Separating show and substance as Trump addresses Congress

It’s been exactly five years and one month since President Trump last addressed a joint session of Congress, and the biggest story of the week back then wasn’t about anything he said in his one hour, 18 minute stem-winder.

Maybe that’s not a surprise. Such speeches in presidential reelection years are always more campaign kick-off than policy prescription. But what grabbed attention in the first full week of February 2020 was certainly about the speech.

Yes, that was the episode of the original Trump Show when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up her copy of president’s speech and held up the remains like a trophy. That came after Trump appeared to snub Pelosi’s offer of a handshake when he reached the rostrum.

Ah, the majestic pageantry of the republic.

The larger context, though, was that the speech took place at the conclusion of Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Senate, one day before his inevitable acquittal. Trump had been impeached for trying to squeeze the then little-known president of Ukraine for something to use against former Vice President Joe Biden, who had been the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. I say “had been” because the day before Trump’s big speech, Biden laid an enormous egg with a dismal fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses.

Pelosi had counseled her party to resist the urge to impeach Trump ever since Democrats took control of the House after the 2018 midterms. But she had to acquiesce once a whistleblower revealed Trump’s request in the summer of 2019 that a newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky do him a “favor.”

The impeachment was doomed since there was no way the Republican-controlled Senate was going to find 67 votes for conviction, but Pelosi couldn’t hold her members back. They were still smarting from Trump escaping any serious consequences from a two-year-long federal probe into Russian efforts to help him win the 2016 election.

Things were looking pretty good for Trump in those days. The impeachment had, as Pelosi feared, backfired, and the president was reaching his highest job approval rating yet. Democrats’ party-line vote to impeach Trump on a matter related to Russian intrigues helped him start the election year with momentum instead of the dissatisfaction that might have otherwise met an incumbent at the end of a tumultuous first term and with a stagnating economy.

A straight-line projection on the day of Trump’s 2020 speech to Congress would have pointed to pretty rosy chances for his reelection. He had survived an all-out assault on the legitimacy of his presidency and the economy was growing, even if slowly. Better still for Trump, his opponents were a shambles. Biden seemed unlikely to resuscitate his campaign, and the initially preferred choice of the Democratic establishment, Kamala Harris, had flamed out before a single vote had been cast. When Republicans looked at their potential general election opponents, they saw avatars of a Democratic Party teetering out of balance: the former mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana and two radically progressive senators from New England.

With a job approval rating climbing close to 50 percent and the strong historical track record for incumbent presidents seeking reelection, Trump was hardly a lock, but you would have had to call him a heavy favorite. In that context, Pelosi’s speech-shredding looks like a fit of pique by a frustrated opposition leader, but not a matter of any real import. Right?

Lolz.

In a media business always looking for emotional blabber for clickbait to lure addicts of brain-dead partisanship, the Trump v. Pelosi melodrama was treated as major news. Trump and Pelosi, of course, each added to the furor, with Trump accusing Pelosi of a crime by ripping up the speech and Pelosi taking multiple victory laps.

Who tore up what and who refused to shake which hand wouldn’t have been a matter of any lasting consequence regardless of what happened in the intervening 61 months, but it seems even smaller still, once one considers what actually ended up being the most important news story of that week.

Wedged onto the front page of The New York Times the day before the State of the Union address, next to coverage of the Kansas City Chiefs’ first Super Bowl win since 1970, was a dispatch from the city of Wuhan, China — a place then almost unknown to Americans — about “an illness that has sickened more than 4,100 people and killed 224 in their city alone.” On the day the article came out, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security ordered enhanced screening for all flights from China.

The move even merited two sentences, deep into Trump’s big speech: “We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”

The pandemic would go on to kill more than a million Americans and alter nearly every aspect of our national life. Almost a year later, when Trump was again being impeached and tried — that time for sending an angry mob to the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of his defeat in the same election he once looked so certain to win — lawmakers were still wearing masks, and the nation was still eight months away from having access to an effective vaccine.

Which is all a very long way of saying that whatever gestures are deemed ennobling or ignoble at tonight’s speech, or whatever emotionally fraught melodramas have currently consumed the media’s attention, the forces that will mostly decide the course of the next five years are probably taking place far outside the glare of the bright lights in the House chamber.

A big address is like what Trump said of his Oval Office rhubarb with a very different Zelensky from the one who flattered him on a “perfect” phone call in 2019: “This is going to be great television.” But great TV doesn’t usually change the world.

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