Why This Year's SOTU Is Different
It never changes public opinion. It's usually important anyway. Not now.
You really don’t need to watch this year’s State of the Union speech tonight. In normal times I recommend, but not this time.
First of all, these speeches never have significant effects on public opinion about the president; nor do they change minds about the president’s policy choices. Yes, even now, after decades of evidence to the contrary, we still have headlines asking whether a State of the Union address can “fix” Trump’s awful “polling” and articles about how “Trump will have the spotlight as he seeks to sell his victories and convince a skeptical public that he is indeed focused on improving their lives.” We know the answer: Any hope that the speech could “reignite the presidency’s momentum” when it comes to public opinion is wishful thinking.
If it never worked for Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama – all of whom were much better speakers, especially in this format – it’s not going to happen for Donald Trump.1 Especially since they at least (especially Reagan) had the advantage of a captive audience, with fewer alternatives. Even back then those who watched the speech tended to be the president’s strongest supporters; every year, that presumably becomes even more the case. Not only that, but at one point even those who didn’t watch could hardly escape seeing secondary stories about it. That too is much less true now.
Nevertheless, State of the Union speeches have been quite important in the past.
They had important symbolic value as an occasion in which the leadership of the republic all joined together for one event.
They didn’t change what people think – but they could change what people think about. Presidents can do a fair amount of agenda setting, and the institutionalization of that came in the yearly addresses where presidents set out what they wanted to happen.
And perhaps most of all: The process of producing the State of the Union speech was a key part of the policy-making process. It established a deadline for decisions to be made (and without a deadline many decisions never do get made). Its limits force the administration to prioritize, with all kinds of serious fights breaking out over which things are important enough to get mentioned in the laundry lists that most regular viewers ignore. And the need to make news can produce presidential endorsement of new or newly important programs.
All of that is basically irrelevant Tuesday night.
The symbolism of the republic? Trump bulldozes over that every which way. The elements will all still be there, but for now at least their meaning has been destroyed, or at least seriously disrupted, and we’re probably better off being clear-eyed about that than pretending that we’re still seeing is the real thing.2
Agenda setting? Trump barely has a legislative agenda at this point, and we all know by now that whatever he says he’s planning will be either pure fiction or subject to sharp changes as he loses interest in one whim and TACOs out on another. Besides, he’d much rather make up phony stories about how everything was terrible until he showed up and made everything perfect, perhaps with a recitation of his (very, very) long list of grievances. That’s something, but it’s not agenda setting.
One never needed to watch the speech for the preparation for it to be important, but one could see clues to the policy-making process and what it had produced. But there’s no real policy process any more, at least as we’ve known it. Instead, there’s whatever whims the president has, and whatever projects various people in the administration freelance at. The latter are probably more interested in keeping their projects quiet; publicity from a major presidential speech could risk their ability to get away with whatever they’re up to.
Of course, there’s always a possibility that Trump will make important news anyway. Just remember that he may be governing as as if he were an autocrat who can ignore the law, the Constitution, and the rest of the government, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what he wants will actually happen. Acting as an authoritarian leader sometimes works, but often doesn’t.
Basically, unless you need to watch for professional reasons, I don’t see any reason to watch.
No, Clinton’s 1995 State of the Union wasn’t what made him popular after a disastrous 1994 midterms. It was actually the transition from the slow recovery from the 1991-1992 recession to the booming economy of the late 1990s that did that trick.
Put it this way: Matt Glassman says (in his pre-Trump post) that the president “tells the legislature what he believes needs to be done, and then he asks the legislature to do it” (his emphasis). Trump’s as likely to say he’ll do it, or order Congress to do it, as he is to ask. And as for the rest of it, whether Trump behaves himself Tuesday night or not, he regularly treats everyone else in government as fundamentally illegitimate.