Ping-Pong Paddles to a Gun Fight

If Donald Trump’s first joint address to Congress in his second administration was a harsh beam of light, then the Democratic Party was the comatose patient everyone was desperate to see produce a sign of life in reaction to it. You can go through the footage frame-by-frame if you want, but they didn’t. 

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., began the night saying he was there to hear Trump “explain himself,” a rationale that could only have made sense if he’d just been revived from his own coma. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s official Democratic response ended with hosannas to Ronald Reagan in a very satisfactory speech for 1996, updated with GWOT content from 2002. To paraphrase Rick from “Casablanca,” the Republicans wore blue, and Democrats tried different matching colors. It’s time to pull the plug. 

Democrats probably wanted to end the night on a firmer message than, “What the hell are we even doing here?” Unfortunately, they settled for sending signals via clothes like they’d watched a “West Wing” episode called “Hat Day.” Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, provided the only instance of civil disobedience, shouting at Trump that he didn’t have a mandate to cut Medicaid. Green and two other Democrats were escorted from the chamber, and — apart from Bernie Sanders, who leadership takes pains to keep at arm’s length — the rest of the caucus sat for the rest of the night, absorbing abuse like a dog being screamed at. Green and his cohort were hung out to dry as the party’s ill-behaved wingnuts. The message was clear: Objection is an aberration and is not what we will be doing. 

Even if words speak more softly than actions, Slotkin had a chance to say that there were more grownup things to do than smiling while getting kicked in the teeth and fighting via color-coordinated theater-kid gestures. To be fair, she sort-of did: In this moment of profound threat, your Democratic representatives again told you to take care of it. Join Indivisible, or Run for Something. Of the stakes, she did not mince words: “We all know that this country is going through something right now.” Nothing emphasizes danger like depicting it as transitory while refusing to name it.

To a certain extent, the Democrats weren’t alone; it wasn’t clear what the hell Trump or anyone else was doing there either. We all knew what this would be. Each speech is the vilest of his career until the next one, a moral violation and offense against reason. Eighty percent of his statements are lies you can spot already, and the rest are lies you don’t know yet. If you could beam the text back 25 years and put it in the mouth of any national Republican, it would rightly become one of the top verbal atrocities in the nation’s history. Now it’s just a Tuesday, and the contents are predictable enough for a bingo card where everyone loses. 

Trump held us hostage for a record length, turning the event into a sweepstakes for lucky audience members. One person found out he got admitted to a service academy; everyone else found out they got an Islamic terrorist we can execute. But the overall atmosphere combined the worst parts of contempt and sickness and death. Those in attendance were a family of 500 watching a funeral emceed by a terminal patient they had to let try out his standup set because the end won’t be long now.

The speech’s only signs of life came from Trump riffing maliciously, or self-aggrandizingly, on his prepared remarks, like a one-man Dean Martin roast for people too square to drink. He otherwise clung to the lectern for dear life and leered at the teleprompter with the sort of naked dependency that can only come from someone who mocked a Black guy for using one — someone too vain to wear glasses, too stupid to write any of the speech himself and too lazy to have glanced at it once before going live. Most of the text was delivered in a wheeze that sounded like his personal homage to the tuberculosis that he, HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and DOGE are committed to bringing back in a big way. Like you’ve never seen.

The unexpectedly funny asides, the “only this reality could produce this sentence” moments, appear less frequently now. “I also withdrew from the anti-American U.N. Human Rights Council,” he bragged to a world that has abandoned even asking about the implications of such sentences. At another time, after a pause, he breathed at an almost phone-sex pitch, “I love the farmer.” His flesh was the color of a CPR mannequin dusted with cumin. His customary wetness hovered at “a second Dexedrine tablet to get through this” levels. This was all there was.

For years now, my podcast colleague David Roth has been writing about Trump to deserved acclaim and with increasing frustration about repeating himself, because there has never been anything to figure out. He is a lout who missed his calling as an egomaniacal New York talk radio host building a list of daily grievances from The Post. Trump’s only mysteries are imposed on him by a performatively self-lobotomizing media. Well, here he was, the truth unobscured yet again: a vain and wheezing old queen, racist and sexist and incompetent and corrupt and endlessly self-pitying, cold-reading a tabloid newspaper live and bitching about everything he saw. He whined that the Democrats don’t applaud him, don’t smile for him, don’t say thank you. If you had given him a pack of Kents and a phone to deliver the speech into, he would’ve been my grandma Katie.

That the media will have no functionally different response to this profoundly sick display is a given, as is the Democrats’ failure to have one. There’s a good chance that the former will spend the next two weeks fact-checking Trump’s interminable list of supposedly outrageous expenditures that DOGE “found” in the executive branch budget. Their forest-for-the-trees approach will neatly sidestep the civic responsibility of acknowledging that Trump was reading a list of impoundment crimes committed by his administration. 

It’s here, in this last reality, that gives the lie to Booker’s pre-speech comment that he wanted to hear Trump “explain himself.” Nothing could be less necessary, because the explanation is irrelevant. Trump is the most corrupt president in the nation’s history, collecting million-dollar bribes on a nearly daily basis for private audiences at Mar-a-Lago while committing constitutional crimes in real time, in broad daylight. If Trump is a guy holding a smoking gun and standing next to a bullet-riddled body on Fifth Avenue, then Booker is the cop saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — before I do anything, I want to hear your side of the story.”

Democrats chose to hold up paddles with words on them like “false.” It was a gesture as meaningless as showing a cancer patient a picture of a third party wearing a shirt that says, “Disease Sucks.” Almost any other message would have been better. A complete Democratic no-show would have been enough. Better still, even the most dead-eyed consultant could have predicted the majority of this speech’s content. Democrats, selected for their passion or expertise, could have interrupted him one by one as their designated topics arose, provoking their own ejections from the chamber and forcing Trump’s corpse to drape over the lectern for another hour or two. That would at least show that the moment called for effort and something like solidarity. Instead, we got nearly two uninterrupted hours of an enfeebled criminal raining abuse all around him.

A few Democrats did grasp the nature of the moment. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz offered to come to your town and represent you, and senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Ron Wyden of Oregon chose to hold online townhalls, to create and control their own message and speak directly to constituents. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker added another argument for shortlisting him as the party’s candidate for 2028.

On his best days, Trump is an ancient and demented jackass. Yesterday was not one of grandpa’s good days; he stood stock still, a fat and easy target making the world’s best case for dozens of Democrats to challenge his stamina and snipe him daily, with bottomless derision for himself and his co-conspirators. 

In a moment of crisis, when millions of fearful Americans want to know what to do, what they got was more nullity, more evidence of what the Democrats are not, will not be, and what they will not try. They were told, plainly, that we’re not doing that. They have ceded their last claims to respect by surrendering all agency and urgency. They can throw out the dress code and make commemorative T-shirts, because no one should bother looking to them anymore. Anything you need done is up to you.