President Trump delivered the 2019 State of the Union address last night before a joint session of the 116th Congress. I watched the address, then surveyed coverage of it this morning. It is as if there were two different speeches delivered.
The Blaze headlines: “An astounding number of viewers approved of Trump’s State of the Union speech–here are the results.” A Fox columnist claims that “once again, America saw that Trump on the stump is very, very good.”
By contrast, the Washington Post is carrying a column titled “More Trump fantasyland as the world fries.” CNN has an article titled “Critics laugh off Trump’s mispronunciations once again.” Van Jones claimed that the speech was “psychotically incoherent.”
None of this should surprise us.
Who is neutral about the president?
The New Yorker interviewed a Georgetown University scholar this week who called President Trump “an amateur in the White House” and claimed that he “looks hideously weak.” By contrast, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders recently called Mr. Trump “the most productive President in modern history” and claimed, “It’s indisputable that our country has never been stronger than it is today under the leadership of President Trump.”
It seems difficult to find someone who is neutral about the president. The latest poll shows that 39.9 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing, while 55.6 percent disapprove. Only 4.5 percent are undecided.
Our divisions over the president reflect a growing partisan divide in our country. Pew Research Center asked more than five thousand people about several specific political issues and found that, on average, there was a thirty-six-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. This is up twenty-one points since Pew began tracking these questions twenty-three years earlier.
A recent survey found that 80 percent of Americans say the country is “mainly” or “totally” divided. NBC News…
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