1/29/2018

TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: ” ‘American carnage’ appears to be out. Bipartisanship is in. And not everyone is happy about it.
When President Trump delivers his first State of the Union address on Tuesday [1-30-18] at 9 p.m. ET, his most fervent supporters are anxious that he will squander the most high-profile moment of his presidency with a soft speech that bends more to the predilections of the political establishment in Washington and less to the populist army that sent him there to drain the swamp.
Mr. Trump has always veered between ideological extremes in his speeches: He railed against ‘American carnage’ in his inaugural address last year, then gave a speech to a joint session of Congress a few weeks later that seemed restrained and conventional compared with the chaotic first weeks of his tenure. He has delivered partisan red meat at his campaign-style rallies, promising to rip up Nafta and demand better treatment for the United States around the world, but at a gathering of the globalist elite in Davos, Switzerland, last week, he spent most of his speech trumpeting the United States as a place to do business…
At the White House and among Republicans on Capitol Hill, there is a keen awareness that Mr. Trump benefits from extraordinarily low expectations of his ability to stay on message and deliver a coherent speech, given his tendency to ramble off script and insert divisive notes, insulting asides and mystifying non sequiturs that almost always overshadow the topic at hand. Given that, officials believe, the president will be judged a success in many quarters as long as he reads faithfully from his script, resisting the urge to respond to perceived slights or settle scores and instead sticking to a positive message that can resonate with a wide swath of Americans.”

-Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Some Supporters Fear Trump Will Lose Hard Edge in State of Union Speech,” The New York Times online, Jan. 29, 2018