President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was a speech made for social media, far less the pragmatic information transfer and policy proposal the Constitution envisions than a clip-ready string of personal anecdotes, guest backstories, partisan jabs, and victory laps.
All the best of these moments had one thing in common: They were not about Trump.
Consider his evident joy over meeting the US hockey team, fresh off triumph at the Olympics and now honored anew with their goaltender’s receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Or his introduction of two venerable World War II veterans, each 100 this year, some of our last living witnesses of a conflict that remade the world—and America’s role on the global stage. Or his concluding meditation on the remarkable and many-faceted history of a still-young country at its 250th anniversary.
Or consider especially Trump’s profile of Sage Blair, a Liberty University student who “was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender,” the president recounted, “treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents.” Blair’s story is horrifying, a case where no Trumpian exaggeration is needed to make the point. “Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will,” Trump said. Surely we can.
But then consider much of the rest of the speech, the parts focusing less on the state of the union—“strong,” as per usual in the post-Reagan era—than on the man at its helm.
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It is inevitable, of course, that presidents will speak of themselves in this address. Yet it is not inevitable that they will figure in the speech as Trump did last night: as a salvific figure who has personally and exclusively solved all our national problems, improving not only on the performance of past administrations but on the entire country’s collective efforts from 1776 to 2016.
Knocking former presidents is a comparison I don’t begrudge him. My own assessment of most of them, particularly recent leaders, would be similarly dim. But Trump’s more sweeping portrayal of the United States as a “dead country” he alone could resurrect is at odds with his tributes to our accomplishments and principles.
Have we long been, as Trump said toward the end of the speech, “the pinnacle of human civilization and human freedom, the strongest, wealthiest, most powerful, most successful nation in all of history”? Or were we, until Trump just recently fixed us, weak, moribund, poor, and oppressed? Both can’t be true at once.
More important than agreeing on that history, though, is understanding what Trump’s account of himself says of and does to the office of president going forward. We’ve long had an overgrown executive and undernourished legislature in this country. The president is too powerful, and Congress is too feckless, whiny, and self-sabotaging. The powers are not balanced. The checks are not checking.
Trump is by no means the source of that distortion, which well predates him and plays havoc with our Constitutional design. But he does benefit from and exacerbate it—including in this State of the Union address, where he both overstated and inflated presidential power.
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The overstatements were Trump’s claim of personal responsibility for goods no president can reliably produce. Presidential policies matter, yes, but they’re hardly all that matters. When President Barack Obama in 2012 told American business owners they “didn’t build” their companies, giving credit to government instead, conservatives and free marketers of all stripes rightly objected.
This kind of thing is just as objectionable when Trump does it, and he did it a lot in this speech, taking credit for “a turnaround for the ages” on one big, multicausal phenomenon after another.
And maybe much of that, the parts focused on political and economic issues, can be waved away as standard presidential hyperbole in an election year. But the same cannot be said of Trump’s credit-taking for reviving Christianity in America:
I’m very proud to say that during my time in office, both the first four years and in particular this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God. Tremendous renewal. … We love religion, and we love bringing it back, and it’s coming back at levels nobody actually thought possible. It’s really a beautiful thing to see.
In these telling lines, Trump foregrounded himself above the murdered activist Charlie Kirk, misrepresented what current polling on American Christianity actually shows, and gave not even a nod to the work of the Spirit or Christ’s church. Surely we can also all agree that if we’re blessed with another Great Awakening in this country—a renewal not of “religion” generically but of “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3)—credit goes to God, not any politician (1 Cor. 3:17).
This kind of overstatement deserves pushback, but at a pragmatic political level, Trump’s inflation of presidential power worries me more. It will only add to congressional atrophy and further executive branch bloat, destabilizing our economy and governance by building huge policies on the flimsy and impermanent foundation of executive orders.
The most striking example here came in the president’s discussion of how he hopes to levy tariffs in the future, after losing on the issue at the Supreme Court this month:
[Tariffs] will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes, and they’ve been tested for a long time. They’re a little more complex, but they’re actually probably better [than the version the court struck down], leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before.
Congressional action will not be necessary. It’s already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.
I too would love it if foreign countries paid our government so much money that the income tax went away. That’s a lovely fairy tale. But here in reality, per our Constitution, major new policies are not to be authored by the president and approved by time, whatever that means. They are to be authored and approved by our duly-elected Congress.
To put it in Trump’s terms from this speech, running a country on memos instead of legislation is a surefire way to “drain the wealth out of the productive and hard-working people who make our country great, who make our country run.” It is literally lawless. It is no way to continue for the next 250 years.
Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.
The post At SOTU, Trump Overstates and Inflates Presidential Power appeared first on Christianity Today.
