Trump Attempted Poetry in His State of the Union. Instead, We Got a Salesman's Tired Patter.

At some point during the interminable State of the Union address Tuesday night, probably when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to gold-medal goalie Connor Hellebuyck, I began to wonder whether he might have arranged for some lovely parting gifts for those few of his supporters who didn’t get some sort of medal. Something from Dicker and Dicker of Beverly Hills, perhaps, or the home edition of Candy Land: The Nabokov Version, a popular diversion around certain private tropical islands, or so I’m told.

(Old Sportswriter Snark: Shouldn’t Hellebuyck win a ring before he gets the same medal as, say, Bill Russell?)

He handed out Purple Hearts, a Legion of Merit, and two Congressional Medals of Honor, although he subcontracted one of the latter awards to his wife. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic __ has the right of it__. This wasn’t a presidential address. It was some weird combination of a game show and the old Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.

That is except for the shards of what passes for public policy in this administration, which were the usual poisonous stew of arrant bullshit and xenophobic detritus and not funny at all. He bathed himself in the blood of crime victims, over and over again. He pulled a skeevy little stunt by asking the Democrats to stand in support of his murderous immigration campaign. And when they declined to join in Speaker Mike Johnson’s little mechanical-monkey act up on the rostrum behind the president, he gathered some cheap applause by denigrating their patriotism.

Mere mockery is inadequate to much of the damage already done in a little more than a year of Hell’s Encore, but it remains a vital part of limiting the damage going forward. For example, when the peroration to his endless prevarications finally came, the president—or his speechwriters—decided to go for the poetry while gripping the podium like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to the flotsam at the end of Titanic as his voice faded into the raspy ethereal. He went for the poetry but never made it past a salesman’s tired patter.

Americans lifted humanity into the skies on the wings of aluminum and steel. And then we launched mankind into the stars on rockets powered by sheer American will and unyielding American pride. We wired the globe with our ingenuity. We captivated the planet with American culture, and now we are pioneering the next great American breakthroughs that will change the entire world. All of this, and so much more, is the enduring legacy, unmatched glory of the hardworking patriots who built and defended this country and who still carry the hopes and freedoms on all of humanity’s backs. For years, they were forgotten, betrayed, and cast aside. But that great betrayal is over, and they will never be forgotten again. Because when the world needs courage, daring, vision, and inspiration, it is still turning to America. And when God needs a nation to work his miracles, he knows exactly who to ask.

I would like to examine the theological underpinnings of the belief that God has needed us to work miracles. When She created the universe, there were no nations. Maybe She just got lucky.

Hey, rube. Wanna buy a watch?