Presidents have viewed the State of the Union speech as a unique opportunity to make their case to the rest of the government, to the nation as a whole and to the wider world. And this isn't the first time the speech has been given during a crisis.
President Biden's State of the Union speech Tuesday will be his first since becoming president. But in April 2021, he addressed a joint session of Congress, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Harris behind him on the dais.
But even when under maximum pressure, presidents have viewed the speech as a unique opportunity to make their case to the rest of the government, to the nation as a whole and to the wider world as well. The last time war clouds were this dark over a State of the Union speech was in January of 2003, when President George W. Bush used the occasion to make a case for invading Iraq. That invasion would happen less than two months later, overthrowing the strongman dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush argued that the Iraqi regime had been seeking a nuclear weapon and had developed other"weapons of mass destruction." He said this meant the U.S.
The particulars of Bush's appeal in the 2003 speech, however, would come back to haunt him. He leaned heavily on an allegation that Iraq"recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Lyndon Johnson, who ordered the largest escalation of the war in 1965, concentrated his 1966 State of the Union address on defending that decision. In effect, he acknowledged the degree to which the war had upstaged all the other events of the previous year, including enactment of the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a host of other"Great Society" programs he had first laid out in his previous State of the Union speech a year earlier.
But Trump's speech also had the spectacle of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing behind him and angrily shredding the text of his speech after he had concluded. Trump appeared to have refused to shake her hand he arrived at the dais. Something similar had happened to Bush just four years earlier, when in 2007 he found himself facing Democratic majorities in both House and Senate after having his own party in control of both since 2003.
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