When he addressed Congress and the nation last year, Donald Trump was fresh from his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States and just five weeks on the job. His State of the Union address, therefore, focused more on campaign themes and about challenges ahead than about accomplishments.
But tomorrow, when Trump delivers his first real State of the Union message (9 p.m. EST), the man at the podium will be not the brash, self-proclaimed fixer of broken systems, but a badly bruised survivor of a tumultuous, chaotic year. So much went wrong so fast, and much of it of his own making.
Trump, of course, won’t claim responsibility or blame for any of the year’s monumental errors and wrongheaded decisions in domestic and foreign policy, but that doesn’t mean he and his administration will get away with it. Leid Stories listeners take preemptive strikes at Trump’s state of disunion 2018.