U.S. President Donald Trump's detailed and comprehensive State of the Union speech in front of both houses of Congress on Tuesday served to clearly illustrate the tension that has characterized his presidency ever since he took office.
Trump is torn between his desire to keep his many promises to his ideological, nationalist base and his wish to expand support for his policies on a series of core issues, such as infrastructure, where he would like to see the U.S. revive President Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era economic initiatives. His speech served to illustrate the basic contradiction inherent in Trump's wish to govern effectively on the basis of a consensus and so avoid repeated confrontations and crises with Capitol Hill, like the budget crisis, and his desire to completely distance himself from the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and lead the American nation in a completely different direction.
This inherent contradiction was conspicuous throughout his speech. On one hand, it included a powerful and statesmanlike message calling for cooperation with the Democratic camp. At the same time, Trump reiterated some of the contentious objectives he championed as a presidential candidate, among them ensuring the Guantanamo Bay detention camp remains open, erecting a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and preserving the people's right to keep and bear arms.
So while Trump's speech was impressive insofar as it detailed his administration's economic successes, it lacked a constitutive statement that might have burned his remarks into the nation's memory.
No, this was not former President George W. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002, which, following the September 11 terrorist attack and ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was one for the history books. Neither was this Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address, also known as the Four Freedoms speech, in which he garnered broad public support for increasing U.S. involvement in the war effort. But that might be for the best because in contrast to the Roosevelt and Bush eras, the U.S. he heads does not currently face such immediate and tangible threats.
