He bragged about the achievements of his administration so far and proposed ambitious legislative initiatives ahead. He hailed ordinary Americans who had done extraordinary things and called for new sense of national unity.
In other words, the most unconventional president in modern times, governing at a time of historic turbulence, delivered a conventional State of the Union that with some policy tweaks could have been given by any number of his recent predecessors.
In his speech, Trump adopted the language his White House predecessors have favored. The last five presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, had declared that the state of the union was “strong.” So did Trump. “The state of our union is strong because our people are strong,” he said.
He took credit for the nation’s good economy, saying his administration had rolled back regulations, “ended the war on American energy” and “turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals.” He said the $1.5 trillion tax bill he signed in December, the only major legislation enacted last year, had brought “tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses.”
He called for bipartisan action on his administration’s immigration plan, which would offer a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, build a wall along the nation’s southern border, and curb some legal immigration. “A down-the-middle compromise,” he called it.
Trump also urged Democrats to join him in approving a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, including changes in environmental and other regulations to streamline the approval process for road, bridge and sewage projects. “America is a nation of builders,” he said. “We built the Empire State Building in just one year. Isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take 10 years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?”