Elliot Williams (@elliotcwilliams) is a CNN legal analyst. A principal at The Raben Group, a national public affairs and strategic communications firm, he was formerly a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department and an assistant director at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Obama administration. The views expressed here are the author's. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) There is no question that Rush Limbaugh is a man of immense talent, wit and on-air charisma.

There is also no question that he has devoted much of his career to belching out racist invective and dividing the country. He has a colossal audience and has been instrumental in fueling the vicious toxicity and knee-jerk partisanship that characterizes our moment.

Elliot Williams

And so to some extent, we should be alarmed by President Donald Trump's choice to use this year's State of the Union to award Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Or, at this point, maybe we shouldn't.

Established in 1963 by John F. Kennedy, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is widely considered the nation's highest honor bestowed on civilians. Certainly, all presidents send political messages through their choice of who gets an award. For instance, it can be no accident that George H.W. Bush chose to give an award in 1989 to George F. Kennan -- one of the early architects of the policy of containing Soviet expansion -- the same year revolution and change began to spread across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

However, for the most part, the roster of award winners reads as a who's who of figures who embody America's best angels -- those whose contributions to the human experiment were far more moral than anything else.