Don't be fooled by President Trump's superficial makeover
Meet the new President Trump: Tastes great, less filling!


A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
Call it Trumpism with a human face.
During Tuesday night's big joint address to Congress, President Trump showed his same old America First, Last, and Only impulses, but delivered them via a teleprompter, and thus with softer rhetoric. The snap polling suggests the public quite liked the measured man they saw in Trump's first big speech to Congress. And GOP lawmakers and pundits alike showered Trump with praise for appearing plausibly presidential, for once.
Sure, the only maybe memorable line — "Finally, the chorus became an earthquake" — owes its stickiness to its clunkiness. But these speeches rarely produce quotes for the ages. Looking for one perhaps takes you back to George W. Bush's "axis of evil" State of the Union in 2002, and then before that Bill Clinton "the era of big government is over' address in 1996.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
But while Trump offers improved performance at these political set pieces, the substance remains terribly lacking. He offered little leadership on reforming ObamaCare or tax reform, both efforts currently floundering on Capitol Hill. He again promised to "bring back" the jobs of an industrial America forever gone overseas or to automation. And he focused once more on solving problems that aren't really problems. Building walls. Blaming immigrants. Bashing trade. As I wrote not long ago here at The Week, "Trumpism is built around unworkable solutions in search of actual problems."
One moment that neatly encapsulates both the wrongheadedness and emptiness of the Trump agenda was when he lamented that "more than 1 in 5 people in their prime working years are not working." This is not fake news. Well, mostly not. But the claim is confusingly worded. The unemployment rate for Americans age 25-54 is 4.5 percent, not 20 percent, down by more than half since the worst of the Great Recession but still nearly a point higher than just before the downturn.
What Trump was actually referring to was the prime-age labor force participation rate, the share of the population either employed or actively seeking work. That stands at 81.4 percent, still stubbornly below its pre-recession level. Even more distressing is the prime-age male participation rate. It's among the worst of any rich economy. And the gap has been widening, particularly since the recession.
During his speech, Trump implicitly linked the depressed participation rate — and a host of other anemic economic statistics — to trade. Of course he did. But as a recent Goldman Sachs report recently noted, all advanced economies have faced job market disruption from trade, as well as technology.
So why might the decline in U.S. prime-age participation be so much larger? Goldman offers a numbers of potential explanations that make America special, but not in a good way, versus our international competitors. First, American middle-aged men use a lot of painkillers, especially opioids, and the mortality rate for for middle-aged men has been climbing. This suggests "more severe health and drug-related problems have contributed to lower U.S. participation,' according to Goldman. Higher U.S. incarceration rates also means criminal records make the job hunt more challenging. Third, Goldman concludes, the U.S. offers less help when it comes to retraining and job-search assistance.
Trump could have mentioned all those factors — as well as the possible impact of sharply raising the federal minimum wage during a near depression — and briefly talked about possible evidence-based policy solutions. Instead, we got the "the great wall along our southern border." Trump also failed to mention the job challenges posed by automation and how we need to better educate our kids and workers
What America saw on Tuesday night was a superficially kinder and gentler Trump — but a man who continues to spout the same old wrongheaded ideas. As the late Kurt Vonnegut might put it, this was just "old beer in new bottles."
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.
-
The daily gossip: Prime Video is getting ads unless you pay more, Lizzo accepts humanitarian award after being sued again, and more
The daily gossip: September 22, 2023
By Brendan Morrow Published
-
The week's best photojournalism
In Pictures A woman picking cotton, a dog dressed up as a lion and more
By Anahi Valenzuela Published
-
Undignified
Cartoons
By The Week Staff Published
-
Trump surrenders in Georgia election subversion case
Speed Read
By Catherine Garcia Published
-
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries chosen to succeed Pelosi as leader of House Democrats
Speed Read
By Brigid Kennedy Published
-
GOP leader Kevin McCarthy's bid for House speaker may really be in peril
Speed Read
By Peter Weber Published
-
Are China's protests a real threat for Beijing?
opinion The sharpest opinions on the debate from around the web
By Harold Maass Published
-
Who is Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who dined with Trump and Kanye?
Speed Read From Charlottesville to Mar-a-Lago in just five years
By Rafi Schwartz Published
-
Jury convicts Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs of seditious conspiracy in landmark Jan. 6 verdict
Speed Read
By Peter Weber Published
-
A look at the White House's festive and homey holiday decor
Speed Read
By Brigid Kennedy Published
-
Bob Iger addresses 'Don't Say Gay' bill, says inclusion is part of Disney's values
Speed Read
By Justin Klawans Published