President Trump’s joint address to Congress Tuesday evening was a mostly ho-hum affair, and that’s a good thing.
With the exception of a few notable moments, including when Trump honored Carryn Owens, the widow of a Navy SEAL who was killed in a raid in Yemen that also saw the death of Anwar al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter, the president was perfectly boring by the standards he set for himself during the 2016 campaign.
Trump addressed most of the issues and themes he talked about on the campaign trail, with the only real difference being that he softened his tone for his congressional audience.
He didn’t attack anyone by name. He didn’t unveil any surprise initiatives. He stuck to his prepared script.
Though Russia, the Iran deal, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan were notably absent from his address, Trump’s first major address to Congress was what you’d expect from a commander in chief, which is to say it was mostly unremarkable.
This is a good thing.
I want my president to be boring. I don’t want to think about him, or any member of the federal government for that matter, unless it’s absolutely necessary. The quieter the president, and the more removed he is from my life, the better.
Being left alone is about the only thing I think is worth fighting for, and the problem with Trump is that it’s about damn near impossible to go 24 hours without him or someone in his administration saying or doing something alarming.
Andrew Sullivan explained it well recently, writing that one of the big problems with Trump the administration is that it demands our constant attention.
“One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times,” Sullivan wrote.
He added, “A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason, respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until catastrophe inevitably strikes.”
For the last 30 days, this has rung mostly true. With Trump and his team, it seems like it’s just one thing after another. Though a lot of the hubbub surrounding this new White House has involved bogus, media-instigated feeding frenzies, there are also many genuinely disconcerting things about the Trump administration.
But on Tuesday, as the Queens businessman spoke before a gathering of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Trump was decidedly boring by Trump’s standards.
That’s just fine with me.
