US President changes his tone, if not his tune

The content of the president’s speech — on trade, terrorism and other issues — was much like what we’d heard from him in the campaign. But Trump’s goal seemed to be about his tone more than his text: to reassure America that he could simply keep control for an hour.

Since his inauguration, Trump has, for starters, picked a fight on Twitter over Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Celebrity Apprentice” ratings, declared that negative polls and news are fake, raged against his own intelligence agencies over leaks and spun a tale that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.

Tuesday night, even his neckwear was more muted: a striped blue-and-white tie, not a blazing red one, as if to signal that he was putting away his bullfighter’s cloth for one night.

During the campaign, Trump was known for going on furious improv tears, throwing belligerent verbiage against the turbine fan of his aggression. Tuesday night, he had a script.

He largely stuck to it. He performed a sanded-down version of his campaign persona — the thumb-and-forefinger circles, little riffs. (“Great wall” in his prepared remarks became “great, great wall”; he added a joke about Harley-Davidson executives trying to get him to ride one of their motorcycles.)

The character he was playing this night was not the angry boss who might fire someone, but the executive who needed to reassure his shareholders.

Although Trump won office by running an unconventional campaign, his address used many of the conventional tools of past presidents.

He created moments by inviting guests — a tradition that goes back to Ronald Reagan — including the widow of Chief Petty Officer William Owens of the Navy SEALs, who drew a very long, emotional round of applause. (Afterward, Trump said that the fallen soldier was “looking down” and “very happy because I think he just broke a record.”) The father of Owens earlier refused to meet with Trump, insisting on an investigation into the death.

But Trump also used those he invited to send a darker message. In a passage on immigration, he pointed out four relatives of people murdered by unauthorized immigrants whom he had invited to sit in the box with his wife, Melania.

This was showmanship, too, but of a much darker kind, meant to whip up fear against unauthorized immigrants by implying that they’re more dangerous than native-born Americans. Study after study shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.

But if you skew the publicity, you skew the impressions. Put “immigrants” and “kill” in the same sentence often enough and people hear, “Immigrants kill.”

That fearmongering, familiar from his campaign, was a reminder that he still had an obligation to throw red meat to the passionate voters who got him elected. He deployed the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” which his new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, had reportedly asked him not to use, but which he had made a verbal totem in the campaign.

Above all, Trump used the theater and scale naturally built into the event to show his status. The Democrats, in their televised response by former Kentucky Gov. Steven Beshear, a champion of Obamacare, tried to make a virtue of the difference in grandeur by having it take place in a diner.

Trump had used his speech for some damage control, beginning it by denouncing hate crimes he had been criticized for avoiding: the murder of an Indian technology worker in Kansas, blamed on a man who is said to have thought his victim was Middle Eastern, and the rash of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and desecration of Jewish cemeteries.

“We are a country,” Trump said, “that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”

But not that united. The health care issue was one of many that demonstrated the divide in the room: When Trump promised to repeal Obamacare, Republicans stood and cheered, Democrats booed and gave thumbs down on camera.

For at least a year, Trump-watching pundits have been like forlorn bird-watchers scanning the sky for the appearance of the Great American Pivot. Judging by the pundit round tables after his speech, Trump gave them, for a while, reason to think it had returned. That has happened before. “At the right time,” he told NBC’s “Today” during the campaign, “I will be so presidential, you will be so bored.” Since then, America has been a lot of things but not bored.

Tuesday night, however, Trump declared, “The time for trivial fights is behind us.” True enough: Schwarzenegger’s “Celebrity Apprentice” broadcast its finale two weeks ago.

But history suggests we wait to declare the pivot achieved, at least until the congressional crowd has cleared and Trump has gotten his phone back for a while.