Donald Trump chooses greatness — and so should we
SOTU 2019 had a fuller agenda of things to be done and a more circumspect and humble offer to the other side of the aisle
Roger Kimball
Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.â€â€™ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning. ‘With my superior intelligence,’ Wodehouse gloated, I have outgeneraled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names.’
So, mutatis very much mutandis, did the president do tonight. SOTU 2019 bears a marked similarity to SOTU 2018. There was the same reaching across the aisle, the effort, as I put it last year, to restore the first person plural in American civic discourse, a ‘We’ that Democrats and Republicans and Independents could alike affirm.
Last year, the president spoke of putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in pursuing the goal of making a better America.
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