State of the Union enters new era
Americans now will be forced to navigate division, dissonance and Twitter diatribes
WASHINGTON – President Trump’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday night was his biggest opportunity to reset his presidency and reshape the capital’s conversation.
Until Wednesday morning, that is. The resonance of the State of the Union has been reduced by the political circumstances of the day and the ways the 45th president communicates with Americans and the world.
Call it the Trump Broadcasting System, powered by Twitter. The president’s personal social media accounts have a bigger audience than the one he’ll reach when reading the prepared remarks loaded into the teleprompter in the House of Representatives chamber. Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress last February drew a live audience measured by Nielsen at 47.74 million people watching on 11 networks. To compare, Trump has 47.2 million followers on Twitter and 24.4 million followers on Facebook.
“The State of the Union used to be the place the administration would lay out huge political initiatives and agenda,” says Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“They may still do that, but everybody in the room knows what really matters is what they pick up on their Twitter feed the next day. And what he tweets the next day has a very high likelihood of contradicting what he said the night before.”
That’s not to say Trump’s speech isn’t
important. It will be closely analyzed for the tone he uses and the substance he outlines on issues such as immigration and infrastructure. The speech details his legislative priorities. And it launches a year that will include crucial midterm elections to determine control of the House.
But there are several reasons the State of the Union looks less consequential for this president than for his predecessors:
Most Americans’ minds already are made up.
Trump not only has the lowest job approval rating of any modern president delivering his first formal State of the Union Address, but it’s also the most stable. Since last March, Trump’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls has been below 45%. His disapproval rating has been above 50%.
The news cycle spins faster than ever.
“A day feels like a month in the Trump presidency, and news cycles change on a dime,” says Aaron Kall, editor and co-author of The State of the Union Is... Memorable Addresses of the Last Fifty Years.
Remember the three-day shutdown of the federal government? It was just last week, but it was quickly supplanted by reports that Trump ordered special counsel Robert Mueller fired and stepped back when White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign. That story was overtaken by the fierce debate over efforts by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo on the origins of the Russia investigation.
A scripted speech is not how Trump prefers to communicate.
Trump has delivered well-received speeches in official forums, including last week’s address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and last year’s address to a joint session of Congress when he was praised for his optimistic, inclusive tone.
Within 48 hours, he posted a series of tweets that called the Russia investigation “a total ‘witch hunt!’ ” and said Democrats “have lost their grip on reality.” Twitter Trump has a freewheeling spontaneity, often laced with attacks on those he sees as opponents, that Teleprompter Trump can’t match.
Not much legislation is likely to be enacted this year.
The most skilled president would have trouble pushing major proposals through Congress this year. The GOP majority in the Senate was narrowed to 51 seats after Democrat Doug Jones won a special election in Alabama. Democrats see little incentive to give the president legislative victories before what they hope will be an election “wave” that helps them win control of the House.