Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
President Donald Trump hands copies of his speech to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday.
Last night, I attended the State of the Union address as a guest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I wish I could say that President Trump rose to meet the moment. Instead, he gave us partisan showmanship that didn’t square with reality. He tried—unconvincingly—to put a shiny gloss on a failed record that has been all about rigging the system in favor of the privileged and powerful.
It’s time for a reality check.
The economy is only going gangbusters if you’re already in the one percent, if you’re one of those wealthiest Americans who got a huge windfall from Trump’s trillion-dollar tax cut. One staggering data point you certainly didn’t hear last night: The 2017 tax cut bill benefited the nation’s six largest banks to the tune of $32 billion.
By contrast, most working families not named Wells or Fargo experience economic anxiety on a daily basis, barely keeping their heads above water, many of them one setback away from financial ruin. Real wage growth is the lowest it has been in 18 months. Consumer debt is at an all-time high, exceeding $4 trillion. The cost of college education continues to skyrocket. And the Trump administration hasn’t lifted a finger to raise the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 per hour for more than a decade, while CEO compensation has soared.
I could barely believe my ears when I heard the president’s breathtaking dishonesty on health care. The fact is, he has actively tried to take away coverage from some 20 million people and eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions. His administration is engaged in a federal case to eviscerate the most significant health care legislation in generations. Since his first day in office, he has taken every opportunity—through legislation, regulation, and now the courts—to upend the ACA’s promise of affordable health care with strong consumer protections.
In direct contradiction to his comments last night, the president has recently indicated that he is open to cutting Social Security and Medicare. He said last night that he would sign a prescription drug bill. If that’s more than just lip service, then he should embrace the measure passed by the House in December, which allows the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and gives working families affordable access to the medications they need.
He was just as dishonest about food stamps. The Trump administration is literally taking food from the mouths of some of our most vulnerable Americans, with a new rule to strip Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from roughly 700,000 jobless people. And the school voucher proposal he floated last night would undermine the public-education system, diverting taxpayer dollars from the schools attended by 90 percent of American children.
The mood in the chamber was largely tense. The president’s supporters saw fit at moments to turn the speech into a campaign rally. Democrats were understandably uneasy with the relentless lies, as well as the racially tinged divisiveness (ten separate references, for example, to “illegal aliens” or “criminal aliens”).
Nothing I heard at the Capitol last night credibly addresses the concerns of AFSCME members and other working people. I was in Des Moines over the weekend, in advance of the caucuses, and I listened to Iowans questioning presidential candidates and their surrogates about how to strengthen unions and public services, how to improve their voice on the job, how to fight privatization and outsourcing, and more.
If President Trump is truly interested in empowering working people, he would promise to sign the PRO Act, which the House of Representatives will vote on tomorrow. The bill would improve federal labor law to increase protections and remove obstacles to organizing for private-sector workers. He would get on board with the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, a bill introduced in the House to give public employees collective-bargaining rights. Not a word about either of these bills last night. Not a word about the difference unions make in the lives of working people.
President Trump may well avoid conviction and removal from office when the U.S. Senate votes on articles of impeachment later today. But he cannot avoid going on trial for betraying working people across the country. That verdict will be rendered by voters in November.
