It’s better if you watched the SOTU this evening and aren’t relying on the media to tell you about it. Even a friendly group like Fox News is speaking about the speech in terms too politically thematic. It wasn’t a politically thematic speech.
Trump wove statements about policy in with vignettes of American life, heroism, courage, kindness, loss, and redemption – and the latter were the emphatic punctuation points. The speech was about good news, hope, and a positive outlook.
It lacked any ritual references – I don’t remember any – to “our big problems,” or “our deep divisions,” or “our profound disagreements.” Obama used to talk about those all the time. Tonight, Trump didn’t.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
One group of Americans “gets” that if you focus your mind and your dialogue on problems, divisions, and disagreements, you create your own quagmire. The only way to make the quagmire recede is to stop giving all the oxygen to problems, divisions, and disagreements, as if there is perpetually some adjustment still lacking, and some hold they must have on our time and our spirits.
Another group of Americans doesn’t get that. God bless them. At tonight’s SOTU, it was the Democrats in Congress, who sat through virtually all of the speech attired in black and literally slumped over and pouting. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like it.
Trump’s speech, if it had an overarching theme, was simply about goodness, and more goodness to come, in America. He didn’t shy away from addressing some very painful things, like the parents of the two Long Island teens, Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, who were killed by MS-13 gang members, or the sorrow of the opioid addicted young mother whose baby was adopted by Albuquerque police officer Ryan Holets and his wife Rebecca.
But what Trump did was simple but profound: putting a human face on the problems he sees it as a priority to address, and stating what he’s going to do about them.
We have been mired for years in an attitude that problems are all too big to “fix,” as if that is a wiser insight than the simple courage to take them on. You can’t out-insight your faithful correspondent here on the difficulty of big problems, so don’t waste your time. But Trump is right, in his straightforward attitude. It is not actually more intelligent to babble about how big and complex the problems are than it is to start taking the actions that can relieve distortions and disincentives, and get things moving again.
What Trump is good at “getting” is that when you unleash people – not “structure incentives” for them, but actually unleash them, on the understanding that they will do amazing things without your dictation – they, and you, reap tremendous rewards. If you want the key to why what he’s doing is working, that’s a big one.
I was watching on Twitter and observing that there’s another thing one or two segments of our great public don’t get, and it’s that people respond to encouragement. Trump spoke encouragement in the SOTU tonight.
The American people don’t need to be harangued over what a sorry slag-pile of rotten SOBs they are. They really don’t. The rhetoric and political atmosphere of constant rebuke are neither healthy nor helpful. A president should never stand up before his people and tell them they need to think shame on themselves, or check their privilege, or doubt their own good character. If there’s something that needs fixing, his job is to talk about the fix, and the positive end-state to come, and encourage the people forward.
Trump did it right tonight. He said what we need to believe, not what we need to doubt. He said what we love and admire, not what we hate and despise. He celebrated the things that are indispensable: love for family, faith before God and with each other, courage, entrepreneurial spirit, hope.
Regarding policy matters, he scored on a lot of things. I think the people are about 75% with him on border security and immigration. It was smart to outline his four-point plan in the speech, taking the case directly to the people.
There’s not a lot of visible substance so far to the infrastructure plan. On trade, I’m not a fan of tariffs, as a trade-structuring practice (we pay those when we buy things, you know). Deregulate, and deregulate some more, and then keep deregulating; that’s how you keep American jobs thriving.
But endless carping makes little sense when the economy is, in fact, surging again. For a lot of people, after a constant diet of angry rebuke, snark, and spittle-throwing fury from our culture, a speech like Trump’s is water in the desert. I wouldn’t have guessed three years ago that it would come from Donald Trump, whom I had never given much thought to before 2015. But so it has.
A final thought, because it really isn’t worth trying to systematize this any further. There were several very powerful moments in the speech tonight. But the Twitterverse was voting the moment when Ji Seong-Ho, the North Korean defector, lifted up his crutches as the top moment of the evening. And I think that’s right.
Mr. Ji lives in Seoul, as I understand it. A great city, the seat of a great people and a great ally. That’s where he does his work now, after his amazing lifelong ordeal and story of hope: the work of trying to broadcast truthful information into the dark North where he came from.
It was to America that he came, on this night, to be honored and celebrated in the people’s House. Here is where he was hailed by a president; here where the people’s representatives stood for him and cheered as he raised his old crutches high in freedom.
That’s what happens in America. In the truest sense, that’s what America is here for. That is America, still, in 2018. May it always be so.
