It was spectacle as survival strategy.
In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line. He did not seem concerned with making the case that he gets it when it comes to the issue Americans are most worried about. “Affordability,” he said, was part of a “dirty, rotten lie” perpetuated by the Democrats.
Instead, with the slashing style of a natural campaigner and the instincts of a onetime reality television producer, he spent the better part of two hours baiting the ranks of incensed Democrats in the chamber and endeavoring to define them to the electorate as “sick,” unpatriotic and utterly out of step with the values of most Americans.
“These people are crazy, I’m telling ya, they’re crazy,” Mr. Trump said at one point, while relaying the story of a young person who had been forced to undergo a gender transition. “Boy oh boy, we’re lucky we have a country with people like this — Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time.”
Going into the speech, Mr. Trump knew that he needed to use it to maneuver out of a politically treacherous moment for himself and his party. A majority of Americans oppose how Mr. Trump is pursuing his anti-immigration agenda, and more than 70 percent of them think his priorities are in the wrong place. His approval rating has plummeted to 41 percent.
His solution was to wrap himself in the imagery of American heroism with staged asides throughout the speech while throwing the blame for every problem, from the security of elections to the state of the economy, back on his opponents.
In a number of cases, Democrats gave Mr. Trump the confrontations he sought.
Representative Al Green of Texas, who was ejected from the chamber last year for waving his cane at Mr. Trump, was once again removed after he held up a sign proclaiming “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES” — a reference to a racist video Mr. Trump recently shared on social media.
Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois got up and walked out rather than “take another minute” of the speech. And Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s, was one of a handful who yelled at him.
“You’ve killed Americans!” she shouted as Mr. Trump talked about immigration enforcement.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the president shot back.
But if Mr. Trump drew the contrasts he wanted to draw inside the chamber, it was not clear how much effect his performance would have outside of it, where the political realities for him and his party are bracing.
The killing of U.S. citizens by immigration agents and scenes of children being detained have undercut public approval for his deportation campaign despite his success in largely closing the border to illegal immigration. His base remains fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein files and whether the administration has been fully transparent in making public all that is known about those who consorted with him, including Mr. Trump. Last week, the Supreme Court struck down Mr. Trump’s preferred method for implementing tariffs, a keystone of his economic and foreign policy agenda.
If Mr. Trump felt defensive about any of this, it came out as defiant. On Tuesday evening, he looked at a row of stone-faced Supreme Court justices and told them his tariff plans would continue under the “legal power that I as president have to make a new deal.”
Democrats, sensing divides among Republicans about how Mr. Trump is pursuing his agenda and seeking polling moving their way, remain confident about the midterm elections. In a rebuttal address for the Democrats, Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said that Mr. Trump had largely avoided the concerns of everyday Americans.
“He lied, he scapegoated and he distracted,” Ms. Spanberger said. She closed her speech with a call for Democrats running in this fall’s midterms to focus on the economy.
During the speech, Mr. Trump tried to shift the focus to his preferred topics. He offered little explanation about why he is threatening to launch more military strikes against Iran, saying that he would prefer to end the country’s nuclear program through diplomacy, but that he would “never” allow Tehran to have a nuclear weapon — “Can’t let that happen.”
Circling, always, back to Democrats, he called them cheaters and liars, assailing them for their opposition to legislation that purports to address his unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.
He said that he had appointed Vice President JD Vance to combat the “corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation” by tackling widespread fraud, name-checking several Democratic-controlled states, including Minnesota and California. Mr. Trump, who has himself been convicted on fraud charges, then suggested that the vice president may be able to clear up the budget deficit.
“He’ll get it done,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re able to find enough of that fraud — we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
Mr. Trump kicked off his discordant address dutifully enough, hailing a “golden age of America” where the stock market is at record highs, retirement accounts are overflowing, and new investments are coming into the country by the trillion — “Everybody’s up, way up,” Mr. Trump said. He touted the influx of “80 million barrels” of oil from “our new friend and partner Venezuela,” without first mentioning the U.S. military’s audacious capture of the country’s leader.
But it did not take long for Mr. Trump to switch into emcee mode. He invited the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team into the chamber, spending several minutes associating himself with their victory and announcing the first of several awards he doled out: a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Team U.S.A.’s goalie, Connor Hellebuyck.
“This will be a year to celebrate our country and the heroes who kept it free,” Mr. Trump said.
The speech descended into division from there.
As he recounted, sometimes in graphic detail, the stories of people who’d persevered through unimaginable tragedies or survived violence, Mr. Trump seemed attuned to whether or not Democrats were standing and applauding each person. He recounted the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was stabbed to death on a train last year in graphic detail. Ms. Zarutska’s mother was in the chamber, weeping as the president spoke. Mr. Trump finished telling Ms. Zarutska’s story and turned immediately to the Democrats.
“How do you not stand?” Mr. Trump asked.
With one manufactured moment after another, it became clear that the goal of the speech was not to unveil new policies or acknowledge the anxieties of Americans who find housing too expensive or are struggling to pay bills. Instead, Mr. Trump created the sort of social media-ready content that his administration has thrived on to push through one unflattering news cycle into the next.
Ever aware of the camera, Mr. Trump said that he wanted Americans to “see clearly what their representatives really believe,” and asked every person seated in the chamber to make a choice.
“So tonight I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle,” Mr. Trump said. “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.”
Several Democrats stayed seated. Mr. Trump — failing to mention the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens, by immigration agents in Minnesota — basked in the applause from Republicans before his eyes slid over to the other side of the room.
“Isn’t that a shame?” Mr. Trump said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, quickly jumped on social media to make the point of the stagecraft explicit. The seated Democrats, he said, “is the most shocking image in the history of the US Congress.”
Congress has seen its share of shocking images over the years, and Mr. Trump was delivering his address inside the same chamber that a mob of supporters tried to storm a little more than five years earlier in an effort to keep him in office despite his election loss.
Mr. Trump, a target of several assassination attempts, recounted the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. He had another request for Americans: “We must totally reject political violence of any kind.”
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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