As J.E. Dyer noted in her spot-on analysis of last night’s State of the Union address, the audience in the House chamber as well, I suspect, as Americans tuning in at home, was comprised of “gets” and “get-nots.”
Those who “got” President Trump’s largely apolitical message were no doubt moved by portions of his at-times stirring speech, which is a rarity for a president, much less Trump. I know I was.
“Americans,” he reminded as at one point, “are dreamers too,” noting later:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Americans fill the world with art and music. They push the bounds of science and discovery. And they forever remind us of what we should never forget: The people dreamed this country. The people built this country. And it is the people who are making America great again.
Contrast that with the “rebuttal” by Joseph P. Kennedy III, who spoke not of America’s greatness or his pride in this great country. Instead, the New York Times writes sympathetically, he “chastised the Trump administration Tuesday night for what he said was its abandonment of the fundamental values for which the nation stands.”
Their record is a rebuke of our highest American ideal: the belief that we are all worthy, we are all equal and we all count.
The irony is that those were the very virtues the president extolled in his speech, except that he was speaking about Americans — not people who at best are “American wannabes” and at worst are spongers who brashly crash our borders by dark of night in search of a handout.
People like Kennedy are the ones who take citizenship in this country for granted, who treat it so lightly that they are willing to dole it out freely and without forethought to lawbreakers in exchange for their vote in the future.
Kennedy also spoke of “hatred … proudly marching in our streets,” but once again he missed the irony of his words, which also perfectly describe marchers like these:
The administration, Kennedy went on to say, “isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us — they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.” Apparently, the Massachusetts congressman hasn’t paid much attention to the Americans who share his “ideals.”
The Democratic Party’s one-track “focus … on problems, divisions, and disagreements,” to quote J.E. again, wasn’t limited to Kennedy’s response. It was palpable on the floor of the House chamber in the unmovable stony expressions on the face of the party’s leadership, which remained fixed even when the president spoke of record lows in black and Hispanic unemployment or acknowledged the need to allocate $1.7 trillion on infrastructure.
To cede him points on any issue would be a betrayal of the “fact,” as one self-styled feminist put it recently on national television, that “Donald Trump is disgusting.” And Democrats, as we have seen repeatedly, are the party of facts.
