As yesterday’s post suggests, I did snag a few watch minutes of the not-called-a-State-of-the-Union speech to Congress last night. Not really willingly. In and out, mostly out, but caught [more than] enough clips in the follow-up commentary for gist and flavor.

I have a non-paid subscription to Rick Wilson’s Substack. I’d pay just for the pleasure of reading the words he puts together in sentence after sentence (truly delicious), but damn, I have too many paid Substack subscriptions as it is. I’m sure runaway Substack subscriptions are becoming a problem for folks, in the same way that having too many jars of nuts and candy on one’s kitchen island is…

Non-paid subcriptions get you a smattering of full essays each week, and daily teasers to full essays. Today’s was one of the teasers, but isn’t it great? Just enough deliciousness to satisfy.

100 Minutes of Lies

Dear God, That Was Worse Than Even I Expected.

Well, that’s 100 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.

Trump’s big Joint Address to Congress read as if the White House staff told ChatGPT, “Give me a State of the Union speech that’s Castro in length, Von Munchausen in facts, and Culture War Carnival Barker in style. Oh, and make it tendentious, boring, and ugly.”

What else did one expect?

Trump’s speech last night was dull yet terrifying. It was self-referential and self-aggrandizing yet vaguely desperate. It was Trump at his worst, but it also showed America that all he’s got is his base and his same tired bit, his greatest hits played over and over, louder and louder, to an audience getting older, poorer, and more vicious in its demands that their umber demigod give them that old-time religion.

It was divisive, terrible, and badly written, a speech so clunky and organizationally and rhetorically grotesque that even if Ted Sorenson, Ray Price, and William Safire rose from the grave and sat down with Peggy Noonan and Aaron Sorkin for a fortnight, they couldn’t find enough creative mayonnaise to turn that chickenshit into chicken salad. Almost every State of the Union speech ends up with a kind of freight-train problem; too many constituent groups inside the Administration need their paragraph, their nod to their importance. 

This graceless bucket of rhetorical fish guts was a catalog of “Now That’s What I Call Culture War! Volume 27” tropes, riffs, and attacks on the usual Catalog of Imaginary Demons that informs MAGA belief and behavior. None of it was new or more shocking than the first 1,000 times. 

But it was the stunning disregard for truth that set this speech apart.

Trump opened his lie hole and sluiced a torrent of outright lies into the willing maw of his dull-eyed, bovine audience watching at home hooked to their Fox feed of amygdala-stoking fear porn. The absurdity of his lies was rivaled only by their scope.

That photo, borrowed also from Rick’s Substack, borrowed himself from somewhere else, no doubt. And isn’t that just a best placement on the congressional rope line?