The State of the Union Was a Visibly Degenerate Variety Show

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/donald-trump-state-of-the-union-degenerate.html


The State of the Union Was a Visibly Degenerate Variety Show
The address was a joke Donald Trump played on the House.
By Jim Newell
Feb 05, 2020
1:05 AM


For most of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi contained herself. She offered to shake Trump’s hand at the beginning of the speech, an offer he declined. As he spoke, she flipped through an unbound text copy of the speech the way one might review a fresh batch of tax forms, and stood occasionally to recognize a soldier, a widow, or a United States–backed but otherwise unsuccessful claimant to the Venezuelan presidency. She enforced discipline, ensuring that no members of her caucus were rude during this grand tradition. At one point, she gave a death stare to her members who clapped for Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland, Florida, massacre, when he protested the speech’s gun rights advocacy and was escorted from the room. Guttenberg was Pelosi’s own guest.

It was unusually out-of-character, then, when Pelosi made a show of ripping up Trump’s speech immediately after he concluded. But even the most strained performance of normalcy couldn’t survive the full spectacle of the address. The speech is being described as a Trumpian reality show for its assortment of stunt-pegged character callouts in the gallery. It was more of a variety show, though, divided into alternating segments of election-season appeals to the middle, gags, and abrupt fascism. It was a joke he played on the House majority.

snip//

On the surface, it was all as direct and literal as a game show. Education policy? The little girl gets a scholarship! Afghanistan? Here’s one of the troops, brought home, right now! What wasn’t mentioned head-on in the speech was the most relevant fact about the president and the presidency: an acknowledgment from Trump that he had recently been impeached in the room where he was speaking and, for the next 19 or so hours, would remain under impeachment in a Senate trial.

But revenge over impeachment was the subtext of the entire display. He wanted to make a mockery of Nancy Pelosi’s House. It wasn’t just the snubbed handshake. He wanted her to watch, and bite her tongue, as his wife gave Rush Limbaugh the highest civilian award in the country in her chamber. He wanted to throw in an applause break after every single line, to show her the loyal Republicans cheering on cue again and again, the same way they’ll line up to acquit him at trial. He wanted to throw another two or three gruesome sentences into his perfunctory smearing of undocumented immigrants, while she sat there. He wanted to say, in front of her, that “we will always protect patients with preexisting conditions, that is a guarantee” while his administration is currently fighting in court to eliminate the entire Affordable Care Act under a triple-bank-shot legal technicality. It was a three-ringed troll job at a moment when his approval rating is up—not up above 50 percent, but he’s never needed a majority to do what he wants—and Democrats can’t come up with a countermove.

[crickets]

1. Good article, but ...

What wasn’t mentioned head-on in the speech was the most relevant fact about the president and the presidency: an acknowledgment from Trump that he had recently been impeached in the room where he was speaking and, for the next 19 or so hours, would remain under impeachment in a Senate trial.

That impeachment is not going anywhere. Trump will remain impeached for good.