“We have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government,” President Trump said Tuesday night in his first State of the Union address. Was this sarcasm?
This is the president who has fueled a hysterical smear campaign against the FBI for personal gain. He wants to and soon may release a memo with cherry-picked information alleging misconduct in the Justice Department in order to discredit a federal investigation into his associates. He singles out individual FBI officials for accusation and abuse on Twitter. He on a practically daily basis insists that the Russia investigation is based on a hoax, despite the intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that Russia attempted to sway the 2016 election. He insists he respects the professionals in the law-enforcement and intelligence communities, until their professionalism clashes with his wishes.
This is the president who alleged, without evidence, that he really won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in California. He empaneled a commission designed to find “evidence” of widespread voter fraud — which only benefits Democrats, of course. To the chagrin of state officials across the country, the message was that Americans cannot trust their voting system.
This is the president who insisted that the “Court System” is “broken and unfair” because he disagreed with a ruling and that he would consider breaking up the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
This is the president who publicly campaigned for his own attorney general to resign, which means that at least one of them does not deserve the office he inhabits, but kept Jeff Sessions in place anyway.
This is the president who hurls insults at “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” and a variety of other congressional leaders.
This is the president who, on his second day in office, blew the public credibility of the White House staff by ordering his press secretary to baldly lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
In other words, this is the president who has done more to undermine “the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government” than any chief executive since Richard Nixon.
Throughout his address, Trump spoke of grand principles as though he lived up to the words. But, as he has repeatedly proved, saying you are honest does not mean you are, saying you will unite people does not mean you will, and saying that you have fixed government does not mean you have. You might, in fact, be doing lasting damage to the norms and institutions that allow the government to serve the public interest. All the high rhetoric in his Tuesday night speech just made Trump a gaslighting artist and hypocrite as well as a calamitous president.