During the State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening, the American people saw a boisterous, self-confident, united Republican party rally around its president, while a defeated, grim, and moping Democratic party looked on powerlessly.

As soon as the rather long State of the Union speech was over, liberal pundits and Democratic operatives started to attack it. Some focused on the lack of concrete policies or the nativist content of the immigration sections; others pointed out the lack of energy of the speech. They had seen a “low-energy” Trump and assumed the base would be left uninspired and wondering. It again showed their complete lack of understanding of the Trump-Republican party dynamic.

For the past year, interviews and polls with Trump supporters, and the broader Republican base, have consistently shown that the vast majority of Republicans support his policies but not his tone.

They want Trump to be combative and self-confident, but not engage in petty, personal attacks. What they want is authoritarian and nativist policies with a human face, and that is what Trump finally delivered on Tuesday.

This is why people like Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz, a relative Trump-skeptic within the party, tweeted: “Tonight, I owe Donald Trump an apology. Tonight, I was moved and inspired. Tonight, I have hope and faith in America again.”

The full speech – Trump's State of the Union address Read more

No matter that Trump presented an economic agenda that, if actually implemented, would probably bankrupt the country – hello big government! No matter that Trump connected legal immigrants to MS-13 gangsters and called for an overthrow of the age-old immigration system. No matter even that Trump called upon Congress “to empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people” – hello Big Brother!

On Tuesday evening, Trump finally became the president of the whole Republican party. It shows how far the normalization of radical right ideas has come. Trump was already the true voice of the party base, but now the party elite also embraced him. Ayn Rand disciple Paul Ryan even enthusiastically applauded Trump’s $1.5tn government-stimulated infrastructure plan.

Sure, the atmosphere in Congress was, at times, more like that of a frat party. And it reached a patriotic frenzy when the whole Republican contingent broke out in a minute-long “USA! USA! USA! chant. But rather than defensive and nasty, Trump presented his administration as self-confident and successful, ready to do business with the (pesky) Democrats.

Masterfully, every nativist policy was camouflaged by using non-white enforcers and victims and contrasted with policies that are at the top of the Democratic agenda – such as citizenship for “illegal immigrants”.

The kind of night Donald Trump loves best – when he can applaud himself | Richard Wolffe Read more

The Democratic party, on the other hand, showed it had learned nothing from the 2016 defeat and still has no idea how to deal with Trump and the Republican hegemony. Not only did their members of Congress sit there defeated and moping, often not even applauding policies that were, or should be, in their own platform. They chose the personification of the east coast liberal political dynasty, Joe Kennedy III, to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union. From Massachusetts, of all places!

Kennedy’s speech was heralded by the Democratic punditry as inspiring and truly American. But as with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, it was low on substance, particularly in terms of socioeconomic policies. And, seriously, who chooses a trust-fund kid, who is the 22nd richest member of Congress, to speak to “the thousands of American communities whose roads aren’t paved with power or privilege”?

And so Kennedy did what the Democratic party has been doing for over a year now, reach out to Hispanics, including the by now obligatory few sentences in (surprisingly good) Spanish, and women – the type of “identity politics” the party has been criticized for since the 2016 defeat.

But for all the heralding of diversity, and criticism of this administration’s nativism and racism, there was no explicit reference to key issues for the non-white, and white, underclass. Issues like prison reform or voter suppression were not even explicitly mentioned. And he barely mentioned the opioid crisis, one of the most soul-crushing problems of the US in general, and his state of Massachusetts in particular, which Trump had devoted several minutes to.

Trump, meanwhile, delivered exactly what the broader Republican elite and masses wanted: authoritarian nativism with a human face. He spoke directly to the not yet convinced Republicans, knowing that his base will follow him anyway. The Democrats did exactly the opposite.

The past year saw a slew of “non-traditional” electoral victories in terms of candidates, often not the favorite of the local and state party elites, geography, in so-called “fly-over country”, and electorates, such as the disproportionate support of non-whites, in particular African American women. Despite this, the Democratic party presented Kennedy, the poster boy of the party insiders: a rich, white, male from the east coast.

While Steve Bannon might not be a player in the White House any more, and the State of the Union was markedly low on populism, the Democratic party would do well to heed the words he spoke in an August 2017 interview: “The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Cas Mudde is Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction and The Far Right in America



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