The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted |
The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted
Yes, we’re angry about what Donald Trump is doing to our country. But even more than that, we’re heartsick over the countless ways in which he is destroying this nation.
This Tuesday night, America will bear witness to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term. I know—the mere thought of it rots a little piece of our souls that we’re never getting back. At least you can skip it; I have to watch it.
When I was young, I used to love the pageantry of State of the Union addresses. Even when Ronald Reagan was president, the part of me that honored our democratic customs enjoyed tuning into the C-SPAN pre-game show, as it were, and watching the senators and House members file into the chamber, along with the Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices. The First Lady would take her seat in the gallery, alongside invited guests. I liked watching the president standing outside the rear door, and I loved hearing the Clerk of the House—in Reagan’s time, he was appointed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and thus spoke with a Boston accent as heavy as clam chowder—bellow: “Mistah Speakah, the President of the United States!”
During the Reagan years, the president would go on to spend the next hour and change promoting ideas and policies that I found largely repugnant. Even so, I appreciated the ceremony of the event. The State of the Union, like the opening day of a new session of Congress or the certification of electoral ballots, helped anchor our democracy—the address was as good a roadmap as any at to what we’d be debating over the course of the next year. In addition, even as I objected to Reagan’s views, I understood him to be committed, in his way, to the broad American experiment in representative government and to ensuring its continued existence.
We cannot say remotely the same of Donald Trump. He is........