Jacob Ward's Warning | The Trump Speech: Populism Meets Gangster Policy
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How does Jacob Ward summarize the overwhelming nature of Trump's early presidency and speech?
It's hard to take apart a Donald Trump speech because, I mean, it is just like the first 44 days of his time in the White House, an overwhelming avalanche of things to process. He said it himself in the speech again and again. We have been the most productive, you know, in the history of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And while many, many, many things in his speech were untrue, that one is true. He really has broken the record when it comes to just how much he has done in the first 44 days when it comes to executive orders. And that has had the effect of overwhelming people in conventional media, which is why it has been so hard to process this stuff. So in this case, the litany of things that came at us in this speech
can make it feel overwhelming. So what I choose to do is step back from it a little bit and think about a couple of bigger dynamics. So here's one of them. I don't think Donald Trump has a huge amount of experience, at least not recently, in speaking to a room in which half of the people, I guess slightly less than half mathematically, are openly hostile to what he's doing. You know, having a group of people not cheering him on one side of the room clearly disturbed him. And it speaks to the kind of bubble he's been in in the most, you know, in the recent part of his life. He's been surrounded by people who continually tell him what a great job he is doing and how he should keep going. And being face-to-face with such an enormous group of people who really don't approve of what he's doing
and are, you know, in the same halls of power he is, I think he didn't find it exactly unnerving because I don't think he processes things that way, but I think it was unfamiliar for him and it drew him into little strange moments. One thing that happened right away that I thought really was going to maybe, you know, be the beginning of something much more sort of theatrical was the ejection of Representative Al Green of Texas as he stood up to to say, you have no mandate to do away with Medicaid and Medicare. That's what he told reporters in the hallway afterwards is that he was trying to raise his concern that doing away with Medicaid and Medicare, as Republicans are planning to in their budget, will harm his constituents endlessly.
And he was saying, you don't have that mandate. And I thought to myself, wow, is this going to be the beginning of You know, is each Democratic lawmaker going to stand up and and get ejected each time he says something untrue? Well, that was not in the end the case. But I thought, wow, you know, maybe we're going to sort of be in this. We're going to have this incredible theatricality that night instead. What we had was this avalanche of stuff. And what was interesting to me was there were the gimme lines, the lines in which you knew that he was playing to his bass and you knew exactly what his bass was going to say and think about those things, right? So going on and on about trans athletes, right?
Or over and over again, trotting out the widow or the grieving mother of somebody killed. I've never seen so many grieving families at a State of the Union or really almost any speech like this. I thought that was, you know, it's just a gallery of death in a way that I just thought was quite awful. But, you know, that kind of stuff plays with the base. And so you can understand why he would go for that stuff. But in my thinking, he also bumped up against a handful of issues that he seemed, I don't know if he was road testing them or what he was exactly doing, but it felt to me like he was sort of pushing a few of them out into the public sphere. And we got the chance to see the degree to which even his most fervent supporters were willing to stand up and wildly applaud the same way they are.
for his horrible stuff about trans athletes or, you know, calling, you know, an African nation, Lesotho, you know, a country that no one has ever heard of. The laughter and applause that comes from that, right? All of that is the predictable stuff.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
How does Jacob Ward summarize the overwhelming nature of Trump's early presidency and speech?
0:00–6:34
2
Why did Trump's face‑to‑face audience reaction seem unfamiliar and unsettling?
6:34–11:47
3
What happened when Representative Al Green was ejected and what did it signal about the night?
11:47–12:22
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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