Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”

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Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not "Normal" In his address to Congress, President Trump’s words clashed with what he and his aides have spent the past few weeks doing and saying.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY JIM LO SCALZO / EPA / ANADOLU AGENCY / GETTY

In Donald Trump’s America, “normal” is a word that invites nostalgia. It was so rarely heard during Trump’s chaotic first month in office that, on Monday, the Times posed the following question to a panel of political scientists, law professors, and former government officials: “Just how abnormal is the Trump presidency?” But on Tuesday night, after Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, normalcy was breaking out all over. The writer Max Boot, a critic of Trump, commented on Twitter that the address was the “first ‘normal’ speech Trump has given & therefore best.” Brian Williams, on MSNBC, called it Trump’s “most speech-like speech.” The Washington Post, on a similar, circular note, pronounced the President’s address “surprisingly presidential”—which is, when you think about it, like calling an athlete’s performance “surprisingly athletic.”

It’s true that the speech, purely as a political performance, was conventional, and therefore almost bearable. One of its minor revelations was that Trump is capable of being boring. Trump and his speechwriters spooled off so many clichés (“the dreams that fill our hearts . . . the hopes that stir our souls”) and close-your-eyes-and-wish banalities (“true love for our people requires us to find common ground”; “every hurting family can find healing”) that the speech, for long stretches, was almost soporific. It cast only brief glances at the “carnage” that Trump described in his Inaugural Address, in January; it mostly refrained from fetishizing acts of violence and victimization, as he did relentlessly in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in July. (Trump did, however, invite to the gallery the widows of two law-enforcement officers who, he said, “were viciously gunned down by an illegal immigrant.”) Teleprompted Trump usually acts as if he were reading a script under duress, but last night the President was with the program.

Yet these were superficialities. On closer inspection, Tuesday’s speech was not that normal at all—at least, not in light of what the President and his aides have spent the past few weeks doing and saying. Trump’s sudden distaste for “the wedge of disunity”—a wedge he has used with such abandon that he could just as well brand it, gild it, and have his sons sell it—was so obviously at odds with his public persona that it provoked, on the Democratic side of the aisle, bitter laughter. But the starkest contradiction the speech contained was the one between the President, who promised “a new program of national rebuilding,” and the words of his senior adviser, Stephen Bannon, who announced, only five days earlier, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, that the Administration had begun a project of “deconstruction.” So which is it: Is the federal government in the construction business, as Trump insists, or the deconstruction business, as Bannon has put it? Can it possibly be in both?

Trump certainly considers himself a builder—“the greatest builder,” he said during the campaign—a man who has just acquired a total teardown of a country, but sees, in all that’s “broken,” something “greater than ever before,” as he said in last night’s closing riff. He described his dream of “new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways, gleaming across our very, very beautiful land.” Trump’s ambitions include a trillion-dollar infrastructure program (though what he sketched out on Tuesday was more a brochure than a blueprint), a “great, great wall” that will someday stand on the U.S.-Mexico border, a bigger and stronger military, a better health-care system (with lower costs and more choices), and, less tangibly, new “bridges of coöperation and trust” between communities and police officers. All Presidents want to leave a legacy, but a man who has put his name on buildings, airplanes, and “five-star gourmet quality” steaks surely has more in mind than a Presidential library.

During the transition, Bannon told a reporter that “I’m the guy pushing” the infrastructure plan, suggesting he wanted to “rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up.” But, more recently, at CPAC, that goal went unmentioned; the work that Bannon described with enthusiasm was, in his memorable phrase, the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” And that work has begun in earnest. “If you look at these Cabinet appointees,” he explained—referring, it seemed, to most if not all of them—“they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction.” Indeed, hours before the President’s address on Tuesday, his aides were finalizing an executive order that will enable the rollback of E.P.A. regulations protecting streams, wetlands, and major bodies of water from pollution. And, earlier this week, the White House announced its intention to cut fifty-four billion dollars from unspecified federal programs that, as the Times reported, benefit schoolchildren, poor families, scientific research, health-care services, and overseas aid; the full sum would then be spent on a military buildup.

Trump, on Tuesday night, drew cheers from Republicans when he mentioned “a historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations,” but had nothing to say about those proposed budget cuts. (By contrast, in 1981, Ronald Reagan spent one-third of his first address to Congress detailing the cuts his Administration was proposing—including cuts to the arts and humanities, and to school breakfast and lunch programs.) Trump is a man who loves ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings, but budget-cutting, it appears, he would rather do off-camera.

If Trump or Bannon sees a contradiction in their thinking, they have not acknowledged it. It’s possible that both men think they can do it all: build up while they knock down, spend while they save, dream “big and bold and daring things for our country,” as Trump declared, while they pull back and hunker down. Most Administrations—even the new ones—tend to recognize that they face trade-offs and tough choices. But this Administration, as the Times panel concluded, is not “normal.”

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