State of the Union: Trump asks nation for second term amid impeachment trial
An emboldened Donald Trump bragged about the “great American comeback” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, in a speech resembling a prolonged televised election advert that skirted around the inconvenient truth that he remained in the final throes of his impeachment trial.
Only the third president to be impeached in US history, Trump addressed a joint chamber of Congress with still a day to go before he is almost certainly acquitted by Republican loyalists in the US Senate. Despite the ignominy of that position, he sounded remarkably upbeat, at times euphoric, in contrast with the “American carnage” he invoked at his inauguration three years ago.
“In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny,” Trump began. “We are moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago, and we are never going back!”
This is not the first time a president has delivered a State of the Union speech in the midst of impeachment. Bill Clinton was still three weeks away from acquittal for lying in the Monica Lewinsky scandal when he gave his State of the Union in 1999.
But it was historically unique in that an impeached president, still locked in a trial, also faces a bid for re-election now only nine months away. As such it was no surprise that the theme of the speech – the “great American comeback” – bore all the qualities of an election jingle.
He delivered his speech just feet away from the Democratic leaders who inflicted on him the trial that he has tried so hard to dismiss as a “witch-hunt”.
His nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, sat uncomfortably close at his back. For a second year running she and all her Democratic women peers dressed all in white in homage to the suffragettes in part as an understated dig at a president who has evaded multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.
As Trump came up to the podium, Pelosi reached out to shake his hand. In a moment that will go down in the annals of history, the president declined to return the speaker’s gesture.
Some of the women present at that coordinated display last year were notably missing on Tuesday night. Among seven Democrats who boycotted the proceedings were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said she didn’t want to “normalize Trump’s lawless conduct & subversion of the Constitution”.
Her fellow member of the four-woman “Squad” of liberal Democrats, Ayanna Pressley, also skipped what she called a “sham” State of the Union given by a president who is “not legitimate”.
Trump’s advisers and senior Republicans have been pleading with him to take the high ground and focus on positives rather than unloading on his Democratic rivals in the joint chamber of Congress before him. As the White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, put it: “Success is the best revenge.”.
No matter how on-message Trump manages to remain, he was unable to resist taking a poke at his Democratic rivals vying to challenge him in November. With an eye to Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who narrowly came second to Pete Buttigieg in the early results out of Iowa, Trump lambasted his proposal to introduce universal healthcare through Medicare for All.
“We will never let socialism destroy American healthcare,” Trump pronounced, adding that “we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions”. In fact, Trump has backed numerous Republican attempts to pass legislation that would scrap protection for pre-existing conditions.
Among the positives that Trump highlighted is the economy with unemployment standing at 3.5% – the lowest in more than 50 years.
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Trump will be buoyed by the latest Gallup poll that puts his approval rating at its highest yet – 49%. Against that, there is the 51% who expressed disapproval, the economic dark clouds of the coronavirus crisis, widespread censure of his handling of the Middle East, and the disdain he showed for the constitutional limits of his power in seeking to coerce Ukraine to dish dirt on a political rival that led to impeachment.
There is also the matter of the wall on the Mexican border, Trump’s personal obsession that dominated his State of the Union last year. This year he might be less inclined to focus on the subject, given its halting progress and the fact that a section of it blew over last month in high winds.
