Well, what a fucking surprise

How about we start calling these ridiculous claims what they are: lies.

The heart of darkness.  The heart of Hell.

Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress early last year attracted at total of 47.7 million viewers, for example, while former President Barack Obama had 48 million in Jan. 2010 and 52 million in Feb. 2009 and former President George W. Bush had 62 million in Jan. 2003 and 51.9 million in Jan. 2002, according to Nielsen.

  The Hill

State of the Union addresses are just smoke-blowing. They could be fifteen minutes long and still get everything - which is never anything but self-flattery and bullshit - in. By all rights, this president, who is so outrageous and predictably unpredictable, should have drawn enormous numbers of people just waiting to hear or see what outrage he might offer. The fact that the viewer numbers were as comparatively low as they were is a sign that we don't even care about that any more. The country is apparently exhausted with this asshole.

It was the most elaborate of charades, the most sophisticated of masquerades, that played itself out in the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night. The amount of pretense required to keep all sensible people—which is to say, any person who was not a Republican—in their chairs must have been heroic.

[...]

Everyone had to pretend that a freak show was Shakespeare, and that a rumbling, stumbling geek was Lincoln, and that the whole tableau unfolding before the Congress was somehow made noble despite the obvious fact that the whole event was an endless procession of lies and half-truths, and that the only truly remarkable thing about the speech was that it was such a perfectly round and complete crock of shit.

  Charles P Pierce

After a night’s reflection, I have come to the conclusion that, while delivering his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the president* really didn’t know what he was saying. By this, I don’t mean that he didn’t understand the subjects he was discussing; that is a given with this president*. (For example, when the president* discussing “beautiful clean coal,” he not only is discussing something that doesn’t exist, he’s also discussing something he doesn’t understand, even in the theoretical sense.) I mean that he was not wholly aware of the words that he was speaking.

  Charles P Pierce

Pretty sure he was doped up. I didn't watch the charade, but I've seen some clips, and like all his telelprompter speeches, he sounded sedated.

My evidence for this is the fact that, before the address began, we were handed a copy of the prepared text so that we could follow along and, in the not inconsiderable possibility that the president* would pause to bite the head off a live chicken, mark where in the text he chose to do so. Generally, these texts are printed on official stationery and they are presented essentially as a document in conventional prose. Instead, for reasons known only to god, what we were handed were copies of the speech as the president* would read it from the podium. Words and phrases he was supposed to emphasize were written in all caps, not unlike what you’d see in the angry part of a Tweet. For example:

“As I promised the American People from this podium 11 months ago, we enacted the BIGGEST TAX CUTS AND REFORMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

This curious happenstance enabled us to watch in real time as the president* utterly botched the stagecraft of his address. He blew through most of the capitalized points of emphasis, only occasionally leaning into them the way he was supposed to. So, even on its most basic level, the speech was completely unbalanced in what it chose to emphasize.

[...]

[T]here is such an overwhelming sense of the malignantly whimsical to everything he says and does that nothing seems important, and there is evanescence where there should be emphasis. Nobody knows where the applause lines are any more.

There aren't any. But, if you watched the Republican side of the aisle, they were everywhere. Perhaps they had a cheerleader who cued them.