State of the Union Recap

A Moment of my State of the Union live-tweeting, for anyone who wants a quick recap. https://t.co/Ozln8UkWlu

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 31, 2018

In sum, it was garbage. Naturally, anyone conscious with a modicum of decency fully anticipated that it would be, but the specific way in which it was garbage was that it was hateful claptrap, poorly written and poorly delivered.

Trump is, as per usual, getting plenty of commendation for managing to read the entire thing off a teleprompter while managing to not shit his pants and keep his teeth in his mouth, but the content was dreck — bigotry and bad policy buried beneath jingoistic pablum that sounded like it was written by a malfunctioning nationalism macro — and his delivery was about as compelling as a piece of wet cardboard on a brown floor.

Truly, the banality of evil.

Which I suppose was the objective. Trump delivered a string of despicable lies, the threat of preemptive warfare against North Korea, and an entire cold-blooded section demonizing Latinx immigrants as murderous gangs in a tone so moderated that pundits who can't be bothered to scrutinize anything but optics couldn't help but assume this was a shiny new "moderate" Trump.

It was not. It was the same old cruel bigot, delivering his terrifying threats of authoritarian ruination with all the excitement of a droning metronome.

And of course his signature line about a "new American moment" was plagiarized from Hillary Clinton.

Anyway. NPR has a full transcript with fact checking, if you're interested. And CNN [video may autoplay at link] has a report on how Trump's SOTU got "the lowest net positive rating for a State of the Union address since at least 1998, when CNN first asked the question." So much winning.

Discuss.