Size is not everything.

Sometimes more is less.

Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening. “It’s gonna be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” he had said beforehand.

No, it was gonna be long because he loves the sound of his own voice.

Trump is all about superlatives. Everything he does has to be the biggest, the strongest, the mostest. Who cares that he managed to say almost nothing with all those words?

Quantity over quality; that’s Trump in a nutshell. There’s lots of it and it’s all shit.

The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy.

That’s one way of putting it. Another is that he’s just too stupid now to do anything else. I say now because I don’t know if he was better at it in the past, but I can certainly see in the present that he’s not what you’d call eloquent.

CNN’s latest survey had Trump at a sixty-three-per-cent disapproval rating, and just a thirty-six-per-cent approval one; other surveys show similarly brutal numbers. Trump, in other words, has sunk close to post-January 6th territory with the public—not exactly the moment for a speech that leaned hard into the President’s Panglossian conviction that a country with him as its leader must be doing pretty damn great.

Well Trump doesn’t think about it in those terms. Trump thinks about it as another awesome opportunity to strut his stuff, the way he did when he blathered at the captive military bigwigs back in September for a very very long time.

Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.

And that was his doing! He made them win gold medals! He trained them! He gave birth to them!

First as tragedy, then as farce.