The State of the Union will never favor the minority party. By tradition and design, the annual address to a joint session of Congress has morphed into a lengthy free advertisement for the incumbent president. Gone are the days when presidents would give a measure of tough talk, like Gerald Ford did in 1975 when, in the wake of Watergate, as costs of living and mistrust in government were soaring, he confessed that “the state of our union is not good.”
This was Donald Trump’s sixth State of the Union, and after all those spins on his MAGA tilt-a-whirl, it was clear that Democrats still have not figured out how to effectively rebut the president at his annual marquee address.
