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jodymarie aimee

(3,975 posts)
Tue Jan 30, 2018, 04:02 PM Jan 2018

Why Trumps State of the Union Will Be Utterly Meaningless

VANITY FAIR....
Why Trump’s State of the Union Will Be Utterly Meaningless
Washington journalists are among the few dead-enders eager to ascribe meaning to a night that faded long ago into meaningless ritual. Under Trump, it matters less than ever.


Here’s a useful question as you prepare to spend the next two days suffocating in a fog of hot takes and snap reactions to Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union address. Which of these two things is more consequential: the annual pageantry of the State of the Union, or any single one of Trump’s tweets? The answer is painfully clear. Trump’s staccato-burst missives on Twitter have the power to shake markets, launch congressional inquiries, offend entire nations, and stoke so much cultural grievance that N.F.L. owners are forced to contemplate whether signing a certain free-agent backup quarterback will spark racial unrest in their stadiums. At the very least, Trump’s tweets make you wonder why white Republicans are so obsessed with Black Unemployment (all-caps). Trump’s State of the Union address, meanwhile, will do approximately zero of these things.

The declining relevance of the State of the Union is partly a function of Trump and what we all know about him. “He is who he is” has become a go-to dictum of the Washington cocktail circuit, and no scripted-teleprompter performance can disguise the truth that our president would much rather be back at the White House residence feasting on Big Macs and Lou Dobbs. “Trump hasn’t changed, and won’t,” Mike Allen of Axios wrote this week. Allen writes some variation of this point every week—and he’s right every time. The Trump who will stand before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening isn’t fooling anyone, except some Beltway pundits who insist on always adding something new to “the conversation.” Washington journalists are among the few dead-enders eager to ascribe meaning to a night that faded long ago into meaningless ritual. White House aides have promised reporters, on the condition of anonymity of course, that the president will deliver a “unifying” speech on Tuesday.

The president supposedly did the same thing last year during his first speech to Congress, when he honored the tearful widow of fallen Navy SEAL Chief William Ryan Owens. It was a moment that stroked the erogenous zones of rinse-and-repeat pundits who can’t resist the idea that presidents should “grow” into their office, even if that president is a 71-year-old man who’s displayed remarkably consistent behavioral patterns over his four decades in American public life. But never mind that. Nothing washes away the sins of bad politics like good “optics.”

The State of the Union—with its applause lines and cutaway shots and carefully selected special guests—stopped being about the speech a long time ago. Political stagecraft is about “moments”—moments you’ll probably forget about in a couple days, anyway. A handful of smart people fell prey to this plainly avoidable sand trap last year, but none more so than Van Jones, a usually sharp-eyed contrarian who declared on CNN after the speech that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones claimed it was “one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” which besides being flatly untrue—honoring our military heroes is among the most shopworn staples of political theater—sets an awfully low bar for the word “extraordinary.”

That kind of analysis, pegged to a vestigial ceremony obsessed about only by the kind of people who spend their weekends on Twitter, was bound to collapse under the reality of a Trump’s presidency. And boy did it. Not four days later, Trump tweeted out the sensational and false accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s speech was already fading into the recesses of our constantly distracted hive mind—can you remember a single item of substance from that address?—but the wiretapping claim ensured it would evaporate, as so many stories of this presidency have, like a fart in the swampy wind.

The withering of one of Washington’s dumbest rituals isn’t just about Trump, of course. It’s primarily a live television event at a moment when fewer and fewer people are bothering to watch live television. Much like N.F.L. games and awards shows and even the most popular primetime dramas, ratings for big TV events are slipping. That’s not because of a divisive president. It’s because there’s a constant war for our attention, and live television no longer commands our time. Any given hour of the day offers endless choice. That’s the reason State of the Union ratings have been in steady decline for over a decade. Trump’s speech last year, six weeks after taking office, drew 47.7 million viewers, the highest viewership in some time for an address to a joint session of Congress. TV networks were still feasting on the ratings sugar high of the presidential campaign and the public was still reeling from Trump’s confounding election. But Trump’s maiden speech was nevertheless viewed by fewer people than the first-year speeches of Obama (52.4 million) and Bill Clinton (66.9 million). Whether the country has political fatigue can be debated, but one thing cannot: fewer people will tune into the State of the Union this year than last, and the downward trend will continue for the rest of his presidency.

Hardcore political junkies will make the speech appointment viewing, but plenty more will opt out. Ratings for this year’s speech will undoubtedly be lower than last year’s. And it will have no impact on public opinion whatsoever. As FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten noted on Sunday, “Since Carter, the average net change in a president’s approval rating between before and after the SOTU is 0 points.” What’s left is a made-for-television event full of empty calories and little political consequence. Tom Brokaw, the moral grandpa of TV news, tweeted that the State of the Union is “a kabuki exercise. reps of potus party hop up and down, like electronic programmed moles. Oppo goes dark.”

Brokaw left out of the embarrassing spectacle of random congressmen lining up hours beforehand, along the aisle of the House floor, just to be seen on camera touching the president, but he’s right. Brokaw’s admonition, though, will do little to stop decision-makers in the media from manufacturing drama where there isn’t any. The networks will put their biggest names on beautiful sets overlooking panoramas of Washington, executives will dash into town from New York on the Delta Shuttle to lord over their D.C. bureau control rooms, and producers will commission snap polls and maybe even a Frank Luntz focus group. Hopefully we can hear from voters in Trump country. We haven’t heard enough from them. Pundits will spend the day and night chewing over Trump’s promises about infrastructure and immigration, even though those agenda items will be gunked up in the washer and dryer of House and Senate committees, if they make it that far. Trump has no goodwill to speak of with the Democratic caucuses in either chamber. At least seven House Democrats are skipping the speech altogether. Those seven will surely be among those to vote for Trump’s impeachment if they take back the House in November. And while roughly 800,000 Dreamers are waiting for a sign that the White House will protect them from deportation, whatever the president says about DACA won’t matter much, either. Congressional leaders in both parties will go back to hammering out a possible immigration deal on their own the next day, while Trump puts on a hat and pretends to make phone calls from an empty Oval Office desk.

If anything is to be remembered from these big congressional speeches, it’s the moments that aren’t manufactured. They might even tell us something about our politics, as when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You Lie!” at President Obama, a decorum-breaching sign of increasingly toxic partisanship that would come to define Obama’s presidency. But that speech—a September 2009 address to Congress about health-care reform—wasn’t even a State of the Union address, so I’m reaching. Some of the memorable moments are the unpredictable gaffes, often from the response speeches delivered by a “rising star” in the opposition party. They make us laugh but do little else. A dry-mouthed Marco Rubio reaching off camera for a bottle of water in 2013, for instance, or Tim Kaine’s maniacal floating eyebrow in 2006.

This year’s “official” Democratic response will be delivered by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson and a 37-year old congressman from Massachusetts. Kennedy, once hailed by Joe Biden as a future president, is supposed to represent the next generation of party leaders, even though Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill is controlled by a group of 65-and-older politicians who would rather guzzle sewer water than turn their power over to the next generation. There’s also a response speech from Bernie Sanders that will be live-streamed. California Rep. Maxine Waters will do one for BET. Elizabeth Guzman, a newly elected Hispanic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, will deliver the Spanish-language response. Other elected officials, in both parties, will create their own content and distribute it on their social-media channels, not having to worry about the traditional media gatekeepers who used to run the show. Some of those videos may get more viewers than the official response speech on television. It will all blend together, and I’ll be watching Ball State play Toledo on ESPN3, anyway.

Instead of this giant farce, it would be nice, for once, to watch an actual, lowercase state of the union event. Imagine if all the TV resources and all the talent dumped into a fleeting day of State of the Union coverage were spent on an an entire day—Any day! Pick a day!—of programming from McAllen, Texas, about the state of immigration under Trump. Imagine a day of stories about the divergent communities of central Ohio, where the vibrant information economy of the suburbs is at striking odds with the small town rot just 50 miles away. Or imagine a State of the Union special revisiting the strife of Baltimore. Any of these stories would tell us more about our country than the president will. But hey, ratings.

It was during the 2016 campaign when “LOL nothing matters” became a favorite joke of political Twitter. It was derived from Trump’s ability to resist even the most insane controversies and self-inflicted wounds, the kinds of political disasters that would have slain any conventional candidate. It always chafed at me, though: whether it was delivered winkingly or not, “LOL nothing matters” felt like excuse-making for a political and media class that was choosing to conduct itself on Trump’s terms, focusing on the small stuff rather than the consequential. It’s partly how he won. But when it comes to the State of the Union, whether it’s Trump’s or someone else’s, an exception has to be made. Nothing about Tuesday matters. LOL

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