Six weeks into his remarkably turbulent second term, Donald Trump will deliver his annual presidential address to a joint session of Congress tonight. For most chief executives, these big speeches (called a state-of-the-union address in the second, third, and fourth years of any term) are a rare opportunity to obtain focused attention on a tightly scripted, coherent presentation. Some offer a recitation of accomplishments or goals, some announce some major new initiative. Last year, Joe Biden mostly wanted to show he still had some life and fire to dispel doubts (temporarily, as it happened) that he was up to the job and fit to serve another term.
Trump is not, of course, like most other presidents. Having been a consistently dominant figure in our political world for a decade now, he has no need to reintroduce himself to the public. He’s run his last race. Given the margins of control and the landscape, there’s probably not much he or his party can do that will save control of the House in the 2026 midterms, or forfeit control of the Senate. And it’s unclear Trump is focused much at all on the future prospects for his party or even his country beyond his time in office, which he believes will merit monuments in his honor for many years to come.
So it’s possible he will ignore the things he should do to maintain his popularity (which has been steadily eroding since he took office) and give his supporters some guidance, and just make this speech to Congress a slightly more organized version of the belligerent and performative MAGA rally speeches for which he is renowned.
But if Trump does want to make a positive impact on this occasion, here are five key things he needs to do:
Speak to the nation, not just the base
Trump will go down in the political history books for having won two of three presidential elections (and come close in the third) while systematically violating the Median Voter Theorem by which undecided voters poised between the two major parties are the great prize and the key to electoral success. Throughout his career he has placed a huge premium on appealing to his party’s (and his MAGA movement’s) base and expanding it only in ways that involve highly combative attacks on the opposition as a pack of corrupt America-hating scoundrels engaged in a conspiracy to oppress and impoverish regular folks. Under near-ideal circumstances, this strategy got him to just under a majority of the vote in 2024, which was barely enough to win. But now he’s the incumbent president, which automatically forfeits him some support in our sour nation, and if he wants the kind of robust public approbation that will help him get his agenda accomplished he needs to reach beyond his adoring fan base. That doesn’t necessarily require empowering Democrats as partners in governance, but it does require breaking out of the self-contained world of MAGA-talk and making sense to people who don’t watch Fox News or post on X.
Practically everything Trump has done since Election Day has been designed to award his supporters with endless supplies of red meat. It’s a good time for Trump to live up to his occasional pledges to serve as president of “all the people.” It is abundantly clear that in Congress, Republicans will do pretty much anything he wants at this juncture; adding just a bit to that governing infrastructure could matter a lot.
Impose order on the chaos
Silicon Valley’s famous slogan for corporate takeovers, “move fast and break things,” has been the central operating principle of the second Trump administration. Again, this pleases the MAGA base that more than anything else wants to “break things,” but doesn’t convey a coherent and responsible agenda. This matters not just to potential Trump supporters or opponents in the general public, but to major corporate and financial movers and shakers who need confidence in the administration’s sanity, and to international audiences already shocked by Trump’s contempt toward traditional alliances and commitments.
A big major speech is exactly the right context in which Trump can lay out some sort of vision of governance that involves measured and calculated steps toward defined objectives, not just the tactics of Bronze Age warlords happy to pillage conquered territory and award warfighters with plunder and trophies. This is perhaps most important to his own allies in government, who crave assurance that their turbulent chief won’t change directions to their peril with every passing whim.
End the “co-president” talk decisively
One of the most sensitive tasks Trump faces right now is to project some degree of control over his subordinates, most notably the “presidential adviser” who apparently has carte blanche to ramble and rage across the federal government, DOGE’s Elon Musk. Trump has never made it clear what place Musk occupies in his regime, which may become apparent tonight. Should Musk sit with the Cabinet, over which he has run roughshod in countless ways? In the galleries, like an uncontrollable force of nature outside the administration? If there is some plan to begin shifting power from the young nerds of DOGE back to regularly appointed and confirmed agency leaders, it would be an excellent time to announce it and reduce fears among friends and enemies alike that the chainsaw-wielding mega-billionaire is literally out of control and is usurping Trump’s own prerogatives.
Conveying mastery over the disrupters of bureaucracy will be tricky. Trump doesn’t want to concede turf to Congress, and likely has plans to pursue “reforms” via executive orders that are as legally irregular as anything DOGE is doing. But inevitably his own power will be diminished if Musk’s continues to expand.
Connect his agenda to the perceived needs of the country
Polls consistently show that even Trump’s largely delighted supporters do not believe he is focused on the concerns that lifted him to the presidency in the first place. In particular, his agenda does not seem to have a coherent strategy for bringing down the prices of food and housing, and even fuel prices seem beyond his control. Now that he has decided to press ahead with a series of tariffs targeting America’s major trading partners, fears of higher prices may spread virally. While some conservatives have sort of Rube Goldberg schemes for reducing inflationary pressures by blowing up federal bureaucracies, it’s not obvious to most voters how this will work, particularly with Trump demanding deficit-boosting tax cuts and a big increase in the national debt limit.
A big part of the problem is that Trump campaigned on significantly incompatible goals like cutting taxes and reducing debt without touching popular federal programs. He needs to harness his agenda more specifically to what Americans expected from his presidency, with a minimum of nasty surprises. Since mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will soon begin on a large scale, it’s particularly important that this program focus on the least appealing deportable immigrants and be conducted in a manner that does not raise associations with authoritarian racist regimes. And after the spectacular Oval Office blowup just last week between Trump and J.D. Vance and Ukraine’s president, the president needs to make the case that he is building a new set of international institutions and alliances and not just destroying the old ones to the horror of traditional friends.
Disclaim blame for bad things just ahead
Americans tend to give presidents who represent a change of party control a bit of a honeymoon on the theory that current conditions reflect their predecessor’s policies. One downside to Trump’s extremely aggressive assertions of authority is that this honeymoon may not last long at all. So he may soon “own” setbacks in the economy, international relations, and effective domestic governance. Within just a couple of weeks, the federal government may shut down, mostly because Democrats are demanding restrictions on Trump and Musk’s usurpations of congressional powers in the pursuit of unpopular spending and personnel cuts. If Trump is disinclined to offer an olive branch to the opposition party, he needs to begin making the case that he and his party don’t view disabling the federal government entirely as a good thing in itself, as some of his MAGA fans (and perhaps Elon Musk) really do. Successfully blaming Democrats for a government shutdown will help Republicans eventually prevail in the budgetary messaging fights just down the road.
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