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Trump’s Tuesday Address Was as ‘Presential’ as a Can of Spam

Don’t be fooled. On Tuesday you were just seeing Trump’s best Sunday school behavior. And even that was barely passable. Trump is still Trump, no matter how you clean him up.

Op-ed

Trump Spam

Since Tuesday night, all I’ve been seeing on Facebook are smug conservatives and hopeful leftists posting about how “presidential” Trump was in his speech before Congress.

As Colonel Potter used to be prone to say on MASH: “horse hockey!”

Any resemblance to an authentic presidential demeanor was all delusional and in the heads of those who are easily fooled. If you had never seen Trump before and were watching him for the first time, you would have thought him to be a mobster who was on his best behavior for a court appearance to plead his case — which is pretty much what he was. But on Tuesday, many people couldn’t help but compare the Trump they saw with the Trump they expected to see — which, I’ll admit made him look a little polished by comparison.

He’d obviously worked hard, and maybe even took time out from tweeting, to pull this off. Most likely, he benefited from the fact that the weekend’s SNL was a rerun. Evidently, he hired a copy editor to go over his speech with a blue pencil to remove all the “I”s, replacing some with “we,” and Xing out whole paragraphs of bragging about how “clever” and “smart” he is. And it looks as if somebody has taken the trouble to try to educate him a bit on how politics works — not exactly Politics 101, but maybe a high school prep course — which accounts for his calls for “unity,” “reaching out across the aisles,” and the bones he threw the Democrats’ way (both hoping some Dems would bite and to later use to turn public opinion against them if they didn’t).

Speaking of the Democrats in congress: they’ve been reminded this week that the same rules of behavior don’t apply to them as to the Republicans. On Facebook, nearly every time someone posts about “how presidential Trump was” somebody will comment about “how petty the Democrats looked” by not standing up and cheering when Trump threw him those bones.

Maybe they saw the bones for just what they are: bait. Or maybe, “Hush, puppies!”

Maybe they remembered how their president, Obama, was treated by those sitting on the Republican side of the aisle when he spoke before congress. At least the Dems didn’t shout “liar!” — which would have been much more appropriate during parts of Tuesday night’s speech than during any speech Obama gave during his entire stay in the White House.

While watching this week’s version of “The New Trump,” I was reminded of the numerous times that Hormel has changed the packaging on Spam for a “modern new look” to bolster sales. This always works for a while and sales take a tic upwards. It doesn’t work for long, however. Eventually people realize it’s still Spam inside the can.

If This Be Treason is an AlternativeApproaches Media website.