The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted
During the Reagan years, the president would go on to spend the next hour and change promoting ideas and policies that I found largely repugnant. Even so, I appreciated the ceremony of the event. The State of the Union, like the opening day of a new session of Congress or the certification of electoral ballots, helped anchor our democracy—the address was as good a roadmap as any at to what we’d be debating over the course of the next year. In addition, even as I objected to Reagan’s views, I understood him to be committed, in his way, to the broad American experiment in representative government and to ensuring its continued existence.
We cannot say remotely the same of Donald Trump. He is largely and proudly ignorant of those traditions; to the extent that he grasps them, he has contempt for them. He is interested in unlimited power and in squeezing every corrupt dollar out of the presidency that he can wedge into his pockets. And he’s in desperate need of the fulsome and brain-curdling sycophancy of those around him, a hallmark of both a weak, insecure man and a leader with an undeniably fascistic personality. The only thing keeping him from facing accountability from very real crimes is the supplication of his party, who have readily accepted being beaten down into cultlike submission.
These things and many more enrage millions of Americans. That rage is given expression every day, in streets protests all over the country, in social media posts, and in columns for those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to write them.