My Reaction to President Trump's Address to the Nation

 Last night, January 8, 2019, my husband and I sat down in my living room to watch President Donald J. Trump address the nation from the Oval Office. We watched the address and the brief Democratic Party reply, then turned off the TV and went to bed. 

Over the years, I have found it difficult if not impossible to sit down and watch any president make an Oval Office address. It does not matter whether the President was one I voted for and supported or one that I voted against, despised and loathed (Nixon and Reagan come to mind). My usual preference is to read the transcripts of presidential speeches after the fact rather than watch them live.  However, this time it felt essential to see and hear President Trump while he was speaking.

This morning I awoke to find that I felt more positive and optimistic about the future of our government and country than I have in quite sometime, and that Trump's speech was the primary cause of my change in feeling. After spending much of the day reading through media reactions and the reactions of both the liberals and conservatives (Trump haters and Trump supporters) in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, it would appear that my reaction to the President's speech is atypical.

Let me be clear: Trump's performance last night did nothing to dissuade me from the belief that he is the worst president of my life time. His address contained multiple factual errors (lies), and substituted anecdotes for data and did nothing to convince me that $5 billion dollars (or any amount of money) for a new physical barrier ("the wall") was a good idea. Nor did he convince me that there was a crisis on our southern border, other than a humanitarian one created by his administration. Every bit of data and research that I have seen suggests otherwise. [For a nice review of such research see this article by fellow sociologist Dudley L. Poston Jr. professor sociology and demography at Texas A&M University in College Station.]

What last night's speech did do was convince me that:

• Someone with substantial influence over Trump cares about the continuance of government functionality at some level. That this person or persons does not want a shutdown to continue for "months or years" and certainly does not want the entire system to lose legitimacy and break down. 
• Someone with substantial influence over Trump understands the negative consequences of a shutdown even if Trump does not.
• This person has enough influence over Trump to get him to do something he hates doing: reading an entire speech from a teleprompter without even a single deviation. 
• Trump is mentally competent enough to follow these instructions and to coherently read, without stumbling, someone else's writing using a vocabulary substantially larger than he himself uses on a daily basis for 8 to 10 minutes, even though he clearly disliked doing it. 

These are not small things. Especially since I had become convinced in recent weeks that Trump's utter disregard for the functions of government and consequences of shutdown would lead us to the complete disintegration of order and the rule of law within the next year.

Moreover, in his speech, before he said anything at all about a physical barrier or wall, he laid claim to issues that have long been supported by Democratic law-makers, many of which were already included in legislation passed by one body or another but not enacted:

"The proposal from homeland security includes cutting edge technology for detecting drugs, weapons, illegal contraband and many other things. We have requested more agents, immigration judges to process the sharp rise of unlawful migration fueled by our very strong economy. Our plan also contains an urgent request for humanitarian assistance and medical support." (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html)

By laying claim to these proposals, Trump's address laid the ground work among his base (who aren't going to any pay attention to Democratic claims that these were their ideas in the first place), to claim that he wrested these concessions from the Democrats in any compromise that might be reached, even if he is not able to get all the funding he desires for a wall. 

This had given me some small hope for negotiations today, however, latest reports suggest that Trump is still stuck on the $5.7 billion for a while and nothing else matters to him. So today's meeting ended abruptly with Trump walking out on Schumer and Pelosi.