A Rhetorician’s Observations of Trump’s First Congressional Speech

Presidential performance matters. This calm, measured guy speaking right now would have never gotten elected. This dude is too polished. The base likes the crazy and he didn’t sound or look crazy but the job demands that he adhere to the conventions and mental stability that the Office of the Presidency demands. This will be an interesting tight rope to walk with a guy in perpetual campaign mode and an election in 4 years.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson have identified three characteristics of State of the Union addresses. In a nutshell, they offer 1) public meditations on values 2) assessments of issues and the current state of things and 3) policy recommendations.

Trump’s speech, while coherent and measured, was disjointed and fell short of all three areas. Overall this address was a rhetorical struggle between two competing speeches 1) a watered down campaign speech that specifically constituted Trump voters as “the rebellion” and 2) an inclusive rhetoric of covenant renewal and american exceptionalism that asks for cooperation and unity from all Americans. It wasn’t a total meltdown but it could have flowed a little better.

• Introductions are important. This is the most presidential Trump has looked and sounded. Ever. That’s significant.
• The First Lady looked genuinely comfortable and, dare I say it, almost happy. To be clear, I’m not advocating that women smile all the time. I am not saying that she should smile more or at all. She is not here for my consumption. But she did seem relaxed and it seemed genuine and it was cool to see what this version of Melania looked like.
• This entire speech wanted to be a call to unity but he can’t bring himself to really be a uniting figure. He tries but his ego gets in the way. So in someways it adhered to the SOTU genre and some ways it did not.
• All presidents have some sort of ideal citizen that is constituted through public discourse. His ideal citizen is the forgotten American and a member of a resistance. This is troubling for a number of reasons. So, if it’s true America is made up of two competing resistance movements, that’s… not…good for anyone. And if his ideal citizen is a rebel, that identity is antithetical to consensus building and cooperation, which was a key theme of his speech.
• He was also torn between utilizing the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and painting an apocalyptic picture of America. Unfortunately, the apocalypse won. It was more optimistic than his inaugural — but that isn’t saying much.
• His speechwriters should have read some Peggy Noonan and taken notes. Overall, it was a disjointed speech that lacked sophistication and eloquence when judged within the genre of presidential rhetoric. It was, however, an excellent speech within the genre of Trump speeches.
• Special Guests at this sort of thing gives insights into priorities and values of the administration. They also serve as living, breathing material representations of policies or ideologies that the president supports. His choice to invite Carryn Owens, the widow of a U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens was interesting particularly because earlier in the week he refused to take responsibility for Ryan’s death. He also invited Denisha Merriweather, a young woman attending graduate school at The University of South Florida, as an example of someone who broke the cycle of poverty the same week he announced a budget that will cut programs directly impacting people like Ms. Merriweather. Let’s also not forget that he invited families who were killed by illegal immigrants. That’s a whole other post I won’t get into here.
• Noticeably absent were families who’s loved ones were killed by domestic terrorism and families who’s black male sons, husbands, and fathers were killed by police. Despite pledging support for GLBTQ Americans, there was no one from the Pulse Nightclub shooting. There’s something that always strikes me as slimy when people who have already gone through so much suffering are used as political tools.

Right away he’s leading with a section on civil rights, so that was a good strategy, it being February and all and it flies in the face his terrible reputation for ignoring race. However, it only lasts a few seconds because he’s switching topics a lot in the first few minutes and the speech’s purpose is not clearly defined. Overall it sounds like watered down campaign rhetoric and is very disjointed. Lots of topics are crammed on top of each other without smooth transitions or eloquent prose. It’s an amazing performance for him — because he seems rational and methodical — but the bar was super low.

There are hints of an emerging rhetoric of covenant renewal and a rhetoric of American exceptionalism desperately wants to emerge — but he’s basically saying that fulfilling our commit as Americans and renewing this covenant is only possible by erasing or ignoring the lived experiences of his opposition, but more on that later. In short, he’s saying we need to work together to make America great again but he only offers his version of America.

He goes back and forth between “doom and gloom” and “let’s work together.” He recounts the election and tells a dramatic story of how the forgotten citizen rose from the ashes and led a revolution. I’m not going to lie, that is odd in this type of speech. Without being privy to private conversations, I’m going to assert that this whole history lesson is an attempt to legitimize his presidency, but, he’s already President. Throwing in a “Make America Great Again” didn’t help.

However, In his opening, he’s more measured. He’s trying to break out of campaign mode and even though it’s measured and well rehearsed, he’s failing. He stuck telling Americans what he WILL do and how they have the potential to Make America Great Again. In any other universe this would have been a campaign or convention speech.

He uses a lot of words like “me, mine, and I.” There’s very little use of “we, us, and our” and it’s pretty clear that he’s missing unifying language in a speech that attempts to unify.

He lists his accomplishments. This isn’t a bad thing because his communication thus far has been GOD AWFUL. At this point he’s spending energy legitimizing his presidency, and with the way this week has gone he needs to do that.

He awkwardly transitions to talking about the coal industry. Wait, what? Then, he jumps to Keystone. Here, he’s pandering to his base and unable to break from campaign rhetoric. Not exactly the hopeful, more upbeat speech we were promised and he’s jumping from topic to topic too quickly for the audience to fully process everything.

Then he jumps to Canada. He specifically uses Justin Trudeau, a current media darling, as an authorizing figure to help him talk about women and financial security. A bold move but it also reveals that the Trump Administration knows they need figures like Trudeau to help them legitimize themselves and get buy in from the populace and congress. Trudeau has some street cred and the administration knows it.

Then he jumps to Cartels. This is so disjointed I can hardly type in time. He uses T-Rex and the ODNI to talk about cartels. Wait, what? Why? OF ALL THE THINGS YOU COULD USE REX TILLERSON TO TALK ABOUT…. Ok, whatever. I’m just going to let this go.

Then he goes into more boarder security talk that was basically a re-write of a campaign speech and then jumps to terrorism. Unsurprisingly, he uses the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” So that sound you hear is HR McMaster’s stress ball bursting.

Honoring Maureen Scalia was a nice touch. I was genuinely moved and feel awful for her loss but after that touching moment, it was back to the blame Obama game and doom and gloom.

Then from terrorism, he jumps to trade and things get weird and he uses Lincoln as an authorizing figure for fair/free trade. This is an interesting rhetorical choice to say the least.

Interestingly enough, he then moves to Eisenhower and uses him as an authorizing figure for plans for national rebuilding. Why so many presidential authorizing figures, I wonder? To me, this is trying way too hard to legitimize his presidency. He needs to stop aligning himself with so many old dead white guys in one speech.

Towards the end, he delivers a call to unity that was good, but this is the language that was missing from the overall speech. He mentions he following terms in rapid succession: clean air, clean water, women’s health, military, infrastructure, common ground, and cooperation. This language needs to be peppered throughout this address not lumped all together at the end.

It’s like he’s torn between making this all about him and his plan — and calling for cooperation.

Towards the end, he uses more “we” language when talking about education and violence. However, a call to build “Bridges of cooperation and trust” with police is more than a little tone deaf because he doesn’t recognize or acknowledge context or history of race or race relations and undermines one of the goals of his speech.

Calling to build bridges while asking an entire population to erase the decades of mistrust and material harm that comes from engaging law enforcement is not a consensus-building move. Not acknowledging the lived experiences of many people of color and asking them to all of a sudden work with law enforcement signals that he doesn’t understand race or power or class.

Moving on to the NATO portion of this speech. It was pretty good. Schumer even stood up, but hey, it was only a few sentences and it was on to the next topic, which was poverty and crime.

As much as he spoke about building new allies and building peace, I’m uncomfortable with the apocalyptic picture of America he’s painting. He talks about poverty and crime like every American is an extra in a post-apocalypse YA novel. He’s two shakes of a lamb’s tail away from (again) declaring “I alone can fix it” — and that is certainly the implication, but instead he calls for unity to help make America great again.

The problem with this portion of speech is that he’s asking Americans to participate in a covenant renewal — not because it will help American continue on a path to greatness and continue to be the city on a hill — but because it would return America to the city on a hill that it once was.

For some reason, he’s tasked himself with returning the county to a version of America that was great only for people who look and sound like him. And that’s sad. This speech, in spite of its best efforts and intentions, is neither collaborative nor is it consensus building.

I personally don’t have the patience to watch this bi-polar drama unfold but I hope his presidency evolves into the type of cooperative administration he promised. If he wants cooperation he will have to use cooperative language and acknowledge the experiences and history of those he has offended. I won’t hold my breath but I am relieved this speech was not a hot-mess of crazy. If this administration fails, so does America so I wish our president the best of luck and hope the next one is a little better. That’s all I can hope for right now.

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Originally published at medium.com on March 1, 2017.