It was so heart-warming to hear about Donald Trump’s love of America and the American dream in his first official State of the Union address.

Just one day after he decided to go easy on Russia for manipulating American democracy, our “America first” president declared that “Americans love their country. And they deserve a government that shows them the same love and loyalty in return.”

They surely do. They will also have to wait a few years before their love is returned, based on Trump’s behavior since he won the White House by losing the popular vote.

For any other president, all this talk about love of country would be the definition of boilerplate speechifying. But for someone who so clearly loves Putin’s Russia, it was more like epic trolling.

Love and loyalty is one way to describe how Trump prefers to wimp out of sanctions against Moscow, under something called The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. There’s a clue in the name, for those playing at home.

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That was a law that was passed with the overwhelming support of both parties in Congress, but you wouldn’t know that from the reaction of congressional Republicans. The gang that wrapped itself in the flag through the Bush years has no problem giving standing ovations to a man who thinks the Russians have suffered enough.

“For the last year we have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government,” he continued.

Trump’s methodology of trust-building is unorthodox, to say the least. You have to be either delusional or called Donald to think that the best way to restore trust is to undermine all confidence in the FBI, the justice department and the rule of law in general.

Aided and abetted by so many House Republicans, Trump has now concocted an entire conspiracy about Deep State liberals trying to overthrow his vote-losing presidency via some secret society deep in the bowels of the FBI. It only sounds far-fetched if you don’t watch Fox News.

Now that he has fired the FBI director and pushed out his deputy for their dogged inquiries into his Russian connections, Trump is turning his fire on to the attorney general and his deputy. That’s because he failed in his earlier attempts to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

This is how Stalin went about restoring the bonds of trust in government. There’s nothing quite like a good purge to get your citizens to believe in good government.

Play Video 1:32 Moments of protest during Trump's State of the Union address – video

Of course when Trump talks about citizens, he means a certain type of citizen in particular. For a man who prides himself on speaking bluntly, Trump is curiously confusing when it comes to new Americans. It’s like he’s tripping over something he just can’t bring himself to say about immigrants, even as he talks about immigration. What’s the word to describe this? Oh yes, xenophobia.

“Struggling communities, especially immigrant communities, will also be helped by immigration policies that focus on the best interests of American workers and American families,” he declared.

On the face of it, who could object to such an innocent thing as protecting American families? On the other face of it, how is it in the best interests of American families to stop them reuniting with their relatives in America?

It’s hard to know which immigrant community Trump was thinking about. None have so far indicated they want to see an end to what the law calls “family reunification” and Trump calls “chain migration”.

But these are niceties that are lost in a tidal wave of immigrant crime and terrorism washing across the continental United States. At least, that’s what it sounded like when Trump was reading slowly from his prompter.

The murderous MS-13 gang apparently number “thousands and thousands and thousands” – and those are the ones who’ve been deported, so just imagine how many are left behind. In case you were wondering how they got here in the first place, Trump explained: “Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors.”

You see? That’s why we can’t be so kind to all those Dreamer kids who were also unaccompanied alien minors.

The same is true of all those large immigrant families, who are best thought of as a national sleeper cell of al-Qaida assassins. “In recent weeks,” Trump intoned, “two terrorist attacks in New York were made possible by the visa lottery and chain migration. In the age of terrorism, these programs present risks we can just no longer afford.”

So now we know. Guns don’t kill people and terrorists don’t kill people. Immigration kills people.

Let’s dispense with the niceties about the style of Trump’s delivery. The State of the Union is a gimme. It’s a chance for presidents to project their status with the help of a captive congressional audience, several speechwriters and a few teleprompters.

It’s a chance for the rest of the nation to place hope over experience and pretend like a president who spends his days watching cable news is capable of things like coherent policy, crafting legislation and complex diplomacy. The only complexity Trump embraces involve his convoluted dealings with the Russians.

The only way Donald Trump could look unpresidential in a situation like this is if he spanked himself with a copy of Forbes magazine. The only way he could sound unpresidential is if he read out loud his hand-crafted tweets about Fox News. And the only way he could miss all the normal notes about E Pluribus Unum is if he honestly explained his nativist immigration policy.

And yet he still managed to speak from his teleprompter like he was either reading his speech for the first time, or trying to talk to a room full of six-year-olds.

Perhaps the painfully slow pace stopped him from choking on the most pious lines of the night. “In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life,” he explained. “Our motto is In God We Trust.”

As it happens, Trump also trusts his personal lawyer, who paid quite a lot of hush money to a porn star ahead of a presidential election that obviously kept faith and family at the center of American life.

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Since his first address to a joint session of Congress a year ago, the Trump presidency hasn’t exactly set popular opinion on fire. He has lost five points in his approval ratings, dropping from 43 to 38 points. That’s 13 points lower than his predecessor Barack Obama, at the same stage of his presidency, and 23 points lower than Richard Nixon, who took another three and a half years to become as unpopular as Trump.

Nevertheless, this was the kind of night Trump loves. A night of unending applause from a Congress that ridicules him behind his back; a night when he could applaud himself when all else failed.

Above all, it was a night when he could pretend to be the president he never is. “To everyone still recovering in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, California, and everywhere – we are with you, we love you, and we will always pull through together,” he said. “Always.”

He was speaking just one day after his own Fema ended its supplies of food and water in Puerto Rico, where power won’t fully be restored across the island for at least another four months.

They may not have electricity and they may not have economic recovery. But the Americans of Puerto Rico will have Trump’s love to light their dark nights and fill their empty pockets. Always and forever.

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