U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on March 3.Leah Millis/Reuters
Seven weeks into his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has issued a spate of executive orders (76), social media messages (around five a day), formal and informal public remarks (19), press gaggles (4), press interviews (2) and in-person dressing-downs of foreign leaders (2).
On Tuesday evening, he will have more to say – in a setting that has all the trappings (a speech from the rostrum of the House of Representatives), pomp (the natural soundtrack of all things Trump) and circumstance (unprecedented in American history) of a State of the Union message.
Like the past seven presidents just entering office, Mr. Trump’s speech, taking place at the beginning of his term, is technically not delivering the address required by the U.S. Constitution. (The document says the President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”)
Even more than his Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress, as his remarks on a similar occasion in 2017 were formally titled, this speech will be watched for hints of the administration’s course for the next weeks of the most tumultuous beginning of a presidential term since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1933, during the Great Depression.
In a period of enormous change, the Tuesday speech will stand as a measure of how much Mr. Trump himself has changed.
In his 2017 remarks, he expressed strong support for NATO (which he described as “an alliance forged through the bonds of two world wars that dethroned fascism, and a Cold War, and defeated communism”); spoke of “fair trade” but said nothing about tariffs (“I believe strongly in free trade”); and saluted his Canadian counterpart (“with the help of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, we have formed a council with our neighbours in Canada” on an initiative to boost the efforts of female entrepreneurs).
No one expects the 2025 speech to replicate any of that.
Since January’s inauguration, the President has upbraided the Atlantic alliance and shattered its unity over assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia, replaced the drive for broader free-trade measures that prevailed in the United States for a third of a century with a fresh America First doctrine of protectionism, and has taunted Mr. Trudeau and attacked Canadian sovereignty.
And on Monday, he confirmed that he will move ahead with 25-per-cent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico as of midnight, the same day of his 2025 speech.
Mr. Trump’s 2017 speech was not the address of a man with small goals and little confidence. But at the beginning of this second term, the President’s ambitions are even more sweeping and his confidence in prevailing – against his Democratic opponents, against a Congress that he has bent to his desires, perhaps even against courts that rule against him – seems boundless.
“Trump is sitting pretty right now,” said Claire Wofford, a political scientist at the College of Charleston. “Tuesday night he has to do nothing but revel in the moment he’s created. I expect nothing less than the full throated, ‘I am the voice of the people, they have spoken overwhelmingly, and I am doing exactly what they want me to do.’”
It was on such occasions that James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine (1823), FDR outlined the Four Freedoms of the future world he envisioned (1941), and George W. Bush spoke in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of the “axis of evil” comprising Iran, Iraq and North Korea (2002).
Mr. Trump’s remarks will be delivered in the very hall where lawmakers will determine whether there is a government shutdown in 10 days; whether there will be tax cuts; whether Congress will respond to presidential threats not to spend money it appropriated; whether lawmakers will tolerate the executive branch tinkering with agencies created by the legislative branch; and whether the power to impose tariffs returns to Capitol Hill, where the country’s founders specified it should reside.
Speeches of this nature – Mr. Trump’s 2017 remarks were intended, he said, to “deliver a message of unity and strength” – often set out presidents’ perspectives and goals. The Trump speech after taking the oath of office in January had the air of a State of the Union address more than an inaugural address, so this week’s remarks almost certainly will be an extension of that speech.
“Presidents can be expected to stretch the truth a bit in these kinds of occasions,” said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “But Trump is excessive in this regard. He is not grounded in the truth.”
One area where Mr. Trump is expected to clarify his intentions is the profile of the United States in the war in Ukraine, described over the weekend by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as “rapidly changing” and emerging as a foreign policy that “largely coincides with our vision.”
For three-quarters of a century, the Republican Party has defended the rights, and ultimately the potential independence, of the nations subsumed in the old Soviet Union – so much so that president Dwight Eisenhower signed 1959 legislation creating the National Captive Nations Committee and compelling future presidents to proclaim Captive Nations Week. Mr. Trump did so the third week of every July of his first presidency.
Perhaps the audience for the President’s remarks – lawmakers, dignitaries, diplomats, millions of Americans and listeners beyond American borders – will recall Abraham Lincoln’s words during a similar moment in 1862. They came when the country was consumed in a great Civil War, remarks that might be embraced both by Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents, both of whom believe – for far different reasons, from far different perspectives – that this is a critical juncture in the country’s passage.
“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour to the latest generation,” Lincoln said.
He added: “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”