President Trump Addresses a Divided Congress 

In his first State of the Union address since taking office last January, President Trump trumpeted his accomplishments, called for unity, and promoted his own vision of immigration reform.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump hailed what he called the “extraordinary success” of his administration’s first year, and largely steered clear of the confrontational tone for which he’s become famous.

“Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people,” President Trump said to raucous applause from many Republicans. Democratic leaders, who have bitterly criticized his policies, sat stone-faced in their seats.

“This, in fact, is our new American moment,” Trump said. “There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.”

Rather than laying out new policies, as presidents often do in State of the Union addresses, Trump recited what he described as his greatest successes in office: the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the rollback of regulations, progress in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, job growth, historic gains in the stock market, and a $1.5 trillion tax cut. He also laid out an ambitious agenda for a Congress facing midterm elections in the fall. Lawmakers are often hesitant to tackle controversial legislation in the months leading up to an election.

The president said he would bring Republicans and Democrats together around a $1.5 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and electrical grid to “give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve.” And he called on Democrats to support what he called a “down-the-middle compromise” on immigration in which “nobody gets everything they want, but where our country gets the critical reforms it needs.”

“For over 30 years, Washington has tried and failed to solve this problem,” Trump said. “This Congress can be the one that finally makes it happen.”

The speech also included a tough message to the North Korean government and a denunciation of Kim Jong Un as a leader who has brutalized his own people and must be forced to give up his nuclear program. And Trump announced that he plans to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects open, reversing the policy of President Barack Obama, who had pledged to close the facility, which is located in Cuba.

Democrats in the House chamber spent much of the speech refraining from applause, scowling at the president’s boasts, and at one point hissing in disapproval at his proposal for restricting the number of family members immigrants can bring to the United States.

It’s traditional for the opposition party to deliver an official response to the State of Union address. This year, Democrats chose Congressman Joseph Kennedy III, who represents a district in southeast Massachusetts. Kennedy, 37, is a member of one of America’s most famous political dynasties: His grandfather was Senator Robert Kennedy, and President John F. Kennedy and longtime Senator Edward Kennedy were his great-uncles. 

Speaking at a vocational-technical high school in Fall River, Massachusetts, Kennedy offered a different vision of Trump’s first year in office.

“It would be easy to dismiss the past year as chaos, partisanship, politics,” Kennedy said. “But it’s far bigger than that. This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us—they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.”

As he took the dais at the Capitol, Trump had the weakest approval rating of any president of the modern era entering his second year in office: Just 37 percent of Americans approve of his performance in the job. But Trump remains very popular with his base of supporters, many of whom love his frank talk and unpredictability.

Trump built his speech around the theme of heroes, using the stories of ordinary people who had overcome extraordinary challenges—a police officer who adopted the child of a heroin-addicted mother, an Army staff sergeant who won the Bronze Star while fighting in Syria, a North Korean defector who now rescues other defectors—to argue that “the state of our union is strong because our people are strong.”

Trump delivered his roughly 80-minute speech—the longest since President Bill Clinton's in 2000—almost verbatim from a teleprompter, staying uncharacteristically faithful to his prepared script as he paused for ovations.

Trump’s tone became markedly sharper as he turned to the issue of immigration. He highlighted the parents of young girls killed by immigrants who entered the country as “illegal, unaccompanied alien minors,” saying it was time for Congress to “finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminal gangs to break into our country.”

The speech came in the middle of an intense immigration debate in Congress about the fate of the so-called Dreamers, young people who were brought illegally to the United States as children. Trump has repeatedly expressed sympathy for the Dreamers and used the speech to reiterate his proposal to grant them legal status, including a path to citizenship, in exchange for stepped-up enforcement, the building of a wall on the southern border with Mexico, and changing the laws that govern legal immigration in order to give priority to higher-skilled immigrants.

“It is time to reform these outdated immigration rules and finally bring our immigration system into the 21st century,” Trump said.

“So tonight I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, to protect our citizens, of every background, color, religion, and creed,” he said.

Democrats used the occasion to send their own message to Trump on the matter: They invited Dreamers who were to lose their protections from deportation—as well as family members of people the Trump administration has detained and deported—to sit with them in the House chamber as the president spoke.

Many political pundits praised the overall tone of president’s speech, but also cautioned that it’s unlikely to have a major impact on the bitter debates in Washington.

“Every major address like this is an opportunity for reset,” says Lanhee J. Chen, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. “But that is unlikely in this case and even more unlikely still given that it’s an election year.” 

With reporting by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Michael D. Shear, and Peter Baker of The New York Times.