One oddity of American governance: New US presidents don’t deliver “State of the Union” addresses during their first weeks in office. Instead, a global audience gets the televised and streamed spectacle of a presidential “joint address” to Congress—the same venue (a packed House chamber) and purpose (laying out a policy agenda), albeit with a different descriptor.
Here, the unorthodox Donald Trump is no different from his predecessors—including himself. Back in 2017, Trump bookended his inaugural address with a February 28 joint address to Congress—the fortieth day of his presidency. Eight years later, Trump’s congressional address came on the forty-fourth day of his “second first term.”
About Tuesday’s address: As with most such speeches on such occasions, it was overly ambitious. For any president, let alone a longwinded dynamo like Trump, a four-pronged “Renewal of the American Dream”—touting his administration’s accomplishments to date; hoped-for economic advancements in the months ahead; a plea for additional funding for border security; bringing peace to two war zones—is the rhetorical equivalent of stuffing ten pounds of goods into a five-pound bag.
In this case, a nearly hundred-minute speech sounded more like a block of Fox News programming than a presidential address in its embrace of hot-button topics like crime, immigration, and gender identity, plus a few heart-tugging human-interest stories. For as long as Trump did talk, he still managed to leave a few matters unexplained, such as how he plans to whittle down the nation’s crippling debt (federal expenditures on interest payments now surpass annual defense spending) and whether there will a Trump defense buildup, plus what, if anything, he intends to do about entitlement obligations between now and January 2029.
The questions now:
1) How long before Trump picks up where he left off, with another significant policy address to fill in some blanks?
(2) Or, does Trump’s second term mirror the first in that big speeches won’t do much of the talking?
Here, let’s turn to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and this web page devoted to presidential speeches and other forms of utterances (statements, press conferences, and so forth). Let’s also limit this to what the Miller Center designates as “speeches” and “addresses,” which suggests preparation in the form of wordsmithing and groupthink (I’m not including “remarks,” as that can vary from prepared words to talking points or off-the-cuff commentary).
Back in 2017, Trump waited four months after his congressional address to give a significant policy speech—a June 29 event at the US Department of Energy during which he announced six new initiatives “to propel this new era of American energy dominance.”
Trump did deliver a prepared speech the following month at the annual National Boy Scout Jamboree, but that was more a political stemwinder than it was a policy spiel. Otherwise, there was no significant policy address until September 19 and the United Nations General Assembly, with Trump offering a worldview none too welcoming for rogue actors like Iran and North Korea (“Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” Trump said of Kim Jong Un).
According to the Miller Center’s count, Trump delivered fourteen post-inaugural speeches or addresses during his first presidential term, five of which (2017’s joint address, three State of the Union addresses, plus a 2021 farewell address) are considered de rigueur for American presidents. That’s keeping in line with the fifteen post-inaugural speeches and addresses that Barack Obama delivered in his first term … with one key difference: Obama’s interest in foreign policy during his first year in office.
In 2009, Obama followed his congressional joint address with a June speech at Egypt’s Cairo University signaling a major shift in US foreign policy (“a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition”).
After that: Obama, in early September, delivered another address to Congress—this one an urgent plea “to deliver on health care.”
And in December, two sets of foreign policy remarks further clarified Obama’s weltanschauung—one at West Point laying out “the way forward in Afghanistan” and the other, Obama’s Nobel Lecture at the Oslo City Hall.
Should Trump follow Obama’s lead and likewise do several speeches over the next nine months further clarifying his intent and ambitions?
The answer: yes, especially when it comes to a foreign policy that has rankled both friends and foes (and received far less attention in Trump’s address than lengthier recitations of inane government spending and border-related injustices).
If Trump were to do so, he should follow the lead of another president: Ronald Reagan.
In his first year in office, Reagan delivered six speeches or addresses, only one of which—a November appearance at the National Press Club to outline arms reduction—could be classified as purely nondomestic.
But in the summer of his second year, Reagan delivered back-to-back speeches in London and Berlin—the former the famous “Westminster Address” in which Reagan made the case for confronting communism (“At the same time, we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?”).
Could Trump do the same this year—travel to two European capitals and explain America’s role on the world stage, on a continent that’s home to a three-year war of attrition which has exhausted several nations’ resources and nerves and caused them to question their alliance with America?
Composing two such addresses might benefit the new administration in that a laborious speechwriting process would help first- and second-tier appointees with philosophical differences come to a clearer consensus on the Trumpian worldview (I defer to my Hoover colleague and Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson on what it takes to craft a memorable foreign policy address despite the State Department and National Security Council’s meddling).
But that’s assuming Trump wants to deliver big addresses, which also means buying into the concept that, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, the era of big speeches is not over.
Keep in mind: Obama’s soaring rhetoric coincided with the onset of not-so-uplifting social media (then-Twitter publicly launching on July 15, 2006, seven months before Obama launched his presidential campaign). Reagan’s policy orations were at a time when cable news was in its infancy (CNN debuting on June 1, 1980, six weeks before Reagan accepted his party’s nomination). John F. Kennedy had neither of those media in his arsenal, maybe one reason why his abbreviated presidency included two dozen speeches and addresses.
To say that Trump’s return to office marks the death knell for presidential speechmaking would seem an overstatement (keep in mind that the man who wants to inherit the MAGA movement—Vice President J. D. Vance—gave a startling address in Munich two weeks before the Oval Office kerfuffle between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy).
Indeed, in the annals of presidential history and its gallery of heroes and rogues, Trump might be the rare example of a very successful politician who sees speeches as a source of irritation. At various stops on the campaign trail last year, he lashed out at misfiring teleprompters and mocked the notion of reading prepared remarks (“Isn’t it nice to have a guy that doesn’t need a teleprompter, a president, a potential president that doesn’t need a teleprompter?”).
As such, perhaps Trump is a sign of a larger societal drift, i.e., the world has become more casual, both in terms of fashion and of how politicians fashion words. Prior to this century, American presidents didn’t dress in “corporate casual.” Nor did they communicate via short bursts on social media.
So maybe Trump and his aversion for big speeches is in keeping with the times—even if time is working against him.
Like many a modern president, the final months of Trump’s second term will be devoted to the unpleasant task of finding a site for his presidential library and a means for funding the shrine (“unpleasant” in that there’s limited space in and around Palm Beach, even though Florida’s legislature is considering a measure that would ban local government from interfering with the library’s construction).
What goes inside a presidential library, other than art and exhibits? Words, sentences, and paragraphs—many of them lifted from major speeches and addresses.
Perhaps that’s not Trump’s lot. His destiny may be that of the first president to harness social media who also chose to etch his Truth Social posts and replies in marble.
As for Trump’s team of speechwriters waiting for that next big assignment? At a time when Elon Musk has the federal workforce on notice, they might be thinking back to Trump’s days as a (non-elected) television star: you’re fired.
