Trump's Congressional Address: The Biglythread

[citizen k]

Anybody hear Van Jones comment after the bigly speech? The left is crucifying him for it.

[Syt]

And to quote Will "Shut up, Wesley" Wheaton:

This asshole manages to read a speech for an hour and suddenly he's "presidential".
Fucking idiots.

[The Brain]

Chilli infused.

What happened to choker boy anyway?

[garbon]

George Takei on the speech:

George Takei ✔ @GeorgeTakei
You can't be "a country united against hate" when your AG is a racist, your VP attacks LGBTs, and your top advisor is a White Nationalist.
2:27 AM - 1 Mar 2017

[dps]

Can you imagine the conspiracy shitstorm/civil war if one of Trumps Secret Service bodyguards accidentally injured the president that way.

If you seem to recall, we had a difficult enough time with the Secret Service not protecting the President enough.  But he was a negro, so it was no big deal.

JFK was a Negro?  I always thought that he was Irish-American.

[jimmy olsen]

Pretty good analysis I think.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/the-three-failures-of-trumps-speech/518253/

The Three Failures of Trump's Speech

Glowing reviews of the president's first address to Congress miss the crucial respects in which he fell short.

David Frum
| 9:40 AM ET

President Donald Trump wore a non-sparkly tie last night. His suit fit. He seems to have upgraded his haircut too. After some initial hesitation, Trump found something positive to say about Black History Month and something negative about anti-Semitic hate crimes.

Better still, Trump worked his way through more than an hour of television without insulting or demeaning anyone. He did not mention his crowd sizes, argue about his vote margin, or attack the press. Although he again trafficked in misleading or deceptive statements, he eschewed outright lies.

Different people will have different reactions to Trump's spotlighting of a Navy SEAL's widow to immunize himself against accusations that he cavalierly and ignorantly ordered troops into a poorly considered combat mission—but clearly, many TV viewers found the moment inspiring and affecting.

These limited but real accomplishments elicited a barrage of praise from cable and social media commentators last night. Donald Trump: presidential at last!

In the light of morning, it's time for a colder review. Trump did achieve something last night, and something important. But he failed to achieve three other things that are even more important to his presidency—and those three failures will matter much more in the days ahead.

The first failure: There's still no coherent agenda.

The purpose of these joint-session speeches is not, actually, to reassure the president's base that the leader of the country is mentally well. The purpose of the speeches is to mobilize support in Congress and the country for the president's legislative plans. President George W. Bush's 2001 address argued for his tax cut. Barack Obama's in 2009 defended and advanced his recovery program.

Donald Trump omitted to do anything like that. On every one of the issues dividing House from Senate Republicans—tax reform, healthcare, immigration—Trump avoided so much as indicating a preference, let alone leading the way. His line about Israel-Palestine ("I'm looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like") also seems to apply to the issues before Congress: You guys sort it out.

Health care? If Obamacare is repealed, millions of people will lose Medicaid coverage, including many Trump voters in states like Ohio and Kentucky. What does the president propose to do about that? His answer is contained in one single sentence: "We should give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out."

Tax reform? Donald Trump endorsed "massive tax relief for the middle class." No such relief is offered by the various plans circulating in House and Senate. House Speaker Paul Ryan in fact is touting a "border adjustment tax" that (while an elegant solution to inefficiencies created by the present corporate income tax) would have the side effect of increasing costs of everyday goods like clothing, shoes, and consumer electronics.

Immigration? Senators Cotton and Perdue have introduced in the Senate exactly the kind of immigration reform  Trump supposedly favors. Its most important feature—lowering the absolute level of immigration—went undiscussed.

Infrastructure? Trump said he would soon ask Congress for a $1 trillion public-private program. How would it work? What would it do? Why should Americans support him? All went unargued.

As Paul Ryan told Today's Matt Lauer on the morning of the speech, Trump acts more like a chairman than a president, assigning the real work of leadership to others. The trouble is, the system cannot work that way. Without presidential leadership, House and Senate Republicans cannot agree, laws will not pass, and entropy will win. The February 28 speech ominously indicated that leadership continues to be unforthcoming.

The second failure: There's still no plan to build a majority coalition to support a Trump program.

Donald Trump's fierce need for approval has disabled him from acknowledging the strategic fact of majority disapproval. Fifty-six percent disapproval is not an insurmountable obstacle. But how can a leader surmount a difficulty that he insists does not exist?

In 2001, President Bush—elected with a narrow popular vote deficit—reckoned with the enduring popularity of the Clinton economic program by promising that his tax cut would leave the essentials of that program intact. In 1993, Bill Clinton—who had won only a 43 percent plurality of the national popular vote—responded by adopting Ross Perot's concerns with debts and deficits as his own.

Donald Trump's political plan, by contrast, continues to be premised on the idea that he commands a big latent pool of public support, awaiting only activation and mobilization by him. Unlike Bush's No Child Left Behind program or Bill Clinton and his support for NAFTA and the death penalty, Trump's offer to those who did not vote for him continues to be—like Michael Corleone in The Godfather—"Nothing."

Michael Corleone had the clout to compel acceptance of that offer. Does Trump? A year from now, millions of Hillary Clinton voters may face the imminent loss of Medicaid coverage. They could be paying higher prices at Wal-Mart (thanks to Ryan's border-adjustment tax) in order to finance a tax cut for upper-income America. If Trump's hopes for rapid job and wage growth have come true, he may get away with it. But if not, he will have no answer at all to those voters' grievances, especially if they feel themselves to be on the receiving end of Trump's angry cultural politics. Numbers are not everything in American democracy. Trump's election by itself proves that. But numbers do matter, and a lot. Trump's plan to deal with the weight of numbers against him remains a long-odds gamble that this already seven-year-old economic expansion will now accelerate rather than—as history suggests—soon come to an end.

The third failure: The scandals accumulate unanswered.

It may someday seem highly symbolic that Donald Trump delivered his first joint session speech on the same evening that his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and daughter Tiffany, had traveled out of the country to open the Trump family's newest hotel: a project build and financed by the son of a Malaysian plutocrat with a criminal record.

Suspicions of ethical violations and foreign-espionage penetration overshadow the Trump presidency. On the Monday before Trump's big speech, Sean Spicer expressed angry frustration at the refusal of the press to accept Trump's pledged word for it that there was "no there there" to the Russia connection story. By now, of course, no self-respecting journalist accepts Donald Trump's unsubstantiated word for anything—or Sean Spicer's, either.

Last night would have been the perfect occasion to call for an independent inquiry to vindicate Trump from unfair insinuations that his team colluded with Russian espionage to sway the 2016 election. If Donald Trump were conscientious, last night would have been a magnificent opportunity to review progress toward disentangling himself from the Trump business and erecting the ethical firewall his team again and again have promised to the American people.

But here, too, the gamble is: Plunge ahead and hope that nothing too damaging comes to light. Through his long business career of big risks, big failures, and big recoveries, that gambling instinct has propelled Donald Trump forward. It makes sense that he manages his presidency the same way. But never before has he faced such dangerous consequences if his gamble goes wrong. And this time, the people who will pay such consequences are not only Donald Trump's unfortunate investors, lenders, suppliers, and workers—but the whole of this great nation and its truest friends abroad.

[CountDeMoney]

JFK was a Negro?  I always thought that he was Irish-American.

Worse.  Catholic.

[LaCroix]

trump gives democrats something they've wanted for years, additional infrastructure and rehabilitation for drug addicts, and people still find a way to criticize him for it

[FunkMonk]

trump gives democrats something they've wanted for years, additional infrastructure and rehabilitation for drug addicts, and people still find a way to criticize him for it

To my recollection, the administration hasn't put forward a detailed plan for the supposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan. You may be more informed than I am on this subject. Could you explain, in detail, what it is?

[LaCroix]

no, trump stated his vision and left others to implement it, like all presidents to a degree. we should have the plan out at some point in the future.

[jimmy olsen]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/01/the-pundits-are-wrong-trumps-handling-of-the-ryan-owens-affair-was-contemptibly-cynical/?utm_term=.a1783a4a4a54

The pundits are wrong. Trump's handling of the Ryan Owens affair was contemptibly cynical.

By Paul Waldman 

March 1 at 1:06 PM  

After President Trump's first address to Congress last night, journalists and pundits were effusive in their praise of one particular moment, when Trump talked about Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the disastrous raid of an al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) compound in Yemen that Trump ordered in late January.

"It was without a doubt one of the most kind of emotional moments we have seen in a political speech like this in quite some time," said Anderson Cooper. "That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period," said Van Jones. The Washington Times called it "the most riveting piece of political theater" and claimed that "the president's critics and supporters alike admired it."

Sorry — no. Was that moment, with Owens's widow in attendance, moving and sad? Absolutely. It was also one of the most cynical things Donald Trump has done as president.

The problem isn't that Trump honored Carryn Owens at a moment of terrible grief, or that he spoke movingly of her husband's death. All that was altogether appropriate. Rather, the problem is that he did this after trying to evade any responsibility for what happened, and after the White House cast any criticism of his handling of it as an insult to Ryan's legacy. In this sense, the entire story raises serious doubts about Trump's decision-making on matters of national security, and it may be a grim preview of what's to come.

Let's review the facts. The Yemen raid on Jan. 29 was the first military action of Trump's presidency. The idea for raiding this compound, partly in pursuit of the leader of AQAP leader (who wasn't there) was presented to Trump over dinner one night, and according to NBC News, military representatives "told Trump that they doubted that the Obama administration would have been bold enough to try it," which was apparently good enough to get him to sign off.

Then almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The militants knew they were coming, possibly tipped off by the increased sound of drones in the area. The team encountered stronger resistance than it expected. A couple of dozen civilians were killed (we don't know exactly how many, but it could be as many as 30), including children, among them an 8-year-old American girl. Owens was killed. A $75 million Osprey aircraft was damaged in a "hard landing" and had to be destroyed lest it fall into AQAP's hands.

We all know that if it had been Hillary Clinton who ordered the Yemen raid, there would already be multiple congressional investigations underway and subpoenas would be falling like rain. That's one thing the White House doesn't have to worry about. But they decided that the way to handle questions about the botched raid was to use Ryan Owens as a shield. The raid was a terrific success, said spokesman Sean Spicer, and "anyone that would suggest it's not a success does a disservice to the life of Chief Ryan Owens."

But the questions, and the criticisms, kept coming, most pointedly from Owens' father, himself a veteran. "Don't hide behind my son's death," Bill Owens told the Miami Herald, after refusing to meet with President Trump at Dover Air Force Base.

That brings us to the day of Trump's speech to Congress. With Carryn Owens invited to the speech and the tribute to her husband being written, the President went on "Fox and Friends" that morning and passed the buck for the raid, blaming it on the Obama administration and the military. "This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do," he said. "They came to see me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we've had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan."

Once again, imagine if Hillary Clinton were president, had ordered an operation that went terribly wrong, and then tried to blame it on the military. Republicans would have absolutely lost their minds with rage, and they would have been right. When you're president, you don't get to send American servicemembers into harm's way in an operation you obviously didn't understand, and then when it all goes wrong and one of those servicemembers is killed, claim that it was somebody else's fault.

Then that very night, Trump went before the country, looked Owens' widow in the face, and presented a tribute to her husband's undeniable service and courage. As the applause went on and Carryn Owens stood weeping, Trump offered what in the tiny, narcissistic world he exists in is the highest form of praise: "And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that. And he's very happy, because I think he just broke a record," referring to the length of the ovation.

What exactly is that supposed to mean? Owens set the "Longest Applause for Dead Servicemember In Joint Speech to Congress" record? What kind of person could possibly think that would matter to anyone? Oh, right — Donald Trump would.

There are legitimate, outstanding questions about whether Trump's inexperience, his ignorance, and his desire to seem "tough" — in particular, tougher than Barack Obama — led to Ryan Owens' death. A president not as spectacularly unprepared and clueless as Trump might have asked a different set of questions, might not have been so easily manipulated — and certainly would have shown some desire to learn from the tragedy.

But Trump seems determined not to learn a thing. All we've heard from him and his aides in the month since the disastrous raid was what a great success it was (despite the fact that at least some reports say that the raid produced little if any useful intelligence). So what happens next time, and the time after that?

When a president makes the decision to send American troops into potentially deadly situations, he has to weigh the risks involved against the potential benefits, which requires knowledge, foresight, and some analytical capability, none of which Trump demonstrates possessing in the slightest. He also needs to consider how he'll deal with failure if it occurs.

Nearly every recent president, Democrat and Republican, has faced that moment of going before the public and saying, "I ordered this operation, and it failed. It's on me." But Trump, as we well know, is incapable of taking responsibility. He had his first chance, and his answer was to blame it on the military, then use the sacrifice of a dead SEAL and his widow for his own benefit.

So maybe it's not the time to gush about what good theater it all was.

[garbon]

Actually that article fails to make the case that it wasn't good theater. After all, while distasteful, something can still be good theater if it distracts.

[grumbler]

no, trump stated his vision and left others to implement it, like all presidents to a degree. we should have the plan out at some point in the future.

So, he has done what Obama did. Does he not understand that repeating the same action expecting a different outcome is the definition of stupid?  This is a Republican congress we are talking about.  They need leadership from their own party if they are going to be convinced that destroying America is not their mandate.

[LaCroix]

did obama do it with a democratic or republican congress? if the former, this is a republican congress, if the latter, the republican congress wasn't going to listen to obama

[grumbler]

trump gives Republicans something they've wanted for years, additional infrastructure, and  Congress still hasn't passed it.

Still waiting for the plan Trump has to infallibly defeat ISIS quickly and cheaply.  People are dying while he dawdles.