Our Best Stuff From the Week of Trump’s Address to Congress

Hello and happy Saturday. The Ohio bureau marked an anniversary of sorts this winter, and it has me reflecting. Back in 2005, the publication I was working for changed owners. The new bosses didn’t need an office in the Seattle area, and  gave those of us who worked there the option to work from home. I asked if they cared where “home” was. They didn’t. So, 20 years ago, we sold our house, loaded our 1-year-old son and our Labrador retriever into the family truckster and set off for Cincinnati, where my brother had settled after college and my parents had recently moved.

I knew we’d miss the mountains and the lakes, as well as Seattle’s vibrant culture. (And, I’ll be honest, the craft beer scene.) But we were planning to have a couple more kids, and we wanted to be around family. There was something else I was looking forward to: the promise of getting through a social gathering without a political discussion breaking out. We didn’t mind that Seattle was extremely liberal, we just wished we could go to a single cookout without hearing that George Bush was a fascist or that Republicans were trying to destroy the planet. I’d grown up in Ohio, and in my memory, most of the debates that broke out at family dinners and evenings with friends were over whether the Buckeyes could beat Michigan that year or who was picking up the check at dinner—wherein everyone fought to pay. (Maybe I’m exaggerating, but only a little.)

We’ve been very happy here. We were able to build a nicer home than we could have ever afforded on the West Coast and we filled it with a couple more kids, my mom became our amazing nanny-slash-chauffer-slash-chef, and we eventually got used to rooting for the Bengals. And for a few years at least, I was able to leave politics behind when I closed my office door for the day. No one asked us to sign a petition at our kids’ soccer games, and we built friendships without having any clue how our new friends voted.

That’s all changed of course. We’ve been over that a bunch of times. Our permanent podcast guest David French wrote a whole book about it. Polarization is bad. Social media and cable news and nakedly partisan websites thrive on it. I don’t need to rehash that. As much as a big part of our mission at The Dispatch is to counter all of that, and as proud as we are of the work that we’ve done, the last five years have shown us what a daunting task we face.

President Donald Trump’s address to Congress this week laid all of that bare. On my first day of work in the OG Ohio bureau (temporarily located in my parents’ basement), President George W. Bush gave his second inaugural address. A few weeks later, he delivered his State of the Union speech. I had to go back and look it up—such speeches lend themselves more to laundry lists of promises than memorable oratory—but a few things stand out. “We must be good stewards of this economy and renew the great institutions on which millions of our fellow citizens rely,” he said. Bush called for a sensible and fair immigration policy, and he spoke honestly and in great detail about the mounting challenges facing Social Security. The country faced enormous challenges at that time, of course—wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—but looking back, that speech stands out for being so normal, even hopeful.

On Tuesday, Trump bragged about renaming the Gulf of Mexico, celebrated ending government programs that don’t even exist, and blamed former President Joe Biden for increasing the price of eggs. The Democratic lawmakers in the chamber protested by holding up auction-style paddles with slogans like “Musk steals” and “Save Medicaid,” and some turned their backs on him. Democratic Texas Rep. Al Green was removed for disrupting the speech and later censured in the House. We’ve seen worse moments in the hallowed halls of Congress, of course, but Tuesday night’s proceedings just felt bleak. 

Our son who slept contentedly while we drove through an ice storm in Minnesota en route to Ohio all those years ago is now 21, a college junior with a military career in front of him and hopes of becoming an epidemiologist. The two sons we welcomed after we moved here are 18 and 15—young men, not children. For most of their lives, Donald Trump has been the dominant political figure in America, both in and out of power. Divisiveness and anger define our discourse. It’s all their generation knows. 

That makes it even harder to picture a future where we put our current turmoil behind us and return to a more normal politics. But it also makes it feel more important that we try. Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.