Slate - "Altered State. Trump reduces the State of the Union to its irrelevant essence"
by Jim Newell
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/how-trump-pushes-the-state-of-the-union-into-pointlessness.html
On Tuesday night, President Trump will address Congress with a speech that, according to anonymous White House aides, will be “forward-looking,” “bipartisan,” and “softened.” One aide described the speech as offering an “attractive message.” The theme: “building a safe, strong and proud America.” The president will read words off a screen about uniting both parties to produce friendly immigration and infrastructure bills. If he can get through the speech without launching into any tangents about Mika Brzezinski’s looks, cable pundits will declare the speech a “success” and muse about how it will help the Republican Party in November’s midterm elections.
And then Wednesday morning will happen, and none of it will matter, and no one will care.
The State of the Union address, a ritual borne out of a literal reading of the Constitution’s obligation that the president “from time to time … give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union,” has lost its efficacy in the age of the one-minute news cycle. The president can spell out his agenda for the year and then … something else will invariably happen to make everyone forget about what he wanted. Congress, despite the president’s call for bipartisan action, will continue to operate by its own politics: those of structural gridlock, created by that very same 18th-century document that requires the president to occasionally brief Congress on what’s going on.
But Trump takes State of the Union futility to another, final level. Whereas the last few presidents would have seen the news cycle’s immediate trampling of their messages as a frustrating reality, there is no indication that Trump would see it that way. Trump is as mercurial and lacking in attention span as the news cycles that would bury his message, and he is just as likely to be the one trampling on it. There is no reason to believe that he agrees with anything in his speech, or will remember on Wednesday morning what he said Tuesday night. Why should you?
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If Trump’s disinterest in consistency is good for anything, it’s for reducing the State of the Union to its 2018 essence: a speck of dust in a hurricane.
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