Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
People watch as President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, during a watch party hosted by Miami Young Republicans and Trump Victory Miami, February 4, 2020, in Coral Gables, Florida.
That, my fellow Americans, was—minus the asides, the calumnies, and the unhinged attacks on his opponent—Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign speech. Too high-toned to be authentic Trump, it nonetheless had moments of Trumpian authenticity, what with its bestowing of a scholarship on a kid, reuniting of a soldier with his family, and draping the Medal of Freedom around the neck of modern Republicanism’s vilest propagandist. Trump doubtless has secured the serial rights to the re-airing and streaming of these moments of high fluff.
The speech struck all the themes, directed at all the right audiences, that Trump needs to carry him to victory in November. Central to these was proclaiming that he had gifted America’s workers with a “blue-collar boom.” Never mind that the wage increases he cited were largely the result of minimum-wage hikes enacted by Democratic states and cities over Republican opposition. Clearly, he is targeting once again the white workers of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania who gave him the presidency in 2016, projecting that his revision of NAFTA will create 100,000 new jobs in the auto industry. In line with Boris Johnson and France’s Le Pens, he is positioning himself yet again as the economic, racial, and cultural champion of the white working class and their protector against criminal aliens.
Okay, so the speech had some mild contradictions. Trump vowed to keep American medicine from ever being socialized, and to keep Medicare (the socialized part of American medicine) intact from all assaults. He assailed Venezuela’s President Maduro as a socialist tyrant, and cheerfully claimed that “we have perhaps the best relationship we have ever had with China, including with President Xi,” who is a stronger candidate than Maduro for membership in the Stalinist Hall of Horrors.
For sheer cognitive dissonance, though, nothing came close to Trump’s emergence as the Friend of Blacks and Latinos. He hailed Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman (which still doesn’t mean he has any idea who they are), honored a centenarian Tuskegee Airman, mentioned (albeit in passing) Selma and Martin Luther King, and extolled the still nonexistent successes of Opportunity Zones in eliminating inner-city poverty. I was reminded of Tom Lehrer’s cheery 1965 ballad in which a racist, hate-filled nation sets aside its normal bigotry “during National Brotherhood Week [when] Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark [a violent Southern racist of the time] are dancing cheek to cheek.”
Loath though I am to say it, this may be potent political stuff. For swing (chiefly white) voters looking for an excuse to overlook Trump’s racism, an occasional, if awkward, bow to the idea of minority dignity, if not full racial equality, could turn a few votes. More centrally, he’s honing his pitch to the white working class, and should the Democrats be so ill-advised as to nominate Michael Bloomberg, stalwart champion of trade with China and gun control, that pitch should suffice to lock down those Midwest battleground states yet again.
These themes, translated back into the red meat of Trumpian invective, will be the case Trump makes for his re-election straight through November. These, and the mendacious attacks on the Democratic nominee and all those, real or imagined, who oppose him and threaten (so he claims) his base. Nowhere is it written that this won’t work.
