The State of the Union Is Delusion

[DonViejo]

By Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

When Donald Trump took the rostrum Tuesday night, the federal government was ten days away from collapsing into paralysis for the second time in three weeks, and humanity was 12 years away from irrevocably spoiling the only home it has ever known.

When the president punctuated the phrase “my fellow Americans” with his signature nasal inhalations, America’s child mortality rate was the highest of any wealthy nation’s, while its life expectancy had just declined for the third consecutive year, amid an epidemic of drug overdoses and suicides. As Americans gawked at their leader’s crooked tie, thousands of Central American children were still living without their parents — as a result of a White House policy that blatantly contravened international law — and the Trump administration was refusing to do anything to reunite the families it had separated because doing so would require “significant increases in appropriations from Congress.”

When the president basked in his first round of obligatory applause, his approval rating was hovering near historic lows. More than half the country said that they would “definitely not” vote for his reelection. Much of his campaign team had been convicted of crimes, and multiple federal investigations into him and his family were still ongoing. A member of the president’s administration had just leaked private schedules showing that, over the preceding three months, the commander-in-chief had spent 60 percent of his work days doing nothing in particular. Since his inauguration, White House aides had been likening him to a toddler in conversations with reporters on a near-daily basis; one senior administration official had written an op-ed in the New York Times assuring the country that unelected bureaucrats like himself were subverting the president’s wishes, so as to spare the world from his mindless “amorality”; and a Republican senator had likened the White House to an adult daycare center, warned that Trump’s recklessness was a threat to global security, and insisted that most of his colleagues secretly agreed.

Almost everyone in the House of Representatives Tuesday night knew almost all of this. Almost all acted as though they did not. There was nothing exceptional in the mendacity of Trump’s State of the Union address. By now, we are quite used to the lies. But the spectacle of a shoddy con man stiltedly rehearsing a combination of his own willful delusions, and our nation’s — while a chamber of respectables hooted and hollered — proved that this president hasn’t lost the power to unnerve.

more
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/trump-sotu-state-of-the-union-is-delusional.html

[democratisphere]

1. The State of the Union is a shambles.

Hope it is completely different by this time next year.