Republican and Democrat leaders alike entered Tuesday night anxiously. Each side feared its loudest members would turn the State of the Union into an ugly scene and poison the evening.
Democrats worried about the Squad and about 78-year-old Texas Rep. Al Green, who after 10 terms in Congress seems more comfortable waving signs than writing laws. Republicans worried about the president — specifically, whether he would get dragged into a nasty back-and-forth with congressional activists.
Trump does not pretend the country is more unified than it is. He ran as a builder and a wrecking ball: a candidate with a program and a man eager to force Democrats to defend their most radical positions.
President Donald Trump had another idea.
He had no reason to brawl from the podium, flanked by the vice president and the speaker of the House and standing at the most powerful pulpit in American politics. He set a trap instead. In front of more than 30 million ordinary Americans, Democrats walked into it.
Political junkies live inside the daily partisan trench war. They know the script. The fighting started not long after America’s founding and never really stopped.
Most Americans do not live that way.
They have jobs, kids, bills, errands, sports, church, aging parents, and whatever time remains at the end of the day. With the old monoculture mostly dead, they gather around only a handful of events: a few major sports broadcasts, presidential elections, and the State of the Union.
Viewership has fallen over the decades, but the speech still pulls a massive audience — usually somewhere between 30 million and 40 million people. In modern America, that is a huge number.
For perspective, the finale of “Game of Thrones” drew just under 20 million viewers. The USA-Canada hockey game pulled 18.6 million live viewers. The Super Bowl remains the true annual monocultural event, with around 60 million viewers, but even that scale only underscores the point: the State of the Union still reaches a country-sized audience.
More important than the raw number is who those viewers are.
Many of them do not follow politics closely. They caught the big campaign ads, such as “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” and responded. They saw headlines about riots, crime, and immigration. Maybe they saw footage of crackdowns. Then they went back to their lives.
On Tuesday night, they tuned in again — and watched Trump stage a live study in contrasts.
After spending the first hour of the speech reciting accomplishments and laying out goals, Trump turned toward the increasingly agitated Democrat side of the chamber and began forcing choices.
He challenged them to stand if they put American citizens ahead of illegal immigrants and foreign nationals. They sat.
He put a grieving mother before them — the mother of a young Ukrainian woman murdered on a train in North Carolina — and dared them to remain frozen. They did. Iryna Zarutska may be the only Ukrainian in the world Democrats won’t cheer for.
He highlighted a young woman torn from her family as a child by transgender ideology and the institutions that privilege bureaucrats over parents. Democrats reacted exactly as he wanted.
Even when he managed to draw applause from them — despite every congressional instinct telling members to show nothing — he flipped the moment and used it to needle the institution itself, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the chamber’s most famous suspected symbol of insider trading.
State of the Union speeches are usually built for broad appeal. Presidents of both parties use them to sound larger than their coalition. Barack Obama did this well. However radical his policies, he often sounded like Ronald Reagan in these addresses. He studied the Great Communicator, and it showed. Republicans could call him a liar and an ideologue — and did — but many Americans liked the version of Obama they saw on that stage each year.
Trump operates in a different register and in a different era.
He does not pretend the country is more unified than it is. In both 2016 and 2024, he ran as a builder and a wrecking ball: a candidate with a program and a man eager to force Democrats to defend their most radical positions.
That formula worked in both victories. He laid out a positive vision while tying Democrats to policies many voters reject — open borders, soft-on-crime governance, and transgender ideology aimed at children.
Tuesday night, he did not need a campaign ad buy to run the same play.
He had the pomp, the circumstance, and, most importantly, the audience.
And with the instincts of a once-in-a-generation political talent, he let Democrats supply the contrast for him.
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