Heading into Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump’s second speech to a joint session of Congress since he returned to the White House, a key question was on many observers’ minds: Which Trump would show up? Would he rise to the moment, using the address to appear presidential and interested in uniting the country? Or would he succumb to vindictiveness, petty insults, and the desire to divide? From calling the Democrats in attendance “crazy” to labeling the Somali-origin population of Minnesota “pirates,” he clearly—and unsurprisingly, given his track record—went for the latter.
The question of which Trump would show up was also salient to the portions of his remarks that dealt with foreign policy. Would the address be delivered, as Susan Page aptly put it, by the president who champions America First, focused on the home front? Or by the man who covets the Nobel Peace Prize, desirous of establishing a global legacy? Here, it seems the answer was a bit of both. It truly was a tale of two Trumps.
The America First aspects of the speech were loud and clear. One big theme that Trump repeatedly came back to was immigration, from bragging about his efforts to secure the U.S. southern border to highlighting cherrypicked incidents of American citizens being killed by undocumented immigrants and calling for an end to sanctuary cities. In an effort to discredit Democrats, he declared, “The only thing standing between Americans and a wide-open border right now is President Donald J. Trump and our great Republican patriots in Congress.”