President's Speech

For John, BLUF:  The President Done Good last night.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Trump’s Speech Was Quiet — And Quietly Radical

This is from the FiveThirtyEight Blog and is by Mr Ben Casselman.  It is filed under "The Trump Administration".  It is my suspicion that the staff at FiveThirtyEight are all Democrats.  But, they have a special advantage.  They know there is a clue bag and they use it, from time to time.  That makes them different from regular Democrats.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the article, which is well worth a read:

Reviews of President Trump’s first address to Congress on Tuesday night seem to be converging around a single theme: It was Trump at his most subdued.  “Trump Softens Tone in Outlining Goals,” read the lead headline on The New York Times homepage Wednesday morning.  The Washington Post commented on Trump’s “milder tone”; The Wall Street Journal said the address “turned from the ominous language” of his campaign speeches; Politico went with “Trump tries on normal.”

And they’re right. In tone and style, Trump’s speech was relatively normal, at least judging it against his earlier efforts.  He opened his address by condemning recent threats against Jewish community centers and the shooting last week of two Indian immigrants in Kansas City, something he had been criticized for not doing earlier.  He called for unity and cross-party cooperation, and stayed away from attacks on the press or his political opponents.  Apart from a few banal ad-libs, he largely stuck to his script.

But beneath the gentler tone, Trump’s speech — a State of the Union address in all but name — was quietly radical.  He called for a complete overhaul of U.S. policy on taxes, trade, immigration and health care.  He proposed spending billions more on defense and as much as $1 trillion on infrastructure.  And he promised a new version of his controversial — and currently stalled — travel ban on visitors from seven majority Muslim countries.

Hat tip to the FiveThirtyEight Blog.

Regards  —  Cliff