Will Bunch: The most horrifying thing about Trump's State of the Union? The two words he never said

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2020/2/10 12:44 (EST)
©The Philadelphia Inquirer


Imagine that it’s January 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt is delivering his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The planet is literally on fire from the Big One, World War II. Nazi Germany has overrun France and Adolf Hitler’s regime has been raining bombs on London for months. Japan has overrun much of Asia.

But FDR begins his speech with a long riff on how great the American economy has done under his presidency — including some gratuitous swipes at his predecessor Herbert Hoover, even though it’s been eight years since Hoover left the Oval Office. There’s a brief, bloodless mention that “our relationship with our European allies has never been stronger,” and then he moves on — urging a standing ovation for the oldest living veteran of the Civil War. And when the speech is done, the radio pundits gloss over Roosevelt’s snub of the global conflagration.

That’s too crazy to contemplate, so then how insane was it that President Trump rambled on for one hour and 18 minutes (and four seconds) last Tuesday in his reality-show-influenced 2020 State of the Union address and ignored the cataclysmic fires that have engulfed Australia and echoed the flames that are ravaging California year after year, let alone the increasing scientific evidence that we’ve entered a time of rapid sea rise, drought and killer storms?

How could the leader of a global superpower give a serious talk on the current state of his nation in 2020 and never once utter the words “climate change”?

And how did so few people even notice? Delivered just hours before his impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Trump’s third State of the Union summoned up a whirlwind of distracting pop-culture headlines — awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to cancer-stricken hatemonger Rush Limbaugh to own the libs! — and a now-predictable blizzard of lies, including a false narrative about a black Philadelphia schoolgirl that was exposed by my Inquirer colleagues.

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https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/climate-change-trump-state-of-the-union-no-mention-20200209.html