s understandably sourpuss wife, managed to maintain a dignified scowl throughout.)
That is not to say the stories of many of those singled out were not moving. Many had suffered grave losses. (Not all of them. There is some debate about whether the details of one woman’s case concerning her child being forced by their school in the direction of a gender change are actually accurate.) But the evening became more about awarding cash and prizes to members of the audiences than it did about real policy initiatives.
When Trump’s agenda items were discussed, many of them were also designed more to trigger audience reaction than they were to actually address real issues. There was probably more discussion about gender roles and transgender athletes in sports (out of half a million college athletes there are fewer than 10 who are reportedly transgender) than in any presidential speech ever. He honored a girl, Payton McNabb, who was injured in a volleyball game by a transgender girl and then promised to deny federal funding to all schools who didn’t honor his ban on transgender athletes.
The showmanship, the gimmicks, the touching vignettes, all served a purpose, of course. They were to ensure that the morning papers in towns across America would be filled with human interest stories and that they would bury the scarier bits of Trump’s plans. For example, he suggested people needed to brace themselves for a “little disturbance” in the economy—as his tariffs sent markets tanking and worries about a recession soaring. He promised to “take back” the Panama Canal. He even said we would claim Greenland “one way or another,” which, as it happens, exactly the kind of direct threat to a NATO ally (Denmark), which the alliance was created to forestall. But was it just bluster or was it Vladimir Putin’s newest ally opening up a threat on the Atlantic Alliance’s western front?
Trump touted his “government efficiency” operation run by Elon Musk and said it had identified over $100 billion in savings. But who would take time to discover he was off by a factor of six when there were grieving families being exploited? He hailed RFK Jr., his HHS Secretary, and his promise to make America healthy again, even as Kennedy was failing to effectively address the spreading measles outbreak and cuts in USAID funding were blunting our ability to identify and stop the spread of global pandemics. (The other day, Musk said that was a mistake they made and corrected. He was wrong. They made the mistake. But they didn’t correct it.)
Yes, if you were paying attention, you knew that the issues discussed by Trump in between the showbiz flourishes included fabricated problems at Social Security that were clearly being offered as an excuse to make cuts at that organization that nearly 80 million Americans depend upon, promises of more attacks on the environment, stated commitments to withdraw further from the international institutions generations of Americans had sought to build, more threats against our neighbors, the embrace of crazy bad economic policies, and threats to the rule of law in the United States.
There was a sharp irony when, moments before Trump hailed his leadership in restoring free speech to America, one of his wingmen, House Speaker Mike Johnson, had Democratic Representative Al Green escorted from the House Chamber because he had the temerity to shout that Trump did not have a mandate to destroy Medicaid. This happened even as the GOP engaged in countless noisy public displays of affection for the president throughout the event.
Admittedly, one of the most worrisome aspects of the entire extravaganza was the sight of the gathered Democrats in the audience sitting inertly, shaking their heads periodically, holding up little round signs of protest and generally appearing impotent, leaderless, and no match for the Bloviator-in-Chief. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan gave a good, solid, earnest response to Trump’s speech. But for bleary-eyed Americans, after Trump’s Wagnerian-duration performance, more speechifying was the last thing they were likely in the mood for.
Somehow Donald Trump made tedious the outrageous fact that he was attacking the foundations of our democracy, the power of the very Congress he was addressing, the judiciary whose leaders were arrayed before him, the readiness of the military whose chiefs sat just a few feet away from him, our economy, institutions upon which tens of millions of Americans depend, our values, our allies, our standing in the world, and our viability as a global leader. He made a moment of unprecedented danger to America dull. Which was, of course, his intention.
And if he could leaven it all by working his audience, offering them big, big prizes, and basking in the cheers of Republicans who might as well have been responding to an applause sign over their MC-in-Chief’s head, all the better. It might even have made it seem, well, normal. Which it most assuredly was not.
