President Donald Trump started out pretty well with his State of the Union speech this week. He mentioned “our American family.” He talked about restoring “the trust between people and their government.”
These were healing words, which the nation needs.
In his year in the White House, Trump has chosen not to deliver such words very often — or at all. He’s preferred instead to offer us juvenile nicknames for people he doesn’t like, and words of antagonism on race and religion and ethnic background, and versions of the truth that vary wildly from day to day.
This is why it’s so difficult to evaluate his speech before the American people this week. Which is the real Trump? The one who suggests we “set aside our differences”? Or the one who willfully plucks at them when he thinks they appeal to his political base?
In an instant, he hopefully declares “our new American moment,” but then quickly brings up “the flag” and the national anthem – a sly, petty swipe at African-American football players who kneel in protest of police abuse, whose quiet gesture months ago this president turned into an outsized national dividing line and can’t resist hinting at it even now.
This is a president who finally talks about infrastructure. He says he’d put $1.5 trillion into rebuilding decaying American roads and tunnels and bridges. But he doesn’t say how much of that money would have to come from local municipalities – at a time when cities and communities such as Baltimore are, as usual, strapped for funds and Trump has already indicated we’ll have to find the money somewhere other than the federal government.
After all, that tax cut recently passed by the U.S. Congress just added another trillion bucks to the already staggering national debt.
The president’s healing words were nice. But it wasn’t long before he went to his standard, dividing rhetoric about immigrants, at a time when millions wonder if they’re about to be deported.
“They have caused the loss of many innocent lives,” he said. Never mind that the rate of crimes committed by immigrants is far less than the rate among native-born Americans.
Then there’s the ongoing Russia probe. Have we lost sight of the essential question here? The investigation’s about Russian interference in our American election process, which we all consider sacred.
Leaving aside, for the moment, any possible participation by Trump or any of his family in this matter, could he not play the protective father figure here? Could he not mention that Russia should be punished for this, and that never again should an American election be called into question because of some foreign power’s interference?
Nope.
Trump mentioned sanctions, of course. But the sanctions were reserved for Cuba and Venezuela and North Korea — and not a word about Russia.
So it was nice to hear some words of healing from this president. But it would have been nicer if they didn’t seem so removed from so much of the reality of the entire first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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