Like a Pebble in the Ocean

Looking at the major news outlets, some other news has already pushed Trump’s speech down from the top of the page. Even though Trump thanked John Roberts after the speech, Roberts joined the majority of the Supremes in ruling against Trump’s dismantling of USAID. At the Guardian, there’s more interest in the breed of Gene Hackman’s dog than in the speech. They’re leading with tariffs, and King Elon going to the trough again to get Starlink some sweet government cash for providing rural internet.

The conclusion I’m drawing here is that Trump has become boring. I didn’t watch the speech, but he apparently droned on forever, the longest joint session or SOTU speech in the last 60 years.

The challenge that we’re facing as an opposition party is to focus on what’s important. Watching AOC’s take on Instagram, she pointed out that the one thing that didn’t come up in all of Trump’s blabbering and list recitation was cutting Medicaid. That’s because it’s political poison, Trump’s people know it, and they want to put the attention on anything but Medicaid (and Social Security).

So, going forward, I’m going to take what happened last night as a lesson. Trump’s long-form blather isn’t worth picking through. We need to keep our eyes on the things that we know King Elon wants, and that’s to strip the government for parts, get as many government contracts as he can, and get a massive tax cut for him and his buddies. We also need to focus on how much Trump’s stupid obsessions, like tariffs, and screwing over our allies to please Putin. And we need to spread that message to voters.

This may seem simplistic and obvious, but most of politics is that way. Both AOC and Kay made the point that Medicaid goes by many names in different states, so we need to tailor our messaging. (Here’s the best reference I could find for that, but it doesn’t name Ohio’s Medicaid as “Buckeye”, which Kay says is the name that Ohioans use.)

Republicans want to run away from town halls. That leaves a vacuum that we can fill, by both having town halls in Democratic districts, and hosting “where’s our Congressperson” events to substitute for town halls in districts where Republicans won’t do them.

And now that Canada is signaling that getting rid of tariffs is an all-or-nothing proposition, the great dealmaker is going to make cars cost $10K more, gas prices will skyrocket, and the shelves are still barren of eggs. There’s plenty to talk about that isn’t Trump’s speech.