US News Editorial: "State of Banality"
Trump has a well-deserved reputation as a rambling and often incoherent speaker; but a second Trump emerges when he is obliged to make more of a formal, set-piece address like the State of the Union, or his speech in Davos, Switzerland last week or his speech to Congress last year. This more restrained Trump is faithful to his prepared text, which often sounds less like the president and more like a speechwriter's generic conception of how a president ought to sound.
But of course Donald Trump can only be so conventional.
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So he promised the people of Puerto Rico, among other localities still recovering from Hurricane Maria, that "we are with you, we love you, and we will pull through together," on the night before the Federal Emergency Management Agency will officially "shut off" food and water aid to the island where one-third of the population is still without power; he spoke of how important he views the opioid crisis, stirring words underscoring his administration's dearth of action on the issue (Trump "has not really done anything about [opioids], except insofar as he has pushed for massive cuts in Medicaid, which would produce massive cuts in substance-abuse treatment programs," Politico's Michael Grunwald noted this week in cataloguing Trump's broken promises from last year's address to Congress); "there has never been a better time to start living the American Dream," Trump said in describing his "New American Moment," before directing that instant specifically at "every citizen watching at home tonight," never mind that that dream has not traditionally been confined to the citizenry but has also served as a beacon to others around the world who are yearning to breathe free and make a better life for themselves and their families.
There was something mystifying about listening to Trump declare the "era of economic surrender" to be over at the end of a year in which his withdrawal from avenues of American global leadership have left voids which China, for example, has been more than happy to fill. That fact, along with Trump's declaration that "rivals like China and Russia … challenge our interests, our economy, and our values," when he's aided the former and abetted the latter.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2018-01-31/trumps-conventional-banal-forgettable-state-of-the-union-address
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