In the moments following President Trump’s epically long State of the Union address Tuesday night, both liberal commentator Van Jones and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum came to a similar conclusion: It wasn’t great.
“Look, I think this was an incredibly conciliatory speech,” Santorum said. Other than “the wall” and what he referred to as the “Virginia governor infanticide,” he said, “There's no red meat for the base.”
“This was not a Republican speech,” he added, explaining that Trump’s plan to “eradicate” AIDS is “not something that conservatives are going to be cheering tomorrow.” Santorum said, “I'm just saying, if you look at the concrete proposals he put forward, there is not a lot of conservative—there is a lot of outreach to the Nancy Pelosi Democrats.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“I see it very, very differently,” Jones said. “I saw this as a psychotically incoherent speech with cookies and dog poop. He tries to put together, in the same speech, these warm kind things about humanitarianism and caring about children. At the same time, he is demonizing people who are immigrants in a way that was appalling.”
For Jones, that message was a major turnaround from two years ago when he declared after Trump’s first speech to a joint session of Congress that he “became president of the United States in that moment, period” when he led a two minute standing ovation for the widow of the Navy SEAL who died in a military operation in Yemen.
“That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period,” Jones said at the time. “And for people who have been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.”
