Back in 1964, a Supreme Court justice named Potter Stewart famously struggled to devise a legally defensible definition of obscenity. Equally famously, he failed. “I know it when I see it,” an exasperated Stewart wound up concluding. Having watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, I’m with Stewart. I can’t define obscenity any better than he could, but what I know is what I saw. For 80 minutes, the president of the United States — a k a POTUS — performed manual acts of self-gratification upon himself. And — as seems to be the fashion now among serial predators in positions of power — no one on the planet was allowed to leave the room.
Trump began the night by calling out the heroes. To be fair, he’s hardly the first president to conscript genuine heroes to use as political props. But whatever deep-seated feelings Trump has for men and women wearing military uniforms should be expressed only behind closed doors and only with consenting partners. One of the heroes Trump praised, it turns out, was Dave Dahlberg, a Santa Barbara firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service. During last year’s Whittier Fire, Dahlberg hopped onto his dozer, rode it into a sea of flames, and helped save 62 young camp kids. Trump called out Dahlberg by name and had him take a bow. “Thank you very much, David,” Trump said. “Great job.” Compared to the praise heaped on other heroes, however, it felt clipped and perfunctory. Maybe it’s that Dahlberg comes from California, a state with which Trump is at war. Or maybe Dahlberg doesn’t use a gun as part of his job. For whatever reason, Trump didn’t clap that much.
By contrast, there was no shortage of clapping by Trump when he introduced the young, ass-kicking ICE investigator who explained with plucky cheek — after arresting nearly 400, including 220 members of the MS-13 gang — “We’re just tougher than they are.” Trump must have clapped for more than a minute straight — and half that time he clapped alone — after introducing the parents of two teens brutally murdered by MS-13. Trump’s point about MS-13 is not that they are uncommonly violent, which they are. The point is that they are immigrants from El Salvador. Throughout the night, Trump would repeatedly paint the broad spectrum of the immigrant experience with the brush of MS-13. Even to a card-carrying pinche güero like me, this was obvious. More obvious still was the shamelessness with which Trump pimped the insatiable pain of those grieving parents.