Presidents use television for lots of reasons. Eisenhower used it to message cuddly. Bill Clinton used it to message cool. Barack Obama used it to message compassionate.
For Donald Trump, TV has served more purposes than most, including a chance to gain dominion over our mindshare (see under: all those televised rallies in the first campaign) or to seem like a martyr in the face of evil (see under: the 2024 RNC appearance right after the assassination attempt) — both of which helped him win elections many pollsters saw him losing.
Tuesday night’s appearance on all major networks for the State of the Union required some particular television magic. Trump’s approval ratings are abysmal, with the numbers consistently in the 35-40 percent range, a double-digit drop from a year ago. Independents, who will be key to many midterm races, believe the country is worse off today than a year ago to the tune of nearly 70 percent.
Could Trump use television to pull another polling and ultimately electoral miracle? That was the question hovering above the SOTU, and Trump responded by trying two key prongs.
The first was old-fashioned showmanship. Having been gifted the specter of a major U.S. win on the international Olympic stage, Trump grabbed the box and tore off the bow. The dramatic entrance of the United States men’s hockey team into the gallery early in the speech, complete with gold medals and USA sweaters, had all the trappings of a reality-show triumph. Mark Burnett, Trump’s maker and mentor, would be proud.
Members of the Team USA Men’s Hockey Team, including goalie Connor Hellebuyck, wave to the audience as U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump’s talk about all the “winning” the U.S. is doing can’t be focused on affordability, which is a growing challenge for many Americans and seen largely as a loss So the president shifted to a kind of winning we all agreed on. Toss in some “U-S-A” chants, some good-natured jokes about goalie Connor Hellebuyck and the sight of Jack Hughes’ heroically toothless grin, and you have the makings of a perfect Trump small-screen spectacle in line with so many of his other effective small-screen spectacles.
Whatever your politics, the moment was great by pure TV standards. Sure, there were the five athletes who were conspicuously absent. Yes, ICE and inflation concerns continue to rock the country. But the scene on national television did what all good showmanship is supposed to do — make you forget about the facts and get caught up in the moment.
But this is the modern era, and television can’t just be used for great television moments. So Trump went to another trick, one honed by his years of dominating and mastering social media. He crafted a spectacle on TV he knew would go viral — knew would engage and engage again on all the platforms that prized the verb.
He asked Democrats to stand up.
“If you agree with this statement then stand up and show your support,” he called out to the chamber, proceeding to read the statement, “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
This substantively meaningless statement is of course an obvious trap, and a pretty brilliant one. If the Democrats do stand up, they look subservient to Trump and his ICE agenda and he affirms his power. If they don’t, they look petulant and dissenting of the first part of his message, about protecting Americans. They didn’t stand, and took the lesser of two evils.
Trump then implemented the next phase of his neat one-two plan, riding the sitting for all it was worth. He shook his head in performative disappointment and exclaimed, “Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself! Not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Having crafted the perfect feelgood spectacle moment, which is what television is made for, Trump had now crafted the perfect outrage spectacle moment, which is what social media is made for. Needless to say, the bit did exactly what it was meant to do, going viral and causing many right-wing influencers to shriek online about how awful Democrats were. I suspect not much will be remembered about the speech itself and its awkward combination of fearmongering about immigrants and Panglossian visions of an America on the rise. But we will remember the afterburn of these two moments — a smiling USA Hockey Team, and a sitting USA congressional bloc.
Donald Trump concludes his remarks during the State of the Union address in the House Chamber.
The bad news, if we care about democracy, is that television and digital platforms have now been turned over to such shenanigans. Presidents have always used the medium for the message; to decry that is to be naive. But before Trump they’ve rarely tried to poison it — turn it into something whose sole purpose is to get us angry. Given how effective Trump has been politically over the last decade, there’s not a ton of reason to think it will stop; the outrage-farming will probably be adopted by plenty of future Democrats and Republicans alike. The medium may be the message. Unfortunately, that message is now fear and anger about other Americans.
But the good (or at least better) news, if we care about democracy, is that these manipulative moments may in fact be losing their effectiveness. We’ll see what the latest president poll numbers show, but early anecdotal reports, like the swing-voter panel CNN convened, did not seem to go for it. Creating viral outrage moments is not the electoral tool it was a decade ago when Trump began his disruptive journey — our social media itself is too divided, too wary, for even shrewd tricks like this to break through and sway undecideds. Presidents will always find new ways to have the medium deliver the message. But the angry message, at least, may not land like it used to.
