what centrist pundits praising Trump's speech reflect is not just how cynically effective it was, what dupes they are, or how consonant centrism is with authoritarian white supremacy (all true) but how pathetic, uncharismatic, and misbegotten any current liberal alternatives are
it happened. he remains president. he delivered a variety of trollish appropriations of social justice language, cunningly designed by his speech writers. he venerated the war machine. he used dogwhistles instead of outright slurs, and deployed people and their pain as props.
the blunt fact is that there is no real capacity in contemporary mainstream media or liberal political discourse for articulating how and why all of those things are fundamentally inhuman and wrong. so instead: fact-checking, policy critique, and performance scorecards.
IOW: the emphasis on "bipartisanship" as a (paltry) theme *in* the speech actually expresses investment in the bipartisan *conditions* of political impoverishment that made the speech possible in the first place and that define and constrain the limits of media commentary on it
