On Tuesday night U.S. President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress. If your only measure of the speech was the reaction of political pundits, you would be forgiven for thinking that the president had undergone some sort of metamorphosis in which he made fundamental policy shifts.
Van Jones, former adviser to former president Barack Obama and a current CNN commentator, declared the speech to be a pivotal moment for Trump.
READ MORE: Is Donald Trump finally starting to embrace presidential decorum?
“He became president of the United States in that moment—period.”
This was in reference to the moment in the speech when he honoured Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL who was killed during a raid in Yemen. That led to a standing ovation for Owens’ tearful widow, Carryn.
WATCH: Trump pays tribute to Navy SEAL killed in battle
It was certainly an emotional moment. One would have to be dead inside not to feel for a young widow and mother of three who openly wept as those around her stood to honour her late husband. Yet just mere hours earlier that day, Trump laid the blame for Owens’ death at his generals’ feet. This fact was clearly lost on Jones.
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As pundits and journalists largely lauded the president’s address as being a pivot from the Trump we have been used to seeing, few seemed to be paying attention to the fact that Trump’s message remained very much the same.
Trump once again took credit for multinational corporations bringing back jobs to America, despite the fact that many of these business decisions were made well before his election and had nothing to do with Trump’s presidency.
Trump also repeated his dark narrative regarding immigrants and crime, falsely giving the impression that immigrants commit more crimes than Americans born on U.S. soil. Trump even went so far as to establish an office dedicated to those who are victimized by undocumented immigrants. It does not seem to matter to the president that both legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime, including violent crime, than other Americans.
WATCH: Trump order to create office for immigration crime victims called VOICE
The president also continued to portray America as some sort of nightmarish nation with record unemployment, citing that 94 million Americans are out of the workforce. This is a deeply deceptive figure that factors in those who are too old to work, kids in high school, people who are too disabled to work and folks who choose to stay at home with their kids instead of work.
The reality is that under Obama, the U.S. added 16 million new jobs, with unemployment decreasing and high school graduation rates increasing.
One noted departure from Trump’s usual rhetoric was that after weeks of failing to adequately address rising acts of anti-Semitism, as well as the shooting of two Indian men – one of whom died – the president finally unequivocally denounced both.
READ MORE: Democratic response to joint address: Trump is ‘eroding our democracy’
Naturally, this led to effusive praise by pundits because apparently this is how far we’ve lowered the bar: praising a president who just earlier that day suggested that the anti-Semitic incidents could be false flags, refused to acknowledge Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day and stayed silent for a week on the shooting of two Indian men — which is now being investigated as a hate crime — because his speechwriters included a 25-second denunciation in a speech that was over an hour long.
WATCH: Trump condemns fatal shooting of immigrant, attacks on Jewish centres
Don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said about the difference in delivery of Tuesday’s speech. But unless you’re on his speechwriting staff, I don’t know why one would care given that the substance of the speech was still classic Trump. Even the White House was surprised by the glowing reaction from the media, as Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted:
Although I suppose none of this should be surprising. Throughout the entirety of the presidential campaign, Trump was held to a much lower standard than literally any other predecessor vying to be president of the United States. Any time Trump wasn’t actively peddling conspiracy theories or didn’t sound like someone posting on 4chan, he was heralded for acting presidential.
READ MORE: FULL TEXT: Donald Trump’s Joint Address to Congress
Some claimed this was due to the inherent sexist high standard that was placed on Hillary Clinton as the first female nominee for the Democratic party. While there is certainly truth to that, it is worth pointing out that even during the Republican primary, Trump seemed to be held to a lower bar than any of the other GOP candidates as well.
As leader of the free world, a presidential President Trump is in everyone’s best interest. But so is holding the president to a standard becoming of a president, and we’re failing in that respect – bigly.
Supriya Dwivedi is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.
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