MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: It’s Was All a Lie

By Marc C. Johnson

I am an acknowledged political junkie so not watching a State of the Union speech isn’t in my DNA.

But I just couldn’t do it.

Rather than listen to, as Charlie Sykes put it, the “gaslighting and bullshit,” or watching the scripted jumping up to applaud something extremely partisan and flatly crazy and then listening to the “USA, USA” chants, I enjoyed a lovely dinner with my best friend and then watched another episode of frighteningly good TV series called “The Night Of” starring, among others, the brilliant John Turturro.

Turturro plays a defense attorney, John Stone, with a cat, bad feet and a healthy regard for the due process rights of his client. Let’s just say that the U.S. Justice Department could use some lawyers like that right now.

And watching fiction on the TV was an appropriate choice since last night was really “The Night Of” the final degradation of the historic ritual of an American president reporting to the nation and Congress.

The whole stomach turning spectacle of the SOTU wickedly exposes just how profoundly unserious we have become – a carnival barking clown in the White House, with his trained seals populating Congress and clapping on cue and with a mostly feckless Democratic Party trying to stem the further slide toward our very own American fascism.

The State of the Union political pageant has become an abomination, a two hour live TV national lobotomy exposing the feeble thinking, the shameless lying and endless BS that has degraded American political life.

Is there any chance of going back to, well, sanity?

I’ll let Charlie Sykes summarize the Trump speech:

I know that we have short-attention spans, but we know this guy, don’t we? This is not Year Zero in TrumpWorld.

But there is a strange form of Trump Derangement Syndrome that seems to forget everything we know about the man who presided over this festival of bread and circuses — the man who incited a mob to attack the Capitol, was found liable for sexual assault, and continues to cover-up his role in the Epstein scandal. This is the guy who sent masked brute squads to American cities; threatened and alienated our allies; and engages in corruption on a global scale in plain sight. This is the man who presides over a Mafia State that bullies law firms, universities, and media companies to bend to his will and pay him off. And this is man who just days ago tried to arrest six sitting members of Congress, launched a vitriolic personal attack on Supreme Court justices, and posted a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes.

But yeah, he’s entertaining. Amirite?

You can find other analyses of the SOTU (or the State of Trump’s Shallowmindedness) here with Tom Nichols or here with David Frum.

But I’m already moving on.

I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: Republican officeholders have been lying to their voters for so long the lying becomes second nature, like breathing.

You can find this kind of thing today – the Risch posting – from virtually every GOP member of Congress. That such rhetoric is unhinged from reality apparently doesn’t matter since it serves to keep the Republican “base” in a perpetual state where disbelief can be suspended.

Tariffs, oh, tariffs

Just one example: Republicans stood and applauded last night when Donald Trump said his tariff policy would continue unabated even as the U.S. Supreme Court five days ago said the policy was unconstitutional, illegal and effectively a tax on every American, a tax that had been imposed by one man alone – the president of the United States.

In one short section of the SOTU Trump told two whoppers:

• No Congressional action will be needed to keep tariffs in place. Almost any action Trump takes to attempt to replace tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal would require Congressional action, at least after 150 days and that clock is already running.
• And Trump claimed, bizarrely, that his tariffs could eventually replace the federal income tax. This was a big applause line for Republicans even though it is a complete and total fantasy.

Trump said:

“I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will like, in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”

That is simply impossible as Forbes notes:

As of early December, the U.S. had collected about $257 billion in tariff revenues in 2025, with $167 billion coming from new tariffs Trump imposed, according to Politifact.

Federal income taxes generated more than 14 times that amount, $2.4 trillion in 2024, according to Politifact.

And, of course, “foreign countries” don’t pay the Trump tariffs. American companies pay and often pass the costs on to consumers. This is why, if you’ve been paying close attention, some companies are already suing the Trump Administration to get their money back after Trump effectively stole it with illegal tariffs.

A tariff is a tax, as University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said recently:

What we have is a pro-tax Republican president. Maybe he favors this tax because it’s regressive — it takes a bigger chunk out of the paychecks of the poor than of the rich. Maybe he thinks he can baffle us with bullshit and pretend China is paying, but that’s a story people aren’t buying.

Speaking of the rich. One of the major talking points for Republican members of Congress has been the vast benefits for middle class Americans contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last summer and now rechristened the “Working Families Tax Plan.”

Right.

Let me introduce you to Jeff Bezos, the big boss at Amazon. Here’s how Politico described the “Working Families Tax Plan” benefits for the man destroying the Washington Post:

Republicans’ tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon’s tax bill, new government filings show.

The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45 percent to nearly $90 billion.

That’s largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that’s particularly important to Amazon which — in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business — has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers.

Tax cuts are the only thing more dear to Republicans than lying about the effects of tax cuts.

All of this is by way of saying we have become a profoundly unserious nation. Not a good look and definitely not sustainable.