Joel Pollock (8:31)
Well, I tried to look at it in a number of different ways, and I wrote about it at the California Post from my perspective, using my tools, the way that I would write it as a political observer. And next I'll get to how Scott would have seen it, but I thought it was one of his best speeches ever. Yet it was also a very partisan speech. And so I wrestled for some time with the question of whether a partisan speech in the State of the Union could also be a great speech. And I think he pulled it off. And the way he pulled it off was he did not try to establish national unity by talking about the Republicans and the Democrats coming together. That's the old model. And I think he actually tried that a couple of times in his early State of the Union addresses. But what he did instead was he went outside of politics, and he brought heroes into the room that everybody could identify with. The hockey team, the soldiers, the National Guardsman who was wounded, the mother of the refugee who was murdered. He brought people in who could transcend the parties. So he beat up on the Democrats quite a bit, but also said, our national unity is really outside of this chamber. And he almost emphasized the point physically by bringing people into the room from outside. They weren't seated in the gallery. Almost all of his guests were people who were waiting outside in the hallway, and he would bring them in. The Olympic team, the Medal of Honor winner. There were people coming in all the time. He brought the nation into the room. And I think that was a deliberate physical gesture. And I've written about that before, how there's never been a president who has used the room itself almost as a musical instrument. You know, if you go into a church with a pipe organ, the building is the instrument, because you can actually see the pipes usually on the exterior of the building, sometimes inside as well. But the resonance that gives the organic sound is the building. And Trump is the organist in the chamber. He really uses the physical space, not just by projecting his voice, but by bringing people in and out. And then last night, a new technique he really drew attention to, which was standing versus sitting. We're used to that, right? We're used to the party in power standing and applauding the party that's in the opposition sitting and frowning. But Democrats came in and said, we're going to be silent. We're just not going to say anything or do anything. And they've done that in a few years past. But I think Trump took that as an opportunity this time and said, okay, you're going to sit there. Whatever you agree with, stand. If you disagree, sit. And so then he set up this series of questions that they had to sit for. So visually and physically, that created something that was very useful. And I'm kind of already getting into my Scott analysis Here, but that's as far as mine went. I mean, that was basically what I said. So now, how would Scott have looked at this? Well, I gave you a little hint just now. Scott always said that visual persuasion is always better. And what Trump did was he basically showed the nation visually. He even gestured, you know, look, look, look, you know, look at these people. They're sitting down. They're sitting down for American citizens come first. They're sitting down for this poor woman who was murdered. Why don't you stand up for that? You know, he. He made this visual case of the difference between the two parties. Now, that's very powerful in a midterm election year. And I think that is what many Republicans took from the speech. They took a sense of confidence, not necessarily because he talked about how successful his policies had been or the good economic news. Democrats can talk about some of the bad economic news because the economic news is never all good or all bad. But what he really did was draw a clear distinction between the two parties. And that gives the Republicans something to run on. And what the parties need on both sides is they need something to believe in, something to run on. Abigail Spanberger, who gave the response, I thought she was a terrible choice for the response if you're trying to reach the nation. On the other hand, probably a pretty good choice if you're a Democrat. Let me explain that. Abigail Spanberger ran as a moderate. She even said she would not redraw the congressional districts in Virginia. She has governed as a radical, and she's redistricting Virginia from a 6 Democrat, 5 Republican state to a 10 Democrat, 1 Republican state. It's the most egregious partisan gerrymander in the whole country. So you wouldn't have her after the president because in a way, she makes his case for him, at least to independent voters. Trump can point to her and say, listen, the Democrats are selling you some moderate candidates this year, but you're going to get radical. Look what she's doing in Virginia, raising all these taxes. Taxes on dog walking. I mean, it's nuts. As he said last night, these people are crazy. But what a Democratic leader wants to tell the Democratic Party is quietly, quietly, we're going to do all this radical stuff you really want. Just let us run the moderate candidates. Let us do this. And this is, in fact, happening in California. The California Democratic Convention just met and they nominated some candidates for Congress, and they nominated the more moderate ones, not the far left ones, because Nancy Pelosi knows that's how you win. So the message to Democrats is, you know, don't worry, don't worry. Don't make a lot of noise about it, don't get upset about it, but we're going to run some moderate candidates. Once they're in, they can do whatever you want. And the other thing that she did was she reinforced this idea that ICE is basically the Gestapo, that they're arresting citizens, that they're poorly trained, they're a bunch of thugs. They come in. I mean, it's a terrible way to talk about American law enforcement. And just. I don't know, some part of me is just repulsed by the whole thing. But that is the Democratic Party narrative. That's how they see their identity, as opposed to the Republican Party. And so it was a good speech for Democrats because she reinforced the feeling that they're standing up against tyranny in some way. Now, Scott addresses this in his. His book Win Bigley, where he talks about the absolute conviction of Trump's critics that he was the new Hitler and that this horrible authoritarian regime was descending. And he said none of that was true. And when you showed people evidence that it wasn't true, they didn't react. They didn't change their minds. They were at best placed into a kind of cognitive dissonance where they would try to justify the opposite of what they were feeling or experiencing. But that's how we function. Two movies and one screen. And it's just interesting to see the reactions afterward. There was a two movies, one screen effect in the sense that you had Democrats with their talking points coming on and saying, this was a terrible speech. It was awful. He said racist. Gavin Newsom said it was boring. Now, that was probably the dumbest comment, because I think even Democrats understood it wasn't boring. I mean, it was long. He could have said that was long. Right. The joke there is. It's long. I fell, as. I'll tell you what I think about the speech, but I fell asleep. You know, whatever. I mean, there are other. You could have done something funny with that. The longest State of the Union ever. But that's not where he went. He went to boring. It definitely wasn't boring. And that's bad persuasion. It's not credible. It's not funny. I don't think any of their persuasion was funny or credible. And this is the thing. There's always this moment when Trump really does well, when the other side doesn't really know what to do, and so they go with their talking points. There is a kind of cognitive dissonance. I mean, Pete Buttigieg on CNN was talking about how it was terrible speech and the President lied, lied, lied, lied, lied, lied. That's sort of the default. Like I didn't like the speech. So he must have lied. Well, CBS News, which is normally pretty harsh to the President, maybe not since Barry Weiss took over, I don't know. But CBS News did a fact check. I just saw this on X. They fact checked his claim that murders were down to their lowest rate since 1900. Sounds crazy, right? I mean, that's like a long time ago. Fact checked. True. I mean, it's true. It's extraordinary. Now, where Democrats will disagree with Republicans is why. And President Trump said why. He said it's because we had ice on the street deporting criminal gangsters. But Democrats won't admit that. Okay, fine. But I think the two movies, one screen effect was there, but it took a little bit of a shock, a little bit, a little bit of a beating last night. For a moment at least, the Democrats didn't really know what to say. I watched Harold Ford, who's probably the most fair minded Democrat, he's on Fox and before the speech he was saying, well, we have to remember a lot of Americans are still hurting economically and that's what the President needs to talk about, all the people who are hurting. Sort of re emphasizing the idea the economy is bad. When the speech was over, his reaction was Democrats need to talk about economic issues. In response to this president, which told me that Trump was successful because Harold Ford Jr. Wasn't saying Trump failed to talk about the economy. He failed to talk about people who are working for a living. It told me that he knew Trump had really hit a home run and the Democrats were going to have to find a way to respond. So I think that's where it was. And again, visual persuasion, as Scott said, also finally about the persuasion element of it, I said to my wife, you know, Trump has done this before. I mean, how many speeches has he done where he's gone to the gallery, there's been a Medal of Honor awarded or a Medal of Freedom. And we've seen this before. We have actually seen it before. I thought Trump's speech in 2020, the one Nancy Pelosi tore up, was probably the best speech he'd ever given and nobody remembers it because she tore up the speech. That's visual persuasion for you. Right? That's what we remember about the speech. But what was different this time? And I think it was the hockey team. It was the hockey team because it allowed him to frame the Entire speech as a victory speech. It really was a victory speech, and it associated him, or he associated himself with the color gold or with the metallic gold of the medals. They came in wearing medals, another form of visual persuasion. And. And also it resonates because everybody knows Trump likes gold, right? There's gold in the Trump Tower. There's gold Mar a Lago, there's gold in the Oval Office. He's big on gold. The Nobel Prize is gold behind his desk. Everything's gold. He likes gold. It's almost a joke, you know, like, what's he going to build in Greenland? Like a giant gold tower, you know, on the ice float or whatever. But that was very powerful, the gold medals, the hockey team coming in. It also showed that he could break the opposition because half the Democrats stood up and he pointed that out. He said, look, half of them are standing. The other ones aren't. But anyway, so I think that was a way of making this speech different and better and more effective than the other ones, was basically framing it as a victory speech. I'm not trying to make the case for you that I'm better or that I'm succeeding and that you should vote for my party in November. The case I'm making is we've all already won. And that was, I think, what made it very effective. And that's why people are upbeat about it today, if they like the president, and why Democrats are trying to find a better answer for it, and they may just try to forget about it, move on, because they think they have the upper hand as the opposition party in a midterm year. But it was a very effective speech.
