Bestowing Medals, Vilifying Democrats, Clinging to Tariffs
I’ve had the mind-numbing task of covering State of the Union addresses, it sometimes seems to me, since Woodrow Wilson delivered the first one. But Donald Trump’s latest version was the first in which the speech itself had already faded into the mists of memory by the time he’d awarded the evening’s second Congressional Medal of Honor, which followed an award of a Purple Heart, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the goalie on the U.S. men’s hockey team, and a passel of presentations of surprise guests in the galleries, whom Trump summoned to the spotlight with those immortal words from The Price Is Right: Come on down!
Somewhere, threaded between all this, was a speech. And there was at least one far-too-revelatory tell amid Trump’s ad libs while bestowing one of the Medals of Honor: that he’d thought that he, too, was so deserving that he himself might one day get that medal. The Congressional Medal of Honor, of course, is awarded for bravery and valor in military service. Trump almost heroically managed to overlook the fact that he had avoided the military, getting out of the draft at the height of the Vietnam War by obtaining a medical deferment from a podiatrist who claimed he had bone spurs in his foot, a claim that the podiatrist, years later, said was a diagnosis he’d cooked up as a favor to Trump’s father.
To be sure, there were many thousands of young men during the Vietnam War who sought, and in numerous cases, received dubious medical deferments, but leave it to Trump to hint he should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor despite the deception he and/or his father engineered to keep him far from harm.
The other tell I detected came amid his defense of his tariffs, in which he voiced his belief that they could somehow bring so much money into the government’s coffers that they could eliminate the need for an income tax. He frequently makes that claim, though no economist of any political persuasion has been found who believes tariffs could ever yield even a fraction of the funds required to do that. But last night, Trump followed up his much-repeated wish by noting that income taxes, after all, take too much money from “the people that I love.” In other words, the real purpose of Trump’s tariffs, in his mind, is to effectively abolish taxes on his family and his gazillionaire supporters, so much so that he and his beautiful ilk wouldn’t even have to keep paying those goddamn accountants.
There was, if you listened hard, a speech nestled inside the game show format of the evening. Its first salient point was that the economy is the best the nation has ever known, that he’s created a “golden age” not just for White House decor but for America as a whole. Trump is plainly determined to exceed Joe Biden in extolling an economy that Americans don’t recognize. If he persists in making such claims, he will only further inflame an already pissed-off electorate. The notable silence from Republicans in the hall when he extolled tariffs was something of a tell, too.
Trump’s transformation of the existing economy into a golden age is just one manifestation of his need to inflate his every action to world-historic dimensions. He dwelled on his role in the return of living and dead Israeli hostages from Gaza in terms so glowing that you might think he’d solved the Middle East conflict once and for all. “No one thought it could be done,” he said more than once, as though he’d raised Lazarus. (For that matter, he also claimed credit for returning religion to American soil. If you count the number of people praying for his quick departure, he may be right.)
The second salient point of the speech was Trump’s savaging of the Democrats, both those in the room who stayed silent not just for his tariff sales job but for the rest of his arguments, and Democrats generally, whom he blamed for everything since the Black Death of 1347. Calling the Democrats “crazy” was the emotional core of his speech and the emotional core of the MAGA movement; it received the evening’s loudest ovations from the Republicans.
The third salient point was his insistence that the Senate pass the SAVE Act, which as I noted yesterday is designed to make it harder for the poor and the young, two groups that are suspiciously Democratic, to register and vote. As Republicans have done for decades, he claimed such legislation was urgently needed due to verifiably nonexistent voter fraud, the plague of “illegal alien voting” that two generations of Republican federal prosecutors have tried and failed to find. “Rampant” voter fraud, he continued, was behind any and every Democratic electoral victory; “The only way they get elected,” he said, “is to cheat.”
This coming from the guy who told the Georgia secretary of state in the aftermath of the 2020 election to “find” roughly 11,000 pro-Trump ballots, whether they existed or not, is the kind of thing that gives chutzpah a bad name.
Trump’s speech—particularly his vilification of the Democrats—doubtless played well with the MAGA true believers, but Republicans also need to do well with non-MAGA Republicans and independents, and there was little in his talk that would bring those groups back into the fold. That explains why congressional Republicans cheered heartily at Trump’s mentions of the SAVE Act. After hearing Trump’s insistence on reinstating the tariffs, and his rave reviews of the economy, they clearly concluded that the only way they could avoid a career-ending wipeout in November was to enact legislation that they hoped would impede some Democrats from voting in the midterms. Whatever the state of the union may be, that sums up the state of the Republicans.
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