10 Observations about Donald’s 2026 SOTD Address

 

I suppose I’m a masochist, but just for the hell of it (literally) I decided to watch all of Donald Trump’s State of the Disunion address this week. It was bearable only because I had a basketball game playing on my iPad, so I did have some distraction from the endless self-congratulatory blather that was droning away on my TV. Anyway, here are 10 observations from my viewing experience.

1. From the get-go, I felt as if I had been transported to Anaheim and was stuck in Fantasyland. It is obvious that Donald inhabits an irreality that is totally divorced from the world of facts and veracity that most sensible humans recognize. Whether he actually believes all the nonsense that streams from his piehole is a good question. I’m sure that since he’s surrounded by sycophants who tell him only what he wants to hear, he may actually believe what he says, but some of it is just too otherworldly for even Donald to believe. The “golden age” he keeps referring to exists only in his own head, but that can still cause severe problems.

2. I was amused when he claimed he was going to go after fraud and that he was putting J. D. Vance in charge of this “war on fraud.” This is akin to the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” saying he was going to track down cannibals and bring them to justice. But J. D.’s job should be easy. If he wants to find fraud, he doesn’t have to look far. He can find it in the Oval Office and Mar-a-Lago and among the many criminals Trump has pardoned. I mean, seriously, Donald is the only president to have been convicted of fraud. And it’s only gotten worse since his second term began. Whether it’s crypto-scams or taking jumbo-jet-sized bribes from foreign governments or just the pedestrian stuff like Trump University or the Trump Foundation, if J. D. wants to go after fraud, he may as well investigate the king of fraud. A nice little side benefit is that it would lead to a new job title for himself.

3. Once again, Donald bragged about how much winning we are experiencing in America. So much that people are begging him to stop all the winning. And of course he promises even more. But winning in Donald’s dictionary is defined as how he plays golf. The ordinary Americans who are having trouble paying their rent and utilities, who can’t find decent health insurance for less than an arm and a leg, who have been laid off and can’t find a new job may beg to differ. The billionaires are certainly winning. Trump’s family is winning. But the rest of us? Not so much.

4. I was actually surprised at Donald’s audacity when awarding the Medal of Honor to some deserving individuals. He said he’s always wanted one for himself, but he supposed it wasn’t allowed for him to award a Medal of Honor to himself. Oh, really? A serial draft dodger can’t award himself a Medal of Honor? What’s wrong with this country? I’m sure he’ll figure out a way to get one. Maybe one of this week’s recipients will frame his and give it to Donald. Pathetic.

5. In Trumpworld, only undocumented aliens commit murder. Thus, when speaking about the savage attack that killed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, Donald claimed the murderer was a criminal who “came in through open borders.” But according to the Charlotte Observer, the killer’s Facebook page said he was born in Charlotte and attended high school there. The newspaper also said it had interviewed his American mother. Most SOTU addresses are carefully previewed to prevent this sort of blatant falsehood, but untruth is the air Donald breathes, and no one in his circle of sycophants is going to tell him the truth. But the truth is that immigrants, and especially undocumented aliens, commit crimes at a far lower rate than we native-born citizens.

6. According to Donald, the economy is humming, but he inherited a nightmare from Biden, which is why he has presided over the greatest turnaround in American history. Yes, the economy is blundering along at about the same pace it was when he took office for the second time, but there are worrying signs, especially on the job-creation front. It would probably be doing much better, but his tariffs have created a drag on economic growth and a high degree of uncertainty for businesses and our foreign trade partners. The stock market is doing well, but that is because we have a K-shaped economy—great for the wealthy, a struggle for the middle class and the poor. But this was by design, and Donald sees only the upper half of the K.

7. Even though Donald’s own administration assured Americans that the 2020 election was the most secure ever, and the courts tossed out every lawsuit alleging fraud, Donald continues to claim that there was massive cheating in the last election. Of course this is false, but his insistent ranting about fraud creates a pretext for interfering in the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections. Everything the Republicans are proposing (especially the SAVE Act) will not make elections more secure but will suppress voting, particularly among demographics that tend to vote Democratic.

8. The worst moment of the sordid SOTD circus was when Donald asked everyone to stand if they believed the primary task of government was to protect American citizens and not illegal aliens. This was a purely divisive ploy, aimed at accomplishing two goals: first, to paint the Democrats as unpatriotic and, second, to again vilify immigrants. And every Republican who stood knew exactly what Donald was doing, and they all bowed the knee while rising to their feet. But it is not the government’s responsibility to protect only American citizens. Government should protect every law-abiding person in this country, whether citizen, illegal immigrant, refugee, tourist, or visitor. Donald and his ilk, however, are trying to vilify hardworking people who have come to this country to escape horrific circumstances in their native lands or even to try to make a new start, just as his grandparents and his wife did. One might think he would have a special place in his heart for immigrants, but that is true only if they are white.

9. I wondered if Donald would be able to make it through his speech without taking the Supremes to task for killing his tariffs. Well, actually, I did not wonder. I knew he couldn’t. But he didn’t spend as much time on tariffs as I thought he might. But I need to clarify that his new “Section 122” tariffs are actually more illegal than the IEEPA tariffs the Supreme Court just declared unconstitutional. If you don’t believe me, here’s a quote from an article by Andrew McCarthy, a conservative legal commentator, that appeared in the National Review:

“These new tariffs are even more clearly illegal than Trump's IEEPA tariffs…..

“In Section 122, Congress endowed the president with narrow, temporary authority to impose tariffs ‘to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits’ (emphasis added). What Trump is complaining about—something he insists is a crisis but is not—is the balance of trade, not of payments. The United States does not have an overall balance of payments deficit, much less a large and serious one.

“A trade deficit between the U.S. and a foreign nation occurs, mainly in connection with goods (which is just one aspect of international commerce), when imports are greater than exports. This is not really a problem for a variety of reasons—e.g., a trade deficit results in an investment surplus, the U.S. is a major services economy and often runs exported services surpluses that mitigate the imports deficit in goods, etc.

“The balance of payments is a broader concept than the balance of trade. It accounts for all the economic transactions that take place between the United States and the rest of the world. Even without getting into every kind of transaction that entails, suffice it to say that foreign investment in the United States, coupled with the advantages our nation accrues because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, more than make up for the longstanding trade deficit in goods.

“Our overall payments are in balance. There is no crisis.

“It’s vital to understand why Section 122 was enacted. There was a financial crisis in the late 60s and early 70s under the Bretton Woods system, when the dollar was tied to gold. Foreign countries that held dollar reserves could exchange them for gold at a fixed rate. Meanwhile, our government was spending at a high clip due to the Vietnam War and Great Society programs. This and the obligation to pay out gold put enormous pressure on the dollar. . . .

“Now, over a half century later, these conditions no longer obtain. The dollar floats and the government does not concern itself with gold parity. The dollar is the global reserve currency, so demand for dollars by foreign nations is robust. We have strong capital inflows and our highly liquid financial markets are the envy of the world. Notwithstanding trade deficits, there is no balance of payments problem.

“Nor is it necessary, as Section 122 puts it, to impose temporary tariffs in order ‘to prevent an imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar in foreign exchange markets[.]’

“There is no rationale under Section 122 to impose tariffs. Because President Trump has no unilateral authority to order tariffs, he must meet the preconditions of Section 122 to justify levying them. He cannot. Not even close.”

10. Paul Krugman’s title for his post-SOTD email was “So Little Truth, So Much Time.” That is an apt description of the whole bloviating almost-two-hours of truth-torture. Donald is incapable of telling the truth, but he loves to hear the sound of his own voice. Which makes for unbearably long and rambling “speeches” that carry very little weight. Unfortunately, it is what it is. And the ratings proved it. This was the least-watched SOTU in a long time.

So, those are my 10 observations. I could go on and on, like Donald, but I’ve wasted enough time on this depressing topic. I suffered through the whole hour and three quarters of it, just to say I’d done it. Was it worth it? Of course not. And I probably won’t do it next year, if, by hook or crook, he is still president then. With his diet, his weight, and his temper, I’m truly surprised he hasn’t suffered a major heart attack or stroke already. But I’ll grant him this: he is stubborn.

Book of Mormon Questions #12 (Text and Translation)

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. 

What Should We Think about the King James Quotations?

 

Much of this post is taken from my recent article in BYU Studies about Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon critical text project. Skousen devoted all of volume 3, part 5, to the quotations in the Book of Mormon from the King James Bible. Anyone who is acquainted with the Book of Mormon knows that it contains several long excerpts from the King James Bible, particularly the Sermon on the Mount and several chapters from Isaiah. But there is much more King James language in the Book of Mormon than these long quotations. In his analysis of this language, Skousen set parameters to determine what he considered a quotation. He somewhat arbitrarily determined that a passage in the Book of Mormon that was identical to the standard King James text and was sixteen words or longer could be considered a quotation. Because many of the long passages that come from the King James Bible include multiple word changes, Skousen found only thirty-six word-strings that he considered quotations.

There are more strings that are shorter than sixteen words. These Skousen classified as paraphrastic quotations. He lists eighty-three examples of paraphrastic quotations, including all strings that are between seven and fifteen words long and “a few cases of textual blending where the longest string of identical words can be as low as one or two.”¹

Skousen’s analysis of biblical language in the Book of Mormon yields some surprising findings. First, nearly every biblical quotation comes from the King James Bible, but not the original 1611 version, which one might expect given Skousen’s determination that the language of the Book of Mormon is closer to Early Modern English than to the vernacular of Joseph Smith’s day. Instead, the printing that is most likely quoted in the Book of Mormon was published between 1770 and 1820. Oddly, one particular quotation (“and upon all the ships of Tarshish,” Isa. 2:16, 2 Ne. 12:16) does not appear in the KJB at all but comes from the Masoretic Text, which is both unexpected and puzzling.

Second, “when the Book of Mormon biblical quotation differs from the King James reading, we often find that the original Book of Mormon form of the biblical quote is ungrammatical.”² This often occurs when italicized words in the KJB are either replaced or merely deleted. These words were italicized by the King James translators to indicate that there is no corresponding word in the original manuscripts, but that they were added so that sentences would make sense in English.

Third, there are three anachronistic problems involving biblical quotations: (1) Words appear in the Book of Mormon biblical quotations that the King James translators got wrong; there are also cultural translations that are historically incorrect. (2) The Book of Mormon includes text from the Textus Receptus (the text King James translators relied on) that does not appear in the earliest biblical manuscripts. (3) The Book of Mormon identifies text as being from Isaiah that biblical scholars associate with a “Second Isaiah,” who lived after the fall of Jerusalem, long after Lehi and his family departed. Skousen points out that there are ways to deal with the Second Isaiah problem, but “it isn’t necessary to do so.”³

These anachronisms, Skousen concludes, are problematic “only if we assume that the Book of Mormon translation literally represents what was on the plates.” But the evidence Skousen presents in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 (The Nature of the Original Language) suggests that the Book of Mormon text is based on Early Modern English and that the themes in the book are more connected to the Protestant Reformation than to either Joseph Smith’s time or ancient America. “What this means is that the Book of Mormon is a creative and cultural translation of what was on the plates, not a literal one. Based on the linguistic evidence, the translation must have involved serious intervention from the English-language translator, who was not Joseph Smith.”⁴ This translation was then transmitted to Joseph Smith word for word, which he read to the scribes, who sometimes imperfectly recorded Joseph’s words in the original manuscript.

Skousen and his sometimes-coeditor Stan Carmack claim that the Book of Mormon’s vocabulary, usage, and syntax derive largely from Early Modern English, but this claim raises questions that a peer reviewer mentioned to us in his blind review of an article that Carmack submitted to BYU Studies: “This approach leaves a host of questions unasked, such as why God has a particular investment in early modern English. As an early modernist, I am anything but opposed to this proposition, but the language has no obvious connection either to Book of Mormon peoples or to the 19th century American frontier.” Also, referring to the article’s tendency to simply list a variety of examples where Book of Mormon vocabulary appears in Early Modern English texts, the reviewer commented, “Seeing William Caxton (1473) appear alongside Richard Baxter (1673) as evidence of the same language strikes me as odd. English underwent massive transformation during those two centuries: reading a Caxton incunabulum and a Baxter treatise are two very different experiences, both materially and linguistically. Which English are we really talking about?”⁵

Questions, questions, and more questions. It is obvious from Skousen and Carmack’s research that the text of the Book of Mormon is not in the vernacular of Joseph Smith. It does have many features (including vocabulary) from Early Modern English. But as our reviewer pointed out, Early Modern English is a moving target. Is the Book of Mormon more similar to 1400s EME or 1600s EME or perhaps somewhere in between? From examples given by Skousen and Carmack, it appears that the Book of Mormon translation draws from all versions of EME. And even if you could pinpoint a particular period of EME, why Early Modern English at all? And how does a King James edition from 1770 to 1820 fit into this puzzle? It is obvious that whoever composed the English text of the Book of Mormon had an open copy of the KJB sitting on his desk. According to all eyewitness accounts, Joseph Smith did not. But to imagine that Joseph had memorized long sections of the Bible, especially whole chapters of Isaiah, and regurgitated them to the scribe with significant word changes (often involving italicized words) is more than a bit of a stretch.

The three points Skousen raises about the King James quotations—that most of the quotes come from an edition published between 1770 and 1820 (with the exception of that unexpected phrase from the Masoretic Text), that someone introduced grammatical errors when recording the King James quotes, and that there are troubling anachronisms revealed in the quotations—all suggest that the text of the English Book of Mormon does not really represent what was on the plates, assuming there were plates at all containing an actual history of the Nephites and Jaredites. Skousen contends that the only explanation for these issues is that someone, sometime (perhaps in the 1500s or 1600s?), in translating the original record, added text and then managed the translation over time (including updating King James content from the 1611 translation to a more recent edition) so that the language in the book would be understandable to a reader in the nineteenth century. This managed text was then revealed by miraculous means to Joseph Smith, who read it on either the interpreters or a seer stone and then dictated it to a scribe.

But if the English Book of Mormon was given to Joseph through revelation, then there was a divine hand in it. If so, how do we explain all the human sloppiness? Why not give Joseph the translation of the record as it was originally written? Who decided that the original was unacceptable? Why add material from the King James Bible instead of a translation that would correspond more closely to the most ancient Bible manuscripts? Why introduce anachronisms? Why make the English archaic instead of in Joseph’s vernacular? Why change the King James quotations, including the removal of many italicized words, sometimes making the resulting text ungrammatical? Why is King James language scattered throughout the Book of Mormon, sometimes in innocuous short phrases? If the Nephite account has been embellished with all sorts of text that wasn’t in the original account, how are we to determine what is Nephite (or Jaredite) history and what is not? Given all this, how are we to view Moroni’s famous promise? When we ask if “these things” are “true,” what does “true” even mean, and what does “these” mean? Questions such as these are why I have prayed about the Book of Mormon’s veracity in very specific terms: Is it an accurate record of a real people? But in fifty years of praying, I have never received any sort of answer, except, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series, a peaceful feeling one evening about not having to believe the Book of Mormon is a factual record. But that still doesn’t answer the primary question behind this series: What exactly is the Book of Mormon?

________________

1. Royal Skousen, ed., The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, part 5, volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Studies, 2019), 10.

2. Skousen, King James Quotations, 10.

3. Skousen, King James Quotations, 6.

4. Skousen, King James Quotations, 6.

5. Peer review of article submitted to BYU Studies, in my possession.

Egos Are Like Balloons

 

Egos are like balloons. The bigger they get, the more fragile they are. This completely explains almost all of Donald Trump’s behavior. He is a narcissist through and through, so everything is about his wealth, his power, and his ego. He cares nothing about the well-being of ordinary Americans, unless they can serve to boost his ego. And the bigger his ego gets, the more precarious it becomes. In fact, it is consuming Trump’s life and, unfortunately, is negatively impacting the lives of most Americans.

Yesterday morning (February 5), at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump openly admitted this a bizarre speech that had nothing to do with prayer or the welfare of his fellow citizens. In fact, I would wager that he has never really prayed in his life. Perhaps once or twice for show, but never because he wants to talk to God. Anyway, here is what he said: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

Of course, Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, both the popular vote (by more than 7 million votes) and the electoral college (306 to 232). And contrary to his incessant whining, there was no fraud. He and his lackeys filed 62 lawsuits to try to overturn the election. All but one failed. Thirty were dismissed by judges because they had no merit. Only one was initially decided in Trump’s favor, but it was eventually overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

When Trump says he won the popular vote “the first time,” he is referring to the 2016 election, which he won in the electoral college. But he lost the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes. And that absolutely galls him. He can’t bear to admit that he lost the popular vote to a woman, especially a woman named Hillary Clinton.

So, more than five years later, Trump is still obsessed with the fact that he lost the 2020 election, and he lost the popular vote in 2016. His massive and fragile ego just can’t take it. He’s still trying to rewrite history, trying to convince himself that he really won. What an utterly pathetic man. And to think that a majority of American voters wanted to give this abomination almost unlimited power to soothe his fragile ego. Oh, the damage he has caused, which is only exceeded by the damage he will undoubtedly yet cause in his futile crusade to satisfy his insatiable ego.