Trump’s State of the Balcony Address
His annual speech to Congress was more focused on the guests in the audience than on his policies.
Echo chamber.
Photographer: Aaron P. Bernstein/Bloomberg
President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to sell his policy of negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That made sense: He gave a higher profile to an issue that hasn’t received a lot of media attention, which pressured Congress, including Republicans, to get behind a policy they might not want to support.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for the positive. Like last year, Trump’s speech was far more focused on the folks in the gallery – some heroes, some victims – than on policies. If you blinked, you missed infrastructure, which once again seems to be an idea he talks about, not something he plans to enact. He engaged in some soaring rhetoric about child cancer, putting the spotlight on a wonderful little girl in the gallery to illustrate the point … and then asked Congress for all of $500 million over the next 10 years to find a cure for the disease.