Trump doesn’t even try anymore

Have you ever wondered what an authoritarian leader’s speech to the nation sounds like? Look no further than President Donald Trump’s longest State of the Union address.

His speech Tuesday ranged from fanciful, false boasts about the economy and promises of price-lowering policies that will never happen, to dire scaremongering about unwanted and subversive minorities committing fraud and murder, which Trump floridly described with exciting glee. And don’t forget the heroic guests, many of whom received national medals during the live event, who served as props.

This was a speech in keeping with what Trump ultimately is, an unpopular tyrant trying to convince the public to ignore what is before their eyes with a mix of fear, positive thinking and Hollywood magic. But he gave it a modern spin: call it dread and a circus.

We are witnessing “a historic shift” as “factories, jobs, investments and trillions of dollars will continue to flow into the United States of America,” Trump boasted. Prices are no longer rising but “plumbing” due to the “worst inflation in the history of our country.” Meanwhile, “incomes are rising rapidly” and “the booming economy is roaring like never before.” (It goes without saying at this point, but none of this is true.)

At the same time, this “golden age” is full of brutal and violent deaths that could be found just around the corner. You could come home to find your daughter “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely after being stabbed 25 times.” Or your “beautiful daughter, how beautiful, what a beautiful young woman,” could be “brutally cut down.” [with] a knife in the neck and body.” Or maybe they “violently shot him in the head.” The culprit of all these crimes: immigrants and, of course, the Democrats.

Oh, and look, the US men’s hockey team, fresh from winning Olympic gold, comes out of the press gallery to glorious applause. Let’s give the goalkeeper a medal and the soldier a purple heart.

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images

And there is more to come. House prices will go down, but house values ​​will also stay the same. “[W]”We want to keep those values ​​high,” Trump said.[c]Costs were going to go up a lot, and that’s what happened, and now I’m lowering them a lot.” (Health insurance premiums increased this year by the most in years.) Meanwhile, prescription drug prices will fall by an impossible “300, 400, 500, 600%, and more.” And energy prices will go down because AI companies have pledged… have pledged! ― to Trump that they will only use power plants that they themselves build to power their data centers.

This mode of government is not far from the tyranny that the Roman poet Juvenal described when he coined the phrase “bread and circuses,” now understood as a strategy of political distraction, almost 2,000 years ago. The Roman people had given up their right to self-govern to a tyrant who offered them bread (food supplies from the city subsidy) and circuses: cheap entertainment in the form of games and fights at the Colosseum (don’t forget to tune in to the UFC fight at the White House later this year).

Trump dismisses the people and their representative institutions and instead offers cheap thrills, unrealizable promises that only he can keep, and fears of disadvantaged minority groups to awaken and paralyze not necessarily the United States as a whole, but the base it can already count on.

At the State of the Union address, a venue that in recent years has been understood as preaching to the converted, Trump leaned into the friendly audience. He never attempted to present his policies to the political center, much less to the Democrats. The only real Americans are Republicans, or at least the people who support them. This speech was a speech exclusively for them and at the same time directly insulted anyone else.

“These people are crazy, I’m telling you. They’re crazy,” Trump said of Democratic lawmakers after at one point they failed to stand up to cheer. He added: “Democrats are destroying our country, but we stopped it just in time, didn’t we?”

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

This version of Trumpian rhetoric comes at a time when Trump is struggling. Your approval numbers are craters. Public dissent is bigger and stronger than I had ever had to face before. Its distinctive policies: deportation and lowering prices – have left most Americans disapproving or, at best, unimpressed.

But for Trump – who has “joked” about canceling elections where his party is expected to do poorly: the view of his presidency as a form of tyranny was clear at all times.

Voting is a “privilege,” Trump said, and he notably did not call it a right when he proposed passage of the SAVE Act, which would radically restrict voting access and potentially disenfranchise millions of people. That bill, which passed the House but has no chance of passing the Senate, is designed, supposedly by its authors, to prevent non-citizens from voting, a virtually non-existent problem. But Trump made sure to add that the bill would also prevent “others, who are unauthorized persons, from voting in our sacred American elections.” Of course, he sheepishly nodded at his false claim that he won the 2020 election, lies that led to an attack on the building in which he was speaking.

This was also one of three legislative proposals that Trump presented to Congress in his State of the Union. And all three were requests to codify executive orders or agreements he made with other countries. Generally, presidents, in their speeches before Congress, ask something of the legislature. But Trump did not ask for more tariff authorization after the Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he said.

This is the vision of a system of government in which the president acts without Congress, in which the opposition is “the enemy,” as Trump said in the 2024 election, and in which the president decides who votes in the election. That is a fundamentally tyrannical view.

But it remains an open question whether the American people, beyond those who already support Trump, will believe any of this. Despite their tone of distraction and fear, the elections remain free and fair. And the Republicans continue defeated them.