WASHINGTON—After a night’s reflection, I have come to the conclusion that, while delivering his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the president* really didn’t know what he was saying. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t understand the subjects he was discussing; that is a given with this president*. (For example, when the president* discussing “beautiful clean coal,” he not only is discussing something that doesn’t exist, he’s also discussing something he doesn’t understand, even in the theoretical sense.) I mean that he was not wholly aware of the words that he was speaking.

My evidence for this is the fact that, before the address began, we were handed a copy of the prepared text so that we could follow along and, in the not inconsiderable possibility that the president* would pause to bite the head off a live chicken, mark where in the text he chose to do so. Generally, these texts are printed on official stationery and they are presented essentially as a document in conventional prose. Instead, for reasons known only to god, what we were handed were copies of the speech as the president* would read it from the podium. Words and phrases he was supposed to emphasize were written in all caps, not unlike what you’d see in the angry part of a Tweet. For example:

“As I promised the American People from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the BIGGEST TAX CUTS AND REFORMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

This curious happenstance enabled us to watch in real time as the president* utterly botched the stagecraft of his address. He blew through most of the capitalized points of emphasis, only occasionally leaning into them the way he was supposed to. So, even on its most basic level, the speech was completely unbalanced in what it chose to emphasize. In its substance, of course, this equilibrium was completely out of whack.

We heard a lot about MS-13 and nothing at all about Russia. We heard a completely un-ironic call for Cabinet officials to be able to dismiss employees who “undermine the public trust or fail the American people.” (I can think of one prominent government employee who’s done that pretty thoroughly.) This has been widely interpreted as a warning shot at Robert Mueller and his investigators, but that’s only because it was, the FBI being about the only law-enforcement organization at which the president* did not throw bouquets Tuesday night.

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More interesting were the throwaway lines, hit-and-run proposals on issues for which his rabid base has no time or interest. He tossed out the idea of paid family leave as though it were an aside to his daughter. Later, he touched strangely upon that great golden dream of bipartisan cooperation: criminal justice reform.

"As America regains its strength, this opportunity must be extended to all citizens. That is why this year we will embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who have served their time get a second chance."

This brought more than a few people up short. (Not, however, those wiseacres who noted that the president* might be taking steps to help former members of his administration in the event of their incarceration sometime in the near future.) After all, the president*’s attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, has made it clear that he is going to be a hard-bar, that he is going to throw people into private prisons again, and that he wants to re-ignite the “war” on drugs, which has been responsible for most of the problems in the penal system in the first place.

“A lot of rhetoric, some nice sentiments, and the sentiments don’t necessarily match up with the actions,” said Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois. “You got to tell us what you’re going to do going forward. In Chicago, Jeff Sessions wants to tear up consent orders and set the criminal justice system back. For the president to drop those words here, and for Jeff Sessions to be doing something totally different is just an example of why people in the audience were just shaking their heads.”

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This incoherence increased when the president* went right from criminal-justice reform to discussing the opioid crisis, which he continues to attribute bizarrely to foreign gangsters gaming our immigration system, rather than to the nice doctors who over-prescribe and the nice executives of our pharmaceutical companies who dump millions of doses of opioids into small towns in West Virginia and Kentucky. He tagged the opioid problem at the end of his Four Pillars of Immigration Reform, saying,

“These reforms will also support our response to the terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction. In 2016, we lost 64,000 Americans to drug overdoses, 174 deaths per day, seven per hour. We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge.”

“Prevention? He didn’t talk about it,” Krishnamoorthi said. “On the second piece, treatment, it’s extremely expensive, and there haven’t been the monies appropriated for it, and on the third piece, Narcan, that goes back to prescription drugs. Narcan’s going through the roof, but a lot of local jurisdictions aren’t able to afford it in the quantities that they need. Again, I’d like to see him talk specifics.”

Along with infrastructure, criminal justice reform and the opioid problem would be two areas on which the president* and his party actually could get something done. (Don’t underestimate the eagerness with which, say, Joe Manchin, took any opportunity to leap to his feet and applaud. There is some room to move on things upon which everyone can agree, even if there’s overwhelming motivation not to do so.) But there is such an overwhelming sense of the malignantly whimsical to everything he says and does that nothing seems important, and there is evanescence where there should be emphasis. Nobody knows where the applause lines are any more.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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