Jamel Bouie

Hey, Michelle.

Hey, Michelle.

Hey, David.

I'm sort of astonished that I managed to sit through the whole two hours.

But the things that stuck out to me, I mean, the two big things that stuck out to me, the first was really the level of truly lurid and virulent racism, especially against Somali Americans.

I think people have gotten desensitized to this kind of public performance of bigotry, and they shouldn't because it's truly extraordinary.

It's not as if all American, past American presidents, or even most American presidents have ever been racial egalitarians, but there is a recognition that public bigotry of that kind was just not acceptable.

It's not a thing that was okay because the president is supposed to represent all Americans and at best try to represent all Americans at their highest aspirations.

And that gets to the second thing that was striking to me about the State of the Union, which is that there are no aspirations here.

It's sort of the most base kind of emotions and attitudes and feelings, you know, a crude instinct to dominate others.

And that's all that Trump has to offer to the public.

I mean, I don't think this was particularly successful.

We have actually, you know, as David kind of alluded to, we have an example of a elderly declining president trying to tell people that things are good when they feel otherwise.

Just a disaster.

Didn't work out well for him.

Yeah, it's just...

So in fairness to lawmakers, I'll say, in fairness to people in politics, there is a bit of a conundrum here because macroeconomic indicators up until recently were showing a pretty strong American economy, right?

Like something that was humming along.

And even in the midst of that, even in the midst of sort of at least what appeared to be wage growth, what appeared to be high employment growth, people were still very dissatisfied.

Right.