President Trump's Primetime Adress on the Iran War

The presidential primetime TV address has been an important part of the fabric of American life for many decades. And so, when President Trump announced he would be giving a primetime speech last week, I started hoping for something special, something in the grand tradition of such speeches. My mind went back to the memorable past speeches--Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis speech in 1962, Reagan's speech after the 1986 Challenger disaster, Nixon's resignation speech in 1974, Johnson's 1965 speech urging passage of the Voting Rights Act, and many others.

But what did we get? We got a repeat of the same old lies that Trump has been feeding us for lo these many months. There was nothing poetic, nothing appealing to our better angels, nothing inspiring at all. Trump told us that Iran's military had been destroyed, and yet in recent days it waa able to shoot down two of our planes. He told us nothing new, provided none of the rationale for the war in Iran that he should have provided at the start of the war. As a result, his popularity rating has plunged to 35%, a new low.