The most important part of Trump’s State of the Union address is what he didn’t say.
/ AFP PHOTO / Mandel NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address was competently delivered and — for him — relatively inoffensive. The mainstream media and the television pundits will surely deem it to be a presidential moment, representative of yet another pivot to the center.
But one speech does not erase Trump’s record. The speech’s banality — its embrace of optimism and platitude — is a mask. Do not be fooled: Political extremism, divisive rhetoric and bizarre behavior have characterized the first year of Trump’s presidency and underlie many of the harmless-sounding proposals he talked about Tuesday night.
This is the president, recall, who rose to political power on the racist lie that his predecessor was born in Kenya, and he ran for president while calling to ban all Muslims from the country and deriding Mexican immigrants as rapists. He was slow to denounce white nationalists, who have looked to him as a leader and marched openly in the streets of this country. And since last summer, this president has launched an all-out war on the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — a war that continued to rage this week.
Trump mentioned none of those facts in his State of the Union address. Indeed, the speech was most notable for all of the policies and initiatives of his administration that he downplayed or left out entirely.
On immigration, his signature issue, the president called for compromise on the status of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. But he failed to mention that the crisis that has beset these immigrants, known as Dreamers, is one of his own making. Last year, Trump canceled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which granted Dreamers renewable two-year deportation protections and work permits. Thousands of them have already lost their protections. Trump also didn’t talk about his unilateral cancellation of protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans and Sudanese — people who have lived in the U.S. for years and will now have to leave. And he didn’t mention his three attempts to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S, the third attempt of which is due for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling later this year.
On the economy, Trump bragged about job growth and the Republican tax cut bill, but he didn’t mention that those tax cuts were overwhelmingly tilted toward the wealthy and corporations. He argued that the country is undergoing a new American moment under his presidency, promising, There has never been a better time to start living the American dream. He talked about bonuses and wage gains, but he certainly didn’t mention that the richest 5 percent of taxpayers would see the largest percentage increase in after-tax income under the law.
On defense, Trump bragged about U.S. success in the war against ISIS. But he didn’t mention that if he gets his way, transgender members of the military won’t be able to serve openly.
On North Korea, Trump described his policy against the hermit kingdom as waging a campaign of maximum pressure to prevent Kim Jong Un’s regime from acquiring nuclear weapons. That sounds like a reasonable — even presidential — thing to say. But it obscures the fact that Trump’s actual policy toward North Korea has been erratic and ineffective. Last year, North Korea tested a missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. Instead of pushing for nuclear negotiations, the Trump administration is reportedly considering a preemptive strike against North Korea — which nonproliferation experts say would do little to deter the rogue state’s nuclear ambitions and would put millions in South Korea at risk of a retaliatory attack. Hours before Trump’s speech, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had dropped Victor Cha, a former White House official, from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to South Korea because he had warned of the risks of a so-called bloody nose attack on North Korea.