CAA Flagship wrote:So Pelosi is saying Trump is not invited to the the Capitol for the SOTU speech.
So if Trump decides to do a speech on TV from the WH, I guess he doesn't have to give the Dems an advanced copy for them to give a post-speech response.
That would be some great theater watching them scramble to respond.
They don't need an advanced copy. Trump is actually pretty predictable in terms of what one would expect him to say. To me the Democrats could very easily craft a response based on some basic points:
1) Trump lies a lot. They could also go ahead and fact check some of what he says based on the reasonable assumption that he's going to lie again and stick a few note on that in. But, really, they don't even have to do that. They could just talk about the past established record of how frequently he lies.
2) The economy is pretty much a continuation of what it was before Trump got elected. They could even be prepared with some graphs of job creation and unemployment rate to make their case. Yes, the economy is OK but it was OK before he got elected. Most of the drop in unemployment happened before he got elected and the job creation rate was about the same before he got elected as it's been afterwards. He's almost certainly going to talk about how low the unemployment rate is so some of those graphs we've all seen of unemployment rates over time would be very useful. Would probably be good to be prepared to show both a graph of overall rate one of Black rate.
3) Now he's started trade wars so that the economy may NOT be OK in the near future. Cite reports on fears about the world economy.
4) Income inequality is increasing. No, I don't personally think income inequality in and of itself is a bad thing but talking about it would probably work for them because most people are offended by it.
5) Trump is using extortion to get his wall. We can't give in to an extortion tactic. If he gets what he wants it's going to happen again and we'll be dealing with more shutdowns in the future. As a matter of principle we need to open the government so that extortion is off the table THEN negotiate.
AND they need to pick someone who can deliver the presentation effectively without looking like a deer in the headlights, stiff, or anything like that. That's probably the most important thing of all. They also need to pick a setting that's not someone standing up in space looking at the camera. As I said before: They need to let professionals design the presentation atmosphere.
