We begin today’s roundup with a preview of tonight’s State of the Union address, where unfortunately we predict too many pundits will give Donald Trump glowing praise for successfully reading on a teleprompter what a group of staffers wrote for him. First up, Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
The cancerous lie at the heart of this presidency, which his speech will ignore or elide, is that the state of our union is not strong at all.
In fact, it is dying. Not in some abstract sense. I mean we are in imminent—imminent—danger of losing the right to call ourselves a republic, a nation of laws.
How does a “union,” of the sort the president will boast about tonight, go from being a nation of laws to a fiefdom of a dear leader’s whim? Through a hundred small steps from Jan. 20, 2017, to now. But for present purposes, let’s focus on three. And interestingly—and note this well—they’re not mostly Donald Trump’s fault. They’re mostly the fault of his Republican enablers.
Here’s Dana Milbank at The Washington Post:
On Tuesday night, the president will read a speech somebody else wrote for him. The pundits will say he sounds presidential. And on Wednesday Donald Trump will go back to being Donald Trump.
White House officials prepped reporters for Tuesday’s performance by saying that President Trump will be “optimistic” as well as “very unifying” and that “the tone will be one of bipartisanship and it will be very forward looking.” And Trump will speak “from the heart.”
No. Trump will speak “from a teleprompter.” That’s why we’ll hear “unifying” and “bipartisan” notes. If you want “from the heart,” check his Twitter account.