Why the Speech didn't matter

Last night we heard the President give his first speech before a joint session of congress. It is an important time for any administration. It helps set the tone for the work they are going to do and it helps to outline the agenda of not only the first hundred days, but the full legislative calendar.

President Trump stayed on script and on message throughout the speech, a notable exception for him. He read from a teleprompter, which he had criticized President Obama for doing religiously, and his critics wondered if he had the discipline to do.

The speech held to many solidly Republican themes and emphasized the campaign promises that we have come to love or loathe. He was graded above average, and below average. He was graded on a curve, he was graded tabula rosa. Everyone is trying to make sense of it, myself included. I took notes, and I have compared them to notes I have taken at similar speeches. I noticed that my engagement level might have been a little lesser than some previous speeches I had watched.

Therein lies the problem. As the masses and the pundits try to make sense of it all there is one thing that is missing. This speech didn't matter.

The President does not communicate this way. The public does not receive information this way. This is not the way this administration operates, its as if we tried to play a CD on a phonograph. There was a time, seriously not that long ago, when the President of the United States needed to stand before congress to outline their agenda. The gravity of having all of the branches of government sitting together in the same room would bring the viewers to not only turn on their TV sets but to give pause. No matter what the ratings for the event were, the people were not engaged the same way.

Had the whole thing been live tweeted by the President's Id while his human shell spoke the party line the world would have been enraptured. Instead, we got the speech he was supposed to give. It may have been a relief, or a victory, or a sign of things to come. But it didn't really matter.

I should be pointing out that this is a degradation of our public discourse. A destructive and corrosive progression that allowed a reality TV star and not a professional trained in the operation of good government win the the presidency. This is an argument that should be made, but is only noted here to demonstrate just how far downstream we are from being able to have that discussion.

The policy agenda is proposed by this White House through the President's twitter, then it is clarified and reiterated through the official channels and surrogates. This is usually when some heat is taken off the original pronouncement. That phase is followed by a period of uncertainty. Do we trust what we know the president's own hand put out to the internet, or do we trust those who might actually need to be putting in the work to draft orders and research the next day's talking points? Its a hard call to make, and ad hoc reasoning is often needed, taking context clues and a winnowing of the possible, to make a definitive call.

After, or more accurately during, that process we view the whole big mess through the lens of each individual's truth teller. Be it MSNBC, or Fox News, or the Times, or infowars, or what have you. We don't just need the raw tweets we need the context. A personal favorite is “The Atlantic”'s Trump tweet tracker. Once we have the context we need the “take.”

The speech didn't matter because it lacks, by definition, the type of “authenticity” that President Trump is known for. He has made it part of his brand. Even if authenticity needs to remain in quotes, it remains a potent brand. It didn't matter because we are unable to use these context creators, ones that check facts or dial up the entertainment value.

Either way this speech could be a turning point for presidential addresses. If years from now the State of the Union is no longer seen as a pivotal piece of the the president's legislative roll out, and sales pitch to the nation, this will be the speech it is traced back to. And in that way it will matter very much.