As we look back on the State of the Union address that President Trump gave last Monday, January 30, most of us will automatically cringe and shudder. The sheer amount of lies that were delivered to the American people within that one speech was outrageous, but with a long history of bad delivery, what else should we be expecting from his speeches? With the so-called “clean coal,” the end of the “war on American energy” and all the other blabbering, there was a whole lot discussed that was much ado about nothing.

      Since Trump announced he was running for presidency, he’s mentioned the topic of clean coal about 40 times. What is clean coal, you ask? We really have no idea either, but he promoted it quite a bit in his speech last Monday. Upon getting into office, one of the first things he did was overturn the Stream protection rule, which required any companies involved in mining to monitor pollution in streams that exist near the surface of mines (thinkprogress.org). Sounds pretty dirty if you ask us. The term for clean coal was actually coined from an advertising agency (R&R Partners) in the year of 2008. This was supposed to be for mining companies working to reduce emissions from the actual burning of coal, which has yet to actually work (newsweek.com). Even though clean energy such as solar and wind employs a significant amount of more people than the coal industry, coal still appears to be the main focus.

      There wasn’t much new policy that was discussed in the State of the Union address, but Trump did talk about infrastructure, lower prescription costs and more nuclear weapons, but one of these is not like the other. Infrastructure and lower prescription costs is like music to our ears, but the nuclear weapons idea is somewhat aggressive and unsettling. Nothing puts people more on edge than talk about building up the nuclear arsenal.
We also saw that the president recently made complaints about Democrats not receiving his speech as well as the Republicans did.

     According to Trump, everyone who was not seen clapping for his sub-par speech was “treasonous” as well as “un-American” (yahoo.com). So apparently now if you criticize the president in any manner whatsoever, you may be committing treason. We at The Voice know that criticism displays that there is room for growth, especially when it comes to issues that call for bipartisanship.

      So from this State of the Union address, we’ve heard about a lot of old stuff, not enough new stuff and a lot of the same old lies. We hear so much talk of coming together from our president who has a bad habit of pointing fingers and inciting quarrels between the Republicans and Democrats. What we and the rest of America would really like to hear is a speech that can create the spark for bipartisanship to effectively govern. We also hate that we have to fact check every other sentence that comes out of our president’s mouth. The Voice can safely say that all we are looking for are real facts, real policy ideas and decent bipartisan delivery. Is that too much to ask?

~ The Voice