On a night when the president gave the nation’s highest civilian honor to a guy who has called college students “sluts,” made racist jokes about Barack Obama, and mocked Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, the thing Republicans got the most worked up about was Nancy Pelosi tearing up a copy of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech after he finished it. “That was pitiful,” Senator Ted Cruz told Politico of Pelosi’s act of defiance. “It was disgraceful.”

“Ripping up the president’s speech is a new low, even for Speaker Pelosi,” tweeted Representative Doug Collins, who cemented himself as one of Trump’s most loyal boosters after leading his impeachment defense in the House. “But it doesn’t change the facts: America is more safe, secure and prosperous than ever before.”

Trump entered Tuesday evening’s address riding high after a Democratic train wreck in Iowa and on the cusp of acquittal in the Senate. He was expected to be in full campaign mode and didn’t disappoint. For over an hour, the president bragged about his accomplishments, many exaggerated or invented, and took shots at his “socialist” opponents and other villains real and imagined. He hammered home themes straight out of right-wing, talk radio, and fittingly, used the speech to honor Rush Limbaugh, the controversial host recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Republican lawmakers cheered.

Given all that, and the fact that the president declined to shake her hand at the onset of his speech, Pelosi tearing up his address could be seen as a footnote. And yet Republicans were outraged. “Disappointed to see [Pelosi] rip up the speech that mentioned lives we’ve lost and heroes we celebrated at the SOTU,” Nikki Haley wrote on Twitter. “No matter how you feel or what you disagree with, remember others are watching. This was unbecoming of someone at her level in office.” The White House, too, disingenuously suggested that Pelosi was making a statement about various heroes the president referenced Tuesday, and not about the president himself.

Jonathan Turley, one of two constitutional law professors who Republicans found to defend Trump against impeachment, also fretted over the paper-ripping, tweeting that Pelosi’s “act dishonored the institution and destroyed even the pretense of civility and decorum in the House.” And Trump, who has used his Twitter feed to mock and demean his opponents while in office, approvingly retweeted it.

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