CSPAN - Washington Journal Tevi Troy
Aired: 2026-02-24
Duration: 17:46


=== Ronald Reagan Institute Insights (01:33) ===

[00:00:00]  He will help us, especially with China situation.
[00:00:04]  My name is Patrick Connolly from New Jersey.
[00:00:06]  Doug Berman from New Jersey.
[00:00:08]  I would like the President to talk about his trade policies towards our friends and allies around the world and why the hostility and what purpose that serves for this country and how that serves the national interest.
[00:00:23]  I would like the president to address affordability because it's not a hoax.
[00:00:28]  And particularly health insurance costs and the cost of prescription drugs and groceries and things that everyday people have to deal with all the time.
[00:00:39]  C-SPAN's voices, delivering democracy unfiltered.
[00:00:42]  Be part of the conversation.
[00:00:48]  This evening, Democratic elected officials, celebrities, and political activists will be part of an event protesting President Trump's State of the Union address and the administration's policies.
[00:00:58]  We'll hear from former Trump officials as part of just one of a couple of protests we'll be covering.
[00:01:04]  From the National Press Club, watch live at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3.
[00:01:08]  C-SPAN now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-span.org.
[00:01:17]  Welcome back to the program.
[00:01:19]  Joining us this morning to talk about the historical significance and rhetorical significance of tonight's State of the Union is Tevi Troy, presidential historian and senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
[00:01:32]  Good morning.

=== The Process of Presidential Speeches (04:08) ===

[00:01:33]  Hi, thanks for having me.
[00:01:34]  Thanks for being here.
[00:01:35]  All right, let's dive right in.
[00:01:37]  I want to ask you first, what is the Ronald Reagan Institute and how is it funded?
[00:01:42]  Oh, it's a great question.
[00:01:43]  The Ronald Reagan Institute is a think tank.
[00:01:46]  It is part of the overall Ronald Reagan Foundation Library, which is in California.
[00:01:51]  But Ronald Reagan Institute has an office here right near the White House on 16th Street.
[00:01:57]  And it looks at the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has conferences, including the Reagan National Defense Forum, Reagan National Economic Forum, and they discuss how the legacy of Reagan is still relevant today.
[00:02:09]  They brought me on as a presidential historian who talks about all presidents, not just Reagan, but to highlight the importance of the presidency in our country and our system and today's polity.
[00:02:21]  Now, of course, you're a presidential historian, but I just want to give our viewers just some of kind of your rap sheet here.
[00:02:27]  You were Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services for George W. Bush in 2007.
[00:02:32]  You were deputy assistant and then acting assistant for the president for George W. Bush.
[00:02:37]  Again, policy director for Senator John Ashcroft.
[00:02:40]  So you're a perfect person to talk about the significance of what folks are expecting to see tonight as President Trump gives his first Day of the Union since going back to office.
[00:02:49]  Let's start with some of the semantics in the process.
[00:02:52]  Can you talk to us about what being a part of the process of writing a State of the Union is like?
[00:02:59]  What does it entail?
[00:03:01]  And what was your experience?
[00:03:03]  Sure.
[00:03:04]  Well, when I was at the White House, I worked on multiple states of the Union.
[00:03:08]  It is a very long process.
[00:03:09]  It starts in the fall and really gears up in December.
[00:03:13]  And when everybody else is going to Christmas parties, the White House aides are working harder than ever trying to prepare what's going to be in the State of the Union.
[00:03:20]  The agencies come in and brief on their ideas, and those ideas go through the kind of White House maw.
[00:03:26]  People say this is a good one, this is not a good one.
[00:03:29]  And then sometimes the president is also working on kind of a big kind of shoot to Mars type idea.
[00:03:38]  Those often come from within the White House, usually a somewhat secretive group, not secretive in a negative way, but they're trying to maintain a surprise for what the idea is.
[00:03:47]  So it's a combination.
[00:03:49]  They often call the State of the Union a laundry list.
[00:03:51]  So it's a combination of some of the best ideas that the agencies are working on, plus some new ideas that are percolating out of the White House, and they present them all.
[00:03:58]  In the State of the Union, obviously, the speechwriters try and take this laundry list is what it's often called, and they try and make it something rhetorically coherent, which is a difficult thing to do.
[00:04:09]  And that's why people often criticize the rhetorical nature of the State of the Union address.
[00:04:14]  They say it kind of sounds listy, which it often is.
[00:04:17]  But that's what it is.
[00:04:18]  So it's a combination of policy input going through the White House speechwriting machine.
[00:04:23]  We spoke earlier with Wall Street Journal's Meredith McGraw, who said that the president has kind of eschewed more of a traditional speech prep process.
[00:04:32]  I wonder if you could walk us through President Bush's speech process.
[00:04:36]  How does he get prepared for a big speech like that?
[00:04:39]  That's an interesting question, because they did talk in that journal article about Trump's process, how he doesn't read the whole thing.
[00:04:44]  He doesn't like reading speeches out loud.
[00:04:46]  He ad libs more than any other president that I can think of.
[00:04:51]  Look, George W. Bush was, I guess, a more traditional type in terms of he wanted the speech in advance.
[00:04:57]  He would read through the speech.
[00:04:58]  He would make significant notes on the speech and tell the speechwriters, hey, I want this different, I want that different.
[00:05:04]  But he would also practice the speech.
[00:05:05]  And I think that's the more traditional thing.
[00:05:07]  You know, it actually helped to practice these things.
[00:05:10]  Bill Clinton practiced one of his speeches.
[00:05:12]  And then when the teleprompter didn't load the correct speech, he knew the speech well enough that he could start until they fixed the teleprompter problem.
[00:05:19]  So he did it from memory.
[00:05:20]  That's fascinating.
[00:05:22]  Now, this will be President Trump's first State of the Union since his second term.
[00:05:27]  Technically, the speech that we saw last year was adjust to Congress because, say, the union happens a second year in office.
[00:05:34]  What do you believe that he has to accomplish tonight?
[00:05:37]  Yeah, it's a good question.
[00:05:38]  You know, the last time he gave a State of the Union, he said the best is yet to come.

=== President's Speech Practice (12:04) ===

[00:05:42]  And that was six years ago.
[00:05:43]  And think about what's happened in those six years.
[00:05:45]  I mean, we've had COVID, and we've had Ukraine, and we've had the Hamas war, and we've had the AI explosion.
[00:05:52]  The Dow was at something like 30,000 then, and now it's almost 50,000.
[00:05:55]  So, you know, it was ups and downs, goods and bads.
[00:05:57]  But a lot has happened in the six years.
[00:05:59]  It's almost like we packed a whole decade into six years, maybe more than a decade.
[00:06:03]  And so I think Trump is looking at three possible things.
[00:06:06]  Number one is the speech is supposed to be about America at 250.
[00:06:09]  The semi-sesquicentennial, the 250th anniversary, is a great opportunity to highlight America.
[00:06:14]  I remember the patriotic surge at the bicentennial back in 1976.
[00:06:18]  I was a small boy, but people were very excited about it.
[00:06:21]  And then there's also this looming conflict with Iran, and a lot of commentators have said he's not fully explaining what his goals are, what he's trying to accomplish.
[00:06:29]  We have a massive armada there.
[00:06:32]  What is the goal?
[00:06:33]  What are we trying to get out of this?
[00:06:35]  So that is something that has to happen.
[00:06:36]  And then also there was a setback in the Supreme Court on tariffs.
[00:06:39]  And presumably, he's going to make some comments on that.
[00:06:42]  So it's a combination of the obvious every year.
[00:06:46]  You have to tell what you're up to and what your goals are for the year.
[00:06:49]  The celebration of America at 250.
[00:06:51]  He'll have the Olympic hockey team as part of that.
[00:06:54]  That's going to be exciting and different.
[00:06:56]  And then you also have these two other things of the potential Iran conflict and the Iran negotiations and then the Supreme Court tariff setback.
[00:07:04]  I wonder, because something that I talked about with Meredith is that the Supreme Court justices are likely to be in the crowd.
[00:07:12]  Obviously, they handed that major rebuke to the president on Friday over his use of emergency tariffs.
[00:07:19]  How unique is that?
[00:07:21]  Had there been moments in the past in which presidents have addressed the Supreme Court after a ruling that they didn't like?
[00:07:27]  Oh, yeah, the most famous one, I would say, is 2010, when Obama was critical of the Supreme Court over Citizens United and described it in a way that was not actually accurate.
[00:07:37]  And he was actually rebuked by some journalists afterwards that he didn't explain it accurately.
[00:07:43]  But Sam Alito, Justice Alito, was in the audience at the time, and he mouthed.
[00:07:48]  He didn't say it out loud.
[00:07:49]  He mouthed not true.
[00:07:50]  But the cameras picked it up and lip raiders figured out what he was saying.
[00:07:54]  And that became a huge kerfuffle.
[00:07:56]  And Alito has chosen not to go to the states of the union since then.
[00:08:00]  You mentioned the Supreme Court justices will be there.
[00:08:02]  It'll be a subset of the Supreme Court justices because some of them just choose not to come.
[00:08:07]  Justice Scalia, when he was alive, he chose not to go to the State of Union.
[00:08:10]  He didn't think it was the right thing to do.
[00:08:12]  But Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts, for example, goes every year.
[00:08:15]  And as an institutionalist, that doesn't surprise me.
[00:08:17]  That's kind of the way he goes about things.
[00:08:19]  So some of the justices will be there.
[00:08:22]  But I think after the Alito moment, they all know to sit impassively, not to clap, not to stand up, not to boo, not to mouth anything, and they will just be sitting there while all the other spectacle happens around them.
[00:08:33]  And I want to turn to more questions in a second, but I want to invite our viewers to join in on the conversation.
[00:08:41]  Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
[00:08:45]  Democrats, your line?
[00:08:47]  202-748-8000.
[00:08:50]  Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
[00:08:55]  Start calling in to join the conversation.
[00:08:58]  Now, I want to ask to what degree do you expect major new policy initiatives to be introduced during this speech?
[00:09:09]  Obviously, it has happened in past speeches, but the president is facing a pretty slim margin, at least on the House side, when it comes to Republicans being in power.
[00:09:19]  Look, there is no better opportunity for a president to lay out what he wants to do and have multiple millions of people.
[00:09:25]  So you're going to have probably 30-something million people listening to this speech.
[00:09:28]  It's not as many as the 60-odd million that used to listen to a Bill Clinton speech, but it's an opportunity to sell new policies.
[00:09:35]  So every president sees this as an opportunity to put out their best policy ideas.
[00:09:40]  You'll never have a chance to highlight it to more people.
[00:09:43]  And then the White House often has a very complicated rollout plan for each one of the policies, even the ones that don't make the headlines in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, where they're going to go to the different constituent groups and the interest groups and say, hey, this is what we're trying to do.
[00:09:58]  This got real estate.
[00:09:59]  This got mentioned in the State of the Union.
[00:10:00]  That's a big deal.
[00:10:01]  So there will be a whole bunch of new policies.
[00:10:03]  Some of them will be barely mentioned in the press tomorrow.
[00:10:06]  They'll be seen as throwaways.
[00:10:07]  But the fact that you got mentioned in the State of the Union is a big deal as a potential new policy.
[00:10:13]  Now, how often are those policies that are laid out in the State of the Union taken up seriously by Congress?
[00:10:20]  I mean, obviously, that is the hope of the presidents, that they can put something, a call to action for Congress, even though maybe many will say that their actual audience is the American people.
[00:10:30]  How often do these kind of list wishes become actual legislation?
[00:10:35]  Yeah, they're all pursued.
[00:10:37]  Not all of them make it.
[00:10:38]  I mean, I think George W. Bush talked a lot about his Social Security plan.
[00:10:42]  That didn't happen.
[00:10:43]  But he did talk about his PEPFAR plan, which was the emergency AIDS relief in Africa and other nations affected by the HIV AIDS crisis.
[00:10:52]  And that did happen.
[00:10:53]  So these things, you have a higher chance of becoming actual policy if you're mentioned in the State of the Union than if you're not.
[00:11:01]  That's how I'll put it that way.
[00:11:03]  Now, some Democrats plan to, as they have done for years and years, sit in the chamber and bring guests that show their opposition to the president's agenda.
[00:11:14]  Others now attend to, or plan to attend one of two protest events scheduled around the speech.
[00:11:21]  How typical is this type of protest for it to happen outside of Congress in a big moment like this?
[00:11:30]  Well, I don't understand the point of it because all the cameras are here in Congress.
[00:11:34]  So doing it outside, I don't know how much of an impact that has.
[00:11:38]  I mean, everything is lesser than.
[00:11:40]  So, for example, the response to the State Union is often seen as something that's lesser than, and a lot of the respondents have not done so well.
[00:11:48]  In general, my thought is that the people who kind of do performative things in the chamber, it doesn't usually reflect well on them.
[00:11:56]  Joe Wilson, for example, when he yelled out, you lie at President Obama, it just wasn't a good moment.
[00:12:01]  And he's sort of done penance ever since then.
[00:12:04]  So I think that the best thing to do is to be respectful.
[00:12:08]  But when you have your opportunity, you're obviously a member of Congress and you have a chance to go on TV shows or say stuff in the media, that's when you should make your disagreement known.
[00:12:17]  But making a spectacle in the chamber, I think, usually makes you look lesser rather than greater.
[00:12:23]  Yeah, obviously there was that moment last year at his address in which Representative Al Green got up in the middle of the aisle and showed his opposition, leading to this year, Democrats saying, you know, if you want to protest, do so outside, but we want to stay united.
[00:12:41]  What do you think that type of strategy is?
[00:12:43]  How does the opposition party inside of the chamber show seriously to the American people that they are in opposition?
[00:12:50]  Yeah, and I think Leader Jeffries on the Democratic side has been very smart to tell his members not to do this kind of performative spectacle.
[00:12:58]  Look, sometimes you see women legislators wearing the, you know, doing the ladies in white kind of thing to say, hey, we oppose or we're supportive of a certain thing.
[00:13:07]  People can wear something or stand at certain moments, but it really is the president's moment, right?
[00:13:14]  Whether you like the president or not, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, it's the president's moment.
[00:13:17]  It's kind of like if you go to a comedy club, nobody remembers the heckler.
[00:13:20]  People remember the comedian and what the comedian said to put down the heckler.
[00:13:23]  Joe Biden, for example, wasn't known for his rhetorical gifts, shall we say, but I thought he did pretty well pushing back against members who shouted at him.
[00:13:32]  It's just not the right moment for the audience people to stand up.
[00:13:36]  The president has the mic.
[00:13:38]  The president has the lights on him.
[00:13:39]  The president has the spotlight.
[00:13:41]  And it's really the president's moment to shine.
[00:13:43]  And anybody else who's trying to get in the way, again, usually looks worse as a result.
[00:13:48]  One more question before we take some phone calls.
[00:13:50]  But I turn to this union bulletin article.
[00:13:54]  The headline is, how will Trump use his State of the Union to address, a State of the Union address to sell skeptical midterm voters on his plans?
[00:14:04]  Obviously, the midterms will kind of loom over all of this as folks are set to start voting.
[00:14:09]  Actually, come March 3rd in some of these primaries, particularly the one in Texas.
[00:14:14]  I wonder, how do you think this speech will attempt to send a message to some of those voters for the midterms?
[00:14:23]  Yeah, to win the midterms, President Trump, or at least to mitigate the losses in the midterms, because the president's party usually doesn't do well in the midterms, you have to really sell the economy, say that our program is working, highlight patriotism as we're going into the 250th year.
[00:14:39]  I think those are the things he's really trying to accomplish.
[00:14:42]  I think that Joe Biden learned it's hard to tell the American people, hey, the economy is doing great if people don't feel it themselves.
[00:14:49]  So you actually need the economy to be good in addition to selling the economy.
[00:14:54]  And I think that's a hard thing to do.
[00:14:56]  All right, let's turn to some phone calls.
[00:14:58]  God will from California, a Republican.
[00:15:02]  You're next.
[00:15:03]  Good morning.
[00:15:04]  Tell me if I pronounce your name correctly.
[00:15:07]  Thanks for taking my call, Jasmine.
[00:15:10]  Mr. Troy, could you tell us when the first State of the Union address was given, please, for a historical context?
[00:15:21]  And is it right to say that the State of the Union is sort of like a report card as the administration sees it as to how they've performed and sort of a plan for the coming year?
[00:15:47]  I'm interested in especially the historical context for the State of the Union address.
[00:15:54]  Thanks for taking my call.
[00:15:55]  Thank you.
[00:15:56]  All right, thank you, Godwell.
[00:15:57]  That's a good question.
[00:15:58]  So the State of the Union idea, the concept is in the Constitution where it says that the President shall provide updates to Congress.
[00:16:04]  Those were originally written updates for a long time.
[00:16:07]  President Woodrow Wilson started to go to Congress to make them an actual speech to Congress.
[00:16:14]  Starting 1923 was the first time when we had this speech become a radio address.
[00:16:22]  That was under Calvin Coolidge.
[00:16:24]  Then President Truman had it televised, but it was during the day.
[00:16:27]  And in 1965, sorry, 1965, this is the big innovation.
[00:16:31]  Lyndon Johnson made it a nighttime televised address.
[00:16:35]  And so from 1965 to today, 2026, we have had this regular thing where the president comes on at a certain night in the late winter and gives a speech to the American people.
[00:16:47]  And I call this kind of the golden age of the State of the Union, this 60-year period where the president goes on TV, talks about his plans.
[00:16:55]  It is, as Godwell says, it's kind of a report card, how things are going.
[00:16:59]  The president usually says something, the state of the union is blank, usually hopefully good.
[00:17:03]  Trump will probably use a more expressive adjective, great, fantastic, whatever.
[00:17:08]  Sometimes there's been a not good, like when Gerald Ford said the State of the Union is not good in the mid-70s and we were having a rough time.
[00:17:14]  So it is a report card, but it's also an opportunity for the president to give his plans going forward.
[00:17:20]  And I mean, typically, State of the Union, at least in modern times, has been one of the most high-profile moments for a president to actually address Americans.
[00:17:31]  It has been the most viewed speech of the year for a lot of presidents.
[00:17:35]  Obviously, that has changed because of the way that we use.
[00:17:38]  You can continue watching this event if you go to our website, cspam.org.
[00:17:42]  We're going to leave this here for live coverage now of the U.S. House on C-SAM.