That Speech

I was on NewsNation with Leland Vittert last night, right at 10pm ET. During our conversation, NewsNation’s White House correspondent noted the White House staff said that was one of the President’s greatest speeches and reminded people he is the greatest President.

I have seen Donald Trump give good speeches. I have seen Donald Trump give great speeches. That speech was not great. It was eighteen minutes of the President yelling that life is good and you should be grateful.

I saw Joe Biden do the same thing with a bunch of red lights in Philadelphia.

If the White House spin is that this was the greatest speech he’s ever given or in the Pantheon of great speeches, they have real problems. If they think they just have a messaging problem, that’s what Democrats think about their own problems.

Both sides are unwilling to confront reality and, instead, just think they need to message better and yell at us.

The President, to his credit, dropped claims that affordability is a myth or a Democratic con job. He rightly pointed the finger at the problems Democrats and Joe Biden created.

But Americans still don’t think the economy is working for them. They blame, in part, tariffs. They blame Donald Trump. Having him tell them their lives are good is no different than what Joe Biden did.

The President should, at least, acknowledge that people do not feel like the economy is working and that people do feel like they are struggling. He can sympathize with them and then blame Biden and promise things are headed in the right direction, but the hole Biden dug was so deep that it is taking time to fill it in and build a mountain of success.

The fact that the President and his team thought eighteen minutes of yelling a week before Christmas was going to be a helpful reset suggests they have even bigger problems. No one is going to remember this speech in a week, and probably not by the weekend.

That he felt now was a good time to do it seems odd. Certainly, the President’s supporters loved the speech. But will that give them reason to show up next November? They are not showing up with the President on the ballot. How does this speech change that? And independent voters are turning against the President. How does this speech change that?

I don’t think it accomplished either purpose. Opinions are worth the paper they’re written on, and that’s mine. Feel free to disagree. The one thing the President has going for him right now is that people still hate the Democrats more than him. But so long as his voters keep staying home, that won’t help in November.

The wilder thing is the rumors in Washington, then amplified by Tucker Carlson and Russia Today, that the President would be announcing military action against Venezuela.

This White House keeps treating Tucker Carlson as a friend. He is not. He is increasingly carrying water for Russia and undermining President Trump, including by all the war talk about Venezuela.

Concurrently, if the President is going to continue his campaign against Venezuela, the American people probably deserve a fuller explanation than a tweet. Perhaps we will get that soon.