At tonight’s State of the Union address, the first since Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives, the tension around Donald Trump seemed to ease, just a bit. When the President implored the Congress to “end revenge politics,” Nancy Pelosi, right behind him, gave an exaggerated, sarcastic clap at Trump. When Trump said that women had filled fifty-eight per cent of new jobs created in the past year, a formation of Democrats in suffragette white (many of whom had got new jobs in November) rose, laughing. The President smiled and acknowledged them. “Don’t sit yet; you’ll like this,” he said, and then pointed out that this Congress had more women than any in history, which led to some vigorous applause. When Trump implored the Democrats to abandon their program of investigation, the cameras found Adam Schiff, the new chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and he just smiled. Most of Trump’s speech was filled with the familiar demagoguery and big talk: Stephen Miller’s snuff-film roll of immigrant crimes, the insistence that Trump had rescued the country from a precipice (“If I had not been elected President of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea, with potentially millions of people killed”), but the Democrats, for the first time, had some recourse.
Since the midterms, U.S. politics feels like it has reached an intermission. Congress is in an ideological stalemate, and the White House seems mainly to be anticipating the slow, corroding drip of congressional investigations through 2019 and the next Presidential race. Having spent the past two months losing a shutdown fight over his demands for nearly six billion dollars for a border wall, the President had an opportunity on Tuesday to set some new priorities. But he had only the same old ones to offer: criminal-justice reform and infrastructure to raise some bipartisan possibilities; anti-immigration bluster and warm words for North Korea to foreclose it. This was a dud of a speech. But it was also a relief to leave it feeling only dulled and deflated. There were no new horrors here.
