Why Trump’s zig-zagging speech made perfect sense The State of the Union address was designed to revive and strengthen the connection between Trump the president and Trump the candidate.
President Donald Trump stood in condemnation of both parties as mired in a swamp of self-dealing and dysfunction. | Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, as it unfolded, was a dizzying and even disorienting experience, a cascade of rhetorical passages that seemed to contradict each other every few moments.
Appeals for unity and bipartisanship jostled with ideological and cultural scab-picking. Theatrics used by all modern presidents to swell the heart or moisten the eye — We are joined in the gallery tonight by… — were followed by the honking boasts of a MAGA rally.
At first blush this all may have seemed like incoherence, as though the speech was a composite of recommendations from warring factions, every zig offset by a whiplashing zag. But taken as a whole, the address revealed a clear strategic purpose — one designed to revive and strengthen the ideological connection between the Trump of 2019 with the Trump who first began his astonishingly effective takeover of the Republican Party four years ago.
That Trump stood in condemnation of both parties as mired in a swamp of self-dealing and dysfunction. Yes, it takes brass ones — no doubt he’s got ‘em — for this Trump to deliver a sermon on putting the national interest over vindictiveness and partisanship.
But it was also a sign that Trump recognizes the potential damage he incurred by offering to “own” the federal government shutdown and that being seen as the leader of an unpopular establishment party sacrifices the insurgent and outsider nature of his own brand.
The Trump brand is, at its core, against free trade, against illegal immigration and against “endless wars.” So, long sections of his speech Tuesday night made the case on these subjects anew, in plain-spoken language that in the past has won nods of affirmation from millions of working class white voters who in an earlier age were natural Democrats. His calls for big spending on infrastructure rubbed the same muscles; ditto for pledges to use federal power to lower what he called unfairly high drug prices.
For the social conservatives in his base there was a sharp attack on late-term abortions, which was followed with a jarring non-transition by a proposal to increase military spending. Trump’s coalition skews old and patriotic. So there was an homage to the 75th anniversary of D-Day, still several months away, by introducing very old veterans of the invasion, who actually were not all that old 35 years ago, the first time Ronald Reagan merged D-Day commemoration with a presidential reelection in 1984.
For all of Trump’s boasts that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without dimming the loyalties of his supporters, he knows that for many of them this is not true. They vote for him because they think the alternatives are corrupt or left-wing kooks. So it was no surprise that he found time to inveigh against “the new calls in adapt socialism in our country.”
It can be too reductionist, arguably, to interpret every word of a major presidential address through the prism of reelection politics. Historically, though, the State of the Union immediately following a president’s first mid-term has served as the de facto first major statement of the campaign to follow. It was that for Bill Clinton (shellacked by Republicans in 1994 even more than Trump was by Democrats in 2018), and for George W. Bush (fresh off a mid-term victory in 2002) and for Barack Obama (fresh off a repudiation by the GOP in the mid-terms of 2010).
And it is precisely through this prism that all the jolts and swerves of Trump’s speech can actually be seen as logical and linear.
The speech started out with a brief glimpse into an alternative universe, one in which Trump embraces the populist rhetoric and category-killing brand of politics that propelled him past conventional politicians of both parties in 2016 but discarded the vulgarity and taunting and egomania that is also central to his persona.
It is a David Gergen-esque parlor game in which Richard Nixon was still a crafty, Machiavellian statesman but not a paranoiac law-breaker; Clinton would have unified the country if he kept certain appetites on tighter leash; Bush had not abandoned the “compassionate conservative” message of 2000 for the divide-and-conquer politics of 2004; and Obama had not led with a polarizing health care agenda and had done more outreach to Republicans.
Trump on Tuesday night played along with the what-if game for a couple minutes. “There is a new opportunity in American politics, if only we have the courage to seize it,” he said. “Victory is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country… We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution — and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good.”
Trump’s alliterative lullaby soon ended. A few lines later he made clear that his notion of bipartisanship would be for the opposition would be to drop “ridiculous partisan investigations,” even as a prosecutor with a Republican lineage has already secured convictions against several of his former close aides.
There followed attacks on Obamacare, invocation of the “caravans” of immigrants who figured so prominently in Trump’s rally-the-base speeches before the mid-terms, and new appeals to build a wall across the southern border with Mexico and halt the violence and crime that he said accompanies illegal immigration.
It was a redundant reminder to the Gergen fantasists that for Trump — and for most politicians in both parties eager to play on a national stage — modern politics is far more about mobilization of supporters through energizing confrontations than it is about persuasion of a dwindling group of people who are genuinely wavering over which side to support.
Of course with the State of the Union there are rituals that transcend changing fashions of politics. It used to be that recognizing a hero in the audience was like the salt of these occasions — a sprinkle or two to enliven the substance — but increasingly it has seemed these are more like a main course. There were a dozen occasions when Trump paused to recognize honored guests he had invited to the gallery.
In fact there is no way even the traditional pageantry and solemnity of the State of the Union can survive intact an encounter with Trump and the reactions he inspires.
The electric atmospherics between two groups of American politicians who loathe each other were more arresting than any of Trump’s specific words. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at several moments was ostentatiously rifling through her paper copy of the speech rather than looking at him.