Trump’s New Reality Show
The most frustrating thing about Donald Trump’s congressional address last night, aside from his being in position to deliver it at all, is that it was a good speech.
I’m serious. It was a good speech. President Obama and his team surely could’ve cranked out a better one in their sleep, but this one was solid. If you had woken up from a years-long coma yesterday to find out that Donald J. Trump was President of the United States and this was the first thing you’d seen of his presidency, it would go a long way to quelling any initial misgivings you may have had about the world you’d returned to. It may have been riddled with inaccuracies and inherently Trumpian flourishes, but in a vacuum, Trump looked presidential last night.
And that’s the problem. Whether by the grace of observers desperate for some semblance of normalcy, or by his own tendency to suck the air out of a room, Trump keeps getting put in a vacuum.
Trump beginning his speech by mentioning the threats and vandalism aimed at Jewish centers and cemeteries across the country was a great touch. But it’s undercut by the first two times he was directly asked about antisemitism, where he responded by bragging about the size of his win and complaining about difficult questions from the press. Just yesterday behind closed doors, he implied that some of the attacks were false flag attacks.
Trump honoring the history of African-Americans as Black History Month drew to a close was also a nice touch. Or perhaps it would have been, if he hadn’t opened the month by again bragging about himself and complaining about the media, if he didn’t continue to use Chicago and Baltimore and Detroit as metonyms for the “lawlessness” of the black community, or if just yesterday, his Secretary of Education didn’t compare HBCUs to charter schools or his Attorney General didn’t wave off his predecessor’s findings of racial bias in urban policing as “anecdotal” — without even having read the reports.
Trump honoring the widow of a Navy SEAL who died during a raid in Yemen was a genuinely touching moment, his bizarre quip about the SEAL smiling in heaven for setting an applause record notwithstanding. That moment is undercut when you read that just yesterday (are you noticing a pattern?), Trump blamed any failures of the raid, including the SEAL’s death, on the generals under his command, the latest in a long string of dismissive behaviors towards the armed forces that fueled the SEAL’s father’s refusal to meet with him.
There were so many moments like this. Trump warning of the scourge of undocumented immigrants committing violent crime, when statistically speaking they’re less dangerous than natural-born citizens. Trump reinvoking his Big Beautiful Wall and his skill as a dealmaker, when every indication from Mexico is that not a single peso will be paid for its construction despite his many promises otherwise. Trump’s condolences about the shooting in Kansas, despite never mentioning the specific anti-Muslim sentiment inspiring it, a sentiment he has actively inflamed. Trump complaining about “trivial fights” when his Twitter feed exists.
And of course, there was Trump (accurately, it must be said) speaking on last year’s jump in crime and the fundamental threat it poses to the populace, despite crime statistics being on a decades-long downward trend overall. Millions of people in this country will never be able to vote again because of the crimes they’ve been convicted of, justly or otherwise. Meanwhile, any potential crimes that Trump may have committed have been waved off as fabrications of an overzealous press, examples of his economic genius, or best of all, “locker room talk.”
This isn’t stuff you need to be a soulless political junkie like me to know. You don’t need a degree or hours of daily research. All it takes is a baseline skimming of the (FAKE!) news, and holding the image Trump projects against the person he has already revealed himself to be.
They will never match up.
Trump has a tendency to label his opponents “haters,” with great enthusiasm. Aside from establishing that he would have had a great career as a Weezy-lite rapper in another life, he’s not entirely wrong, even when you set aside the particular odiousness of his beliefs and behaviors. On a more fundamental level, that hatred comes from his sheer lack of accountability, the perpetual incongruity between word and deed, and the millions of enablers who protect his every failing with the same swiftness they’d condemn others of a darker hue.
In a nutshell, Donald Trump is every entitled twit with a terminal case of affluenza who keeps receiving second, third, fourth, fifth, and however many more umpteen chances, when all the rest of us are still fighting for our first.
On a personally primal level, It’s very difficult not to hate someone like that.
But he looked presidential last night. And because he looked presidential last night, already it’s being treated as some sort of a comforting turning point, hailed as the mythical pivot, the validation of the millions of people who demanded that he be given a chance he hadn’t earned. And it’s in moments like these that Trump is at his most dangerous; when he, like the “Hollywood elite” that he decries but was part of for decades, is playing a role. He’s no Meryl Streep, but he’s good at it; he didn’t get that star for nothing.
Because as long as he can play the part of the vaguely presidential in the big moments, with Mike Pence and Paul Ryan vacantly smiling and nodding the whole way, as long as his legion of sycophants keep complaining about the unfairness and inaccuracy of any critical press, and as long as people in that selfsame press spot him points for the bare minimum of political civility despite being under constant assault for doing their jobs, then we may not be looking at four or fewer years of this.
We may be looking at eight.
