LAST NIGHT'S INSANE EVENT - UPDATED

If you were smart enough not to watch Krasnov’s bad portrayal of a Fidel Castro rant last night, I’m not going to go over it. Plenty of other people have taken the effort to fact check the firehose of bullshit that spewed from Krasnov’s anus under his nose last night.

Some other people got the night perfectly described:

Mary Trump, who knows Krasnov better than any of us, had it just right in her description of the event: “It is hard to put into words how I feel about tonight’s grotesque event. It was at once a travesty, a farce, and a dystopian exercise in mendacity, disinformation, and fascism. It was, if you will, a stunning and brazen display of American carnage.”

Rick Wilson aptly described the 100-minute event: “Trump’s big Joint Address to Congress read as if the White House staff told ChatGPT, ‘Give me a State of the Union speech that’s Castro in length, Von Munchausen in facts, and Culture War Carnival Barker in style. Oh, and make it tendentious, boring, and ugly.’”

Charlie Sykes got it too: “Can we just admit that for 100 minutes on Tuesday night, America collectively realized that it had picked a very bad week to stop sniffing glue?”

Anne Appelbaum quipped, “90-plus minutes of bad moments — a typical Trump medley of fabrications, provocations and insults.”

Susan Glasser wrote that he strutted for 90 minutes on the stage with “his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies. It turns out that even the most unhinged of Presidential speeches can seem kind of boring if it goes on long enough.”

I think we get it.

Executive Summary: It. Was. Awful.

Trump’s speech received overwhelming approval of viewers by a margin of 76%-23%, which seems curious... until you see who they were. Viewership was 51% Republican, 27% Independent, and 20% Democratic. You got it - the audience for Krasnov’s speech was overwhelmingly his own supporters. The interesting thing is, he got lower marks this time out from his own supporters than he did in his first SOTU during Maladministration I in 2017 - this one got a 44% “very positive” response, compared to a 57% “very positive” response in 2017.

And that’s as much of that fakakte as I care to write. I’m going to remember the rule given me by that college freshman English I professor so long ago that stayed in my mind because he was so right: “Writing should be like a bikini - enough to cover the subject.”

And so it is covered. If you want close detail on what shade of brown the shit was, there are plenty of other specialists in describing shit who have done so for your edification today.

The Democrats should have all stayed away and held that “people’s SOTU” that Greg Olear described yesterday. That would have been something to report on.

UPDATE:

Trump's 2025 address to Congress was his least watched speech of this type ever, and younger viewers virtually ignored it.

Donald Trump’s diminishing power as a ratings draw was on full display on Tuesday night. Even though the corporate media endlessly hyped the speech, Trump drew his smallest viewership number ever for a State Of The Union style address.

Variety:

Donald Trump‘s address to Congress reached an average of 36.6 million viewers on Monday. Trump didn’t manage to draw as large an audience as he did with any of his State of the Union addresses during his first term as president. His 2017 address reached 47.7 million viewers, followed by 45.6 million in 2018, 46.8 in 2019 and 37.2 million in 2020. Older viewers made up a significant majority of Trump’s audience. Nielsen notes that 70.7% of viewers were aged 55 or older, with 20.5% being 35-54 and 5.7% being 18-34.

It was a bad speech by a bad president whose shelf life appears to have expired. If this is the high water mark for Trump 2.0, Republicans better prepare themselves for some very tough sledding over the next three-plus years.

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