Trump’s first State of Union marks rancorous moment for California’s liberal North Coast
Lynda Bengtsson-Davis, a transgender Marine Corps veteran from Fort Bragg, will be seated in the House of Representatives visitors gallery Tuesday night for the biggest regular address in American politics - and her presence will be part of the politicking.
Bengtsson-Davis, whose bid to re-enlist in the Air National Guard has been stalled by President Donald Trump’s attempted ban on military service for transgender individuals, is the guest of North Coast Rep. Jared Huffman at Trump’s first State of the Union speech to a joint session ?of Congress.
“I think he’s wrong,” Bengtsson-Davis said of the man she refers to as the commander-in-chief.
Transgender service “goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War,” she said, referring to Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Continental Army for 17 months.
Huffman, D-San Rafael, said he invited Bengtsson-Davis, the information technology manager for the city of Fort Bragg, to send Trump a message.
“There are real people out there who are hurt by his hateful rhetoric and actions,” he said.
“I wanted to serve my country like anyone else,” Bengtsson-?Davis said.
Political theater will hit a peak Tuesday night when the ornate amphitheater of the House chamber fills with more than ?500 lawmakers, plus generals, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices and hundreds of guests in the galleries. A television audience likely much larger than California’s population of 39 million will be tuned in as all major broadcast and cable channels carry the address, which will also be streamed on Facebook, ?Twitter and YouTube.
Front and center will be a man who won the presidency as a brash and showy real estate developer and reality TV star, and who has sought to reshape the office with his confrontational rhetoric and volatile approach to governing.
Adored by the right wing and reviled by the left, Trump rarely speaks in public but dominates the news cycle via Twitter, including his July tweet on transgender service that caught the Pentagon by surprise and was struck down by the courts.
On Tuesday night, he is expected to read from a teleprompter and stay on script as he did in his first address to Congress in February.
That speech and his demeanor were widely described as “presidential,” winning kudos from Fox News commentators, Republicans and even some Democrats.
“A home run,” House Speaker Paul Ryan declared as he walked from the House chamber.
But Huffman, a vocal critic of the current administration, said last week he was unimpressed by the notion that Trump had behaved as a president should. “That’s a low bar,” he said.
Nearly a year later, Trump will address the nation - and the world - at a critical juncture at the start of his second year in the White House.
With the success of his tax reform measure and an ongoing economic surge for momentum, he faces a trio of daunting challenges in the next two months: the expiration of the short-term federal funding bill; the deadline for extending a program that protects immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children; and the debt-limit deadline.
David McCuan, a Sonoma State University political scientist, said Trump needs a “devilishly large grand bargain” to overcome those hurdles.
On immigration, he needs a plan that satisfies Democratic demands for preserving DACA, the Obama-era program that offered work permits and deportation reprieves for about 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, while also passing muster with the House Freedom Caucus, a hard-right bloc with enough members to thwart any Senate bill it doesn’t like, McCuan said.
Immigration policy looms large in Trump’s plan to pour billions of dollars into rebuilding the nation’s roads, airports and bridges, an initiative that has bipartisan support but, according to McCuan, will falter without a labor force bolstered by undocumented workers.
Sonoma County’s post-fire rebuilding is already hitting obstacles with a shortage of construction workers, while the immigration front has been roiled by federal workplace sweeps that this month included four 7-Eleven stores in Sonoma County.
Expectations for Trump’s performance Tuesday night vary with political perspective. About the only agreement between Huffman and Edelweiss Geary, Sonoma County Republican Party chairwoman, is that Trump will devote considerable attention to his achievements.
“All presidents take credit for the good stuff,” Geary said.
For Trump that includes the tax reform bill he got through a Congress “that is rather divided,” she said. Whether the modest tax cuts for the working class will afford him and his party an election-year boost is a subject of debate.
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