The state of the union is strong, in President Donald Trump’s telling, but also predatory and dangerous.
An undercurrent of Trump’s speech this week was that the “golden age of America” calls for a cold-eyed understanding of the threats that the nation faces and the resolute actions needed to defend itself.
Undocumented immigrants lurking within the country are looking to plunder and kill, the president says. Foreign enemies are ready to massacre American soldiers fighting to preserve the country’s dominance.
To drive home the point, Trump spooled out grisly accounts of suffering and death meant to jar his audience and provoke a visceral reaction that would build support for the solutions he has in mind.
Trump’s often infuses his speeches with imagery meant to seize and hold the listener’s attention, and Tuesday’s address was no exception. His inaugural speech in 2017 set the tone. The newly minted president said the country had devolved into a hellscape of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said at the time.
Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter in Bill Clinton’s White House, said of Trump’s oratory: “He has always had a fetish for that” — meaning gruesome imagery.
This time, Trump recounted the shooting of Andrew Wolfe, a member of the West Virginia National Guard who was nearly killed in November while on duty in Washington, D.C., as part of Trump’s effort to curb crime in the city. Another guard member, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, was killed in the ambush near the White House.
Trump described a phone call he had with Wolfe’s mother as her son lay in his hospital bed, “blood all over.” The story ended on an uplifting note, with Wolfe showing up for the speech and a general pinning a Purple Heart to his lapel.
Left unsaid was the timeline. In October, Trump proclaimed that Washington has “no crime.”
“It took 12 days to solve the problem,” Trump said at the time.
Yet the city he purported to have made safe wasn’t safe enough for the two guard members patrolling it the following month.
In graphic terms, Trump also described the wounds sustained by Eric Slover, who was part of the military strike last month that captured the former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Leading the U.S. strike force in a Chinook helicopter, the warrant officer was hit by machine-gun fire, “very badly, in the leg and hip, one bullet after another,” Trump said.
“He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into numerous pieces,” he added.
Blood was “gushing,” Trump said, “flowing back down the aisle” of the helicopter. Slover told his co-pilot to take over, that he was “about ready to pass out,” Trump said.
“It was unbelievable what’s happened to his legs,” Trump added. “Everybody in the back of the helicopter knew because they saw the blood pouring down the aisle.”
In the end, the mission succeeded, Slover survived and Trump used the speech to award him the Medal of Honor.
Maybe the most sanguinary story that Trump rolled out involved Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine who was murdered in August while riding a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The killing received national attention and has become a flashpoint in the closely contested Senate race in North Carolina, a battleground state that is key to the Democrats’ chances of capturing the upper chamber.
Trump said that “a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body.”
“No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life,” he said. “She died instantly.”
Trump said that she had “escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America. Came in through open borders.”
A fact check from the Charlotte Observer said that Trump’s claim that the suspect, DeCarlos Brown, had come in through “open borders” was untrue. The newspaper reported that Brown was born in Charlotte, according to his Facebook page, and that his mother said he had graduated from a local high school.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the “open borders” reference.
For years, Trump has sought to call attention to the nation’s security by highlighting crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Trump used the State of the Union to draw a contrast between his hard-line border policies and that of Democrats.
He told about the death of a 16-year-old high school cheerleader during President Joe Biden’s term. Lizbeth Medina didn’t show up for a Christmas parade as expected, he said. Her mother went home to find her and found her “lying dead in a bathtub, bleeding profusely after being stabbed 25 times.”
“Lizbeth’s killer was a previously arrested illegal alien who had broken in and brutally, just brutally extinguished the brightest light in her family’s life,” he said. “Violently and viciously.”
Her mother’s presence in the House chamber was a reminder of “why we are deporting illegal alien criminals … and we’re getting them the hell out of here fast,” he said.
Trump chastised Democrats for not backing his immigration crackdown, saying they should be “ashamed.” The comments prompted clashes with some Democratic House members, who called him a “liar” and said he’s the one who should be ashamed.
Macabre though Trump may have sounded, joyous moments punctuated the evening. He borrowed from “The Price Is Right” game show in inviting mystery guests waiting outside the House gallery to come through the doors and surprise the audience. Olympic gold-medal-winning hockey team, “come on in.” Venezuelan political prisoner Enrique Marquez, “please come down.”
Trump summoned the hockey team to the House gallery to congratulate them for winning a gold medal amid rousing applause. He celebrated Coast Guard rescue swimmer Scott Ruskan, who saved scores of lives in a flash flood in Texas last year.
The nation got to see Marquez reunited with his niece.
“He had us on our feet clapping for veterans from five different wars, parents, mothers, children and Olympic gold medalists,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said in an interview after the speech. “That at least was a positive.”