If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you may have heard of a type of content called rage bait. “Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it.” Rage bait, as the name would suggest, is content that is explicitly designed to make you kind of mad, to make you upset, to make you enraged. “These people are crazy.” And to react with anger and preferably potentially create some engagement for the person producing the rage bait. ”The president of the United States.” As I was watching the president’s State of the Union on Tuesday, the long, two-hour State of the Union, my thought the entire time was that this is rage bait. I say that it’s rage bait because once you got past the initial boilerplate, it was really nothing more than a series of provocations. ”Why would anybody not want voter ID. One reason. Because they want to cheat. There’s only one reason.” Provocations aimed at opponents of the president and Democrats. Provocations, really racist invective, aimed at Somali Americans and other immigrant groups that are in the president’s crosshairs. An entire section of the speech, where the president leads his party in jeers and shouts at their Democratic colleagues. ”He should be ashamed of yourself. That is why I’m also asking you to end deadly sanctuary cities that protect the criminals.” And an orchestrated attempt to present Democrats as un-American. ”They’re blocking the removal of these people out of our country. And you should be ashamed of yourself.” An entire digression about how Democrats could not possibly win elections if not for cheating and fraud. ”They want to cheat. They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it.” As if Democrats themselves are almost illegitimate members of the political community. During this, he called voting a privilege, something that must be restricted. Again, that’s rage bait. That is designed to make people angry. Designed to invoke some kind of reaction. ”These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.” Now, what does it mean that the president of the United States is using the State of the Union, which is supposed to be a time when the president speaks about the past year, where the president makes plans for the upcoming year, and where the president speaks to the entire people, and not just a segment of them. What does it mean that the president used that space, which isn’t his, which belongs to Congress, which is to say it belongs to the entire American people. What does it mean to say that he used this to engage in rage bait. It’s a demonstration of a few things. The first, and I just alluded to it, is that Trump does not see himself as president of the United States, if that means the whole people of this country. He sees himself as president for a handful of people, a select group of people. And if you’re outside that group, he feels no obligations to you. The second thing is that if this were truly a successful and productive presidential administration, Trump would have a lot to talk about. Compare this State of the Union to say, Barack Obama’s State of the Union in 2010, Even to Biden’s State of the Union in 2022. Those were presidencies in which the president and his party accomplished something. They had legislation to speak about. Trump doesn’t. He has one piece of legislation under his belt, the ”big beautiful bill.” And otherwise he has nothing but a series of executive orders, many of which have either unraveled due to lawsuits or haven’t been very effective in the first place. His tariffs have been struck down by the Supreme Court, and his deportation program and immigration policies have become so unpopular that Americans are calling for reform, defunding and even abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In other words, the reason that the president has made his State of the Union an exercise in rage bait is because he has nothing else. Trump is trending towards a failed presidency, and the only thing he can do now is to try to make people mad and distract their attention from the simple fact that he cannot and is not governing this country.
