The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy. “A short time ago, we were a dead country; now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world!” Trump said on Tuesday night. But the salesman is not who you want to talk to when you have the broken-down old jalopy towed back to the lot and demand a refund.
Based on the polls, it’s pretty apparent that America wants its money back. CNN’s latest survey had Trump at a sixty-three-per-cent disapproval rating, and just a thirty-six-per-cent approval one; other surveys show similarly brutal numbers. Trump, in other words, has sunk close to post-January 6th territory with the public—not exactly the moment for a speech that leaned hard into the President’s Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.
And yet the message could not have been otherwise. Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.
It was both the most theatrical moment in Trump’s speech and the most revealing. Did he think that he personally was responsible for winning that gold? Probably.
If only he had ended his speech there. The rest of the address turned out to be a reprise of Trump’s “American carnage” greatest hits: a bloody mess of murderous illegal aliens (“And we’re getting them the hell out of here fast”), “Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota,” and all the “stolen and rigged” bad things that Democrats had done to the country. This was Trump in dark mode, his only other setting for one of these speeches, which made a certain amount of sense. Who else but Trump’s most fervent supporters were still listening by this point, long into his speech? The President seemed almost relieved that there were enough Democrats who had not walked out of the room in disgust for him to taunt. “These people are crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”
Trump had been hemorrhaging public support, for himself and his policies, in the weeks leading up to the speech. After a public outcry over the heavy-handed tactics of federal agents, which led to the deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis, he was forced to back away from a major immigration crackdown in Minnesota. He threatened to use military force to seize Greenland, causing a serious rift with America’s NATO allies, before insisting that he had no intention of starting a war of imperial conquest for the Danish territory. On the morning of the speech, NPR reported that Trump’s Department of Justice had removed dozens of pages of the Epstein files related to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor. (In a statement, the White House said that the President has been “totally exonerated on anything related to Epstein.”)
Despite Trump’s many, many words on Tuesday night, none of this was mentioned, even by way of rebuttal. As for the troubled American economy, aside from the magical power of tariffs to transform the world, the President’s new program consisted of a vague suggestion to Congress that it should pass still more tax cuts, but for what and for whom was not clear. Forget the predictions and all the pregame hype. There was no resetting of the narrative, no course correction or even a meaningful explanation of what the course is—though, to be fair, Trump did hand out six medals to various guests he’d invited for the occasion, including two Purple Hearts, two Medals of Honor, one Legion of Merit, and one Presidential Medal of Freedom.
