President Donald Trump used his first official State of the Union of his second term to bait Democrats into a televised confrontation on immigration while offering only limited clarity on Iran, speaking on Tuesday night at the US Capitol in Washington.
The address mattered less for any neat legislative blueprint than for what it revealed about the presidency Trump is running right now: politically defensive on prices, theatrically aggressive towards opponents, and deliberately vague where the stakes are highest abroad. Some claims were plainly contestable, some were broadly grounded in reality, and the unanswered questions will now hang over Thursday's scheduled US Iran talks in Geneva.
