What did we learn from those 82 minutes of Trump?
Trump sounded like Ronald Reagan at the outset of his speech, said McGill history professor Gil Troy, though he noted Reagan was more adept at rising above partisan politics.
Trump turned alliterative here to promote cross-party solidarity, a staple of nearly every State of the Union address, said Robert Danisch, a University of Waterloo professor of political rhetoric. “That was his attempt to be like other presidents.”
Trump’s entire speech was framed “in such a way that everything is tied to the good things that have happened during the two years he’s been president,” said Karlyn Campbell, author of Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. “He wants to be sure that as a result of this speech, nobody will think it’s appropriate to go after him.”
Troy called this the line of the night, one that perfectly encompasses Trump’s megalomania and paranoid sense of being persecuted: “It’s so delightfully simplistic.
