In his first State of the Union address last night, President Trump struck an optimistic tone heavy on American exceptionalism, with conservative crowd-pleasers like faith, family, gun rights, and supporting police and the military.
He also included some tough language on America’s competitors and enemies.
Here are some highlights of the speech that touched on rural concerns, along with fact-checking and commentary. For further reference, see the annotated scripts of the speech by The Washington Post, NPR, and Politifact.
Trump touted the nation’s economy, saying that the stock market is at an all-time high and that unemployment claims are at a 45-year low. Both are true, though rural unemployment continues to lag and most of the world is in a bull market.
He said that the U.S. has created 2.4 million new jobs, with 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone. NPR’s Scott Horsley notes that this total includes job gains from November and December 2016 as well as January 2017, when Obama was still president, and that job gains were 2.7 million in the last 14 months Obama was president. But the past year’s slowdown in job growth isn’t a slam on Trump since it means the economy is nearing full employment, Horsley writes.
Trump also said that the U.S. is finally seeing rising wages after years of wage stagnation. However, Politifact reports that this is mostly false: “By the most common measure, wages did go up for the first three quarters of Trump’s presidency, but they fell in the fourth, wiping out all the gains on his watch and then some.”
Trump also talked about the recent tax cuts, which he said were the biggest in American history. But at 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, they’re the 8th biggest since 1918, behind a whopper 2.89 percent cut by Reagan, two by Truman, one by Johnson, and two by Obama, Glenn Kessler reports for the Post. And though the tax cuts may benefit the middle class and small businesses in the short term, Politifact notes that the wealthy will enjoy a disproportionate share of the cuts, and that the cuts to lower- and middle-income taxpayers may be canceled out by expiring tax breaks.
Trump said “We have ended the war on American energy — and we have ended the war on beautiful clean coal. We are now very proudly an exporter of energy to the world.” As we recently reported, there is no such thing as clean coal. Coal plant emissions can be reduced, though the Trump administration has opposed such efforts. And though coal exports are up, they’re not going to stay that way.
The president touched on international trade, saying “We will work to fix bad trade deals and negotiate new ones” and that he wants “fair” and “reciprocal” trade relationships. But Trump’s protectionist tendencies have hurt the agriculture and meatpacking industries, as when he pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And failing to reach a compromise in the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is in its sixth round of negotiation, would likely hurt the ag industry and many rural counties, especially in the South. And Trump’s tough talk on China, coupled with the new solar panel tariffs, may spark a trade war that would hurt soybean farmers even as it helps coal.
Trump also vowed to keep fighting the opioid epidemic, saying “We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge.” But Paige Cunningham of the Post found it troubling that he focused on the crisis as primarily a law enforcement problem instead of a medical issue. He mentioned that better addiction treatment was needed, but offered no details. Medication-assisted therapy is the industry gold standard for opioid addiction treatment, but few clinics have access to it.
He called on Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion in infrastructure investment, and said he wants state and local governments and the private sector to foot more of the bill on such projects. But National League of Cities president Mark Stodola, who is mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, said in a statement that “We are already leveraging every dollar available, and we need our federal partners to pay their share.”
Politifact also disputed Trump’s claim that road-building permits can take 10 years: “Recent government studies say the permit approval time ranges from 4.6 to 6.6 years. The only study we found that claims a 10-year approval is common comes from an anti-regulation group, which raises questions about its reliability.”
Trump said Congress will vote on an immigration reform package in the coming week that he thinks is a fair compromise to both parties. The proposal includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 1.8 million so-called Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. It also includes plans to build a border wall and hire more border guards. It would end the visa lottery and move toward a merit-based immigration system that favors skilled workers. Hopefully the package will address the concerns of farmers facing a big labor shortage because of the crackdown.
