To understand last night’s raving, deluded, ignorant “State of the Union” message, we must start with a photo taken a few hours before. Awkwardly sitting together on a gold couch, David Ellison and Sen. Lindsey Graham give a thumbs up to the camera.
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Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is currently trying to use his father’s vast fortune to build an entertainment empire. He has already purchased Paramount, which, among other entities, owns CBS.
Virtually all of the capitulation at the once-proud news outlet started when Ellison first sought to acquire the Tiffany Network. It is impossible to know what political views, if any, he actually holds, but in an age of weak-kneed corporate collaborators, Ellison is a poster child for the cause.
So there he is, sitting alongside arguably the most pathetic man in the U.S. Senate, paying homage to Donald Trump.
Trump’s actual address to the joint session of Congress was tedious, low-energy and filled with the expected lies. Trump is most effective when he ignores the teleprompter and script.
Last night, he largely followed what had been written for him, and it showed. For nearly two hours, he droned on, occasionally appearing to read words he had never seen before and barely understood.
That does not mean the speech was without its glaring moments. His dystopian vision of a crime-ridden country with murder around every corner was jarring. His insistence that everyday Americans are wrong to think prices are too high and the economy is faltering was tone-deaf. His claims about international affairs and foreign policy were, at times, laughable.
Most critical for democracy were his words aimed at free and fair elections.
He began by reiterating his strong support for the SAVE America Act, a Republican voter suppression bill that he falsely claimed will “stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections.”
Trump’s lies about our elections are nothing new, and tying them to noncitizen voting has become standard fare — but that does not make it any less corrosive to democracy.
Trump did not stop at describing what is actually contained in the bill. He again targeted mail-in voting by insisting that Republicans ban all “mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Nor did he let up on the growing calls within the GOP to bring Congress’s other work to a complete halt while Senate Republicans embark on a doomed strategy of requiring a talking filibuster to pass his voter suppression agenda — insisting it should happen “before anything else.”
One could sense the dread coming over Republican Senate leader John Thune as he listened. He knows he cannot deliver what Trump was proposing, but he is too spineless to push back.
Trump knows this, too, which is why he turned to his supplicant leader and said, “And we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it, John.”
As he did throughout his speech, Trump used the opportunity to vilify Democrats and lie about their motives. He demonized them for failing to support his disastrous policies and attacked them for refusing to stand and applaud him.
In this section of his speech, however, he was even more autocratic, claiming that Democratic opposition to voter suppression was because “they want to cheat, they have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”
The State of the Union is supposed to be an opportunity for presidents to fulfill their constitutional obligation to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union” and “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
However, in recent decades it has also become a display of presidential and congressional unity of purpose, even as disagreements on specific policies remain. The fact that the president must be invited by the Speaker to give the address, that he travels to their chamber with their officers sitting on the dais behind him and members of Congress in the audience, is intended to display Congress’s primacy at the event.
This year, the entire affair — starting with David Ellison’s photo — was a display of raw presidential power. Trump wanted everyone to know that he was in charge, and Republicans in the audience were happy to oblige. Seated behind him, the Senate President, Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson failed to display Congress’ leadership. They gave the aura of nothing more than his fumbling footmen.
When the event concluded, Speaker Johnson told an interviewer what was really at stake during the nearly two-hour speech: “If we lost the midterms — heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House — it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect.”
Trump knows it. Lindsey Graham knows it. Cowardly business leaders like Ellison know it. For once, I’m grateful to Mike Johnson for being willing to actually say it.