What was the point of Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night? The annual speech – called the “State of the Union” address in every year except the one just after the president’s ascent to office – has long been a somewhat outdated bit of political theater, an event light on policy specifics and heavy on messaging in an era in which political messaging’s most effective venues have long since moved online.It’s perhaps even less clear what a speech to Congress is supposed to mean for this president, who has proven himself so indifferent to constitutional limits on his power – or for this Congress, which has shown itself so willing to abdicate its own constitutional responsibilities. It seems, like so many of the formalities of American politics do now, a bit like a phantom limb: something that Americans keep feeling for long after it has been excised. How long will it be, one wonders, until everyone stops bothering to go through the motions?But Trump, for one, seems to delight in any opportunity to make a spectacle of himself. On Tuesday, with a captive audience of all of Congress, many military leaders, about half of the US supreme court, and large swaths of the American public, he set about indulging all of his worst whims and lowest impulses. He repeatedly and extensively insulted his predecessor, the former president Joe Biden, by name and in strong terms. He relitigated old grievances, from his many prosecutions to his annoyance that not everyone likes him. He threatened the sovereignty of Panama and Greenland, went into extended discussions of the careers of various transgender athletes, boasted of ending “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion” and removing “the poison of critical race theory”, and reminded his audience that he had renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. Occasionally, the gathered Republicans in the crowd would burst into grunting chants of “USA! USA!” It was worse than merely vulgar. It was stupid.Trump boasted of the rapid pursuit of his agenda in the weeks since he returned to power, declaring that the US was entering its “greatest, most successful era” and that “our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never seen, perhaps never will see”. In fact, the country is on the verge of an economic recession. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, and Trump’s hefty tariffs on the US’s largest trading partners – namely Canada, Mexico and China – sent the stock market into a freefall earlier that day. In the past, Trump has got cold feet, and backed off his tariff threats. On stage in the House chamber, he doubled down on them, declaring that he would pursue his trade wars, and acknowledging: “There will be a little disturbance.”Trump spoke intensely and at length about his culture war grievances, touting his executive orders declaring English to be the United States’ official language and that the federal government would recognize “only two genders”. “Our country will be woke no longer,” he said.He also touted his record on immigration, boasting of his administration’s mass deportation plans and the decreased number of migrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. He dwelt at length on stories of violence by undocumented immigrants, pointing to the families of murdered Americans in the crowd and describing undocumented people as “savages”. Alluding to a fringe legal theory that could be deployed to support his unconstitutional effort to end birthright citizenship, he referred to the immigrant population as an “occupation”, and cast his own mass deportation effort as something like the expulsion of an invading army – which sounds a lot more noble than the chaotic and brutal humiliations and human rights abuses that have actually taken place as a part of Trump’s deportation effort.In a section on economic issues, he blamed Biden, specifically, for the price of eggs, which have soared in some places to nearly $20 a dozen. (According to reporting from NPR, some of Trump’s advisers have asked him to talk more about egg prices, which were a repeated talking point during his campaign but which he has mentioned rarely since taking office, though prices continue to climb.) He also repeated false claims by Elon Musk’s extra-constitutional government-slashing group, the “department of government efficiency”, that Musk’s band of sycophantic teenagers who are leading the decimation of government services have found “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and waste” in Musk-targeted programs, such as social security. They have not.In fact, he talked about Biden a lot. At times, when he seemed to get distracted or lose his place in the speech, Trump appeared to insert insults towards Biden almost as filler. “And think of where we were with Joe Biden,” he said, in one such non-sequitur. “Biden took us very low, the lowest we have ever been.” Other digressions included complaints about his own various grievances and mistreatment. “Nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody,” he said once, after a brief discussion of a bill to combat revenge porn.Where were the Democrats during all this? Mostly, they were quiet. A few high-profile Democratic leaders, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the senator Patty Murray, skipped the speech. Others stayed and sat, sedate. Reportedly, word had gone out from Democratic leadership that party members should have a “dignified” presence at the speech, neither seizing the spotlight nor protesting against Trump out loud. The result was underwhelming.Democrats, who have told their voters that Trump represents a threat to democracy, sat silently, holding up ping-pong paddles printed with the word “false”. In an apparent nod to women’s eroded rights, some of them wore pink. Trump, for his part, used their silent presence to his advantage, turning them into props. Even if he cured a terrible disease, he jeered at the Democrats: “They will not stand, they will not jeer, they will not clap.” In fact, Trump has frozen virtually all federal funding of research into those terrible diseases, like cancer and Alzheimer’s, that American scientists were once working to cure. An opposition worth the name could have pointed that out; the one we have raised their ping-pong paddles a little higher.Trump is not the figure he used to be. He no longer seems to be quite in control of his own administration: he has delegated most spending policy to Musk, and has busied himself instead merely with turning the federal law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the broader justice department, into instruments of his petty revenge. He’s not funny any more. But he is also more comfortable in power: even less deferential to formality, even less reverent towards his office, even more inclined to turn the presidency into what was always his greatest passion, a TV show.In Trump’s hands, an old State of the Union convention – pointing out citizens who had been brought to Congress as special guests – was given a new twist: Trump set the people up for surprises. One child, a 13-year-old aspiring police officer with cancer, was gifted with an honorary membership in the Secret Service; the cameras on him, his sunken eyes widened with surprise. A teenager who aspired to go to West Point stood up to wave to the crowd, and was told by Trump himself that he’d gotten in; his jaw momentarily hung open. The genre was the gameshow, the carnivalesque kind where nobodies see if they can catch some luck amid the random dispensation of gifts by the glamorous and benevolent host. Think of Oprah, in her decadent generosity, yelling: “You get a car!” In these moments, Trump seemed to be having fun. At least somebody is.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More
