On Tuesday, Donald Trump will become the first president to walk into the House chamber and deliver a second first address to a joint session of Congress.
“What the heck happened to Roll Call’s fact-checking standards?” some of you might be thinking. “Surely, they haven’t forgotten about Grover Cleveland, the first man to win nonconsecutive terms in the White House?”
Relax. Of course we haven’t. But back when Cleveland was our nation’s 22nd and then 24th chief executive, presidents sent over their annual addresses in writing. It was a tradition started by Thomas Jefferson, who found the idea of the president orating before a captive congressional audience a bit too monarchical for his tastes (or, some historians think, just hated giving speeches). It continued until Woodrow Wilson moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913. So, for his first annual message of his second term in 1893, Cleveland wrote a 12,000-word report that the poor congressional clerks had to read.
Delivery method won’t be the only thing differentiating Trump’s address from that of the only other president with a win-loss-win campaign record.
For one, whereas Trump still refuses to publicly admit that he lost in 2020, Cleveland conceded his 1888 race with grace. Cleveland was a humble man with a prodigious work ethic; Trump is known for his bravado and works famously short days. Cleveland argued that high tariffs were holding back a struggling economy, whereas Trump is pushing for high tariffs that economists say will plunge the nation into stagflation.
While we don’t know what Trump will say Tuesday night, we can make some educated guesses. His previous joint address and three State of the Union addresses (for pedantic reasons, a president’s speech to a joint session of Congress shortly after taking office is typically not considered a State of the Union) ranged between about 5,000 and 6,200 words and lasted between one hour and one hour and 22 minutes.
But the biggest difference between Cleveland’s address and Trump’s isn’t the format or the length. It’s the basic function, said Peter Ubertaccio, vice president for academic affairs at Stonehill College, who teaches a class on presidential speeches.
“In the 19th century, State of the Union addresses read like a report, updating Congress on the activities of the executive branch and then literally suggesting things for them to consider,” Ubertaccio said. “Now they are part of a larger spectacle of politics.”
Cleveland, like the president before him and after, sent over such a “real” State of the Union nine months into his presidency that simply reported what the executive branch had done in the past year: detailing the envoys he received; the resolution of a “dispute growing out of the discriminating tolls imposed in the Welland Canal upon cargoes of cereals”; the status of a treaty between Liberia and France; “that the receipts of the Government … amounted to $461,716,561.94 and its expenditures to $459,374,674.29”; that 440,793 immigrants arrived at U.S. ports; that the Army had 25,778 enlisted men and 2,144 officers; and that there were 966,012 people on the pension rolls, including “17 widows and daughters of Revolutionary soldiers.”
We know Trump’s speech won’t be a similarly comprehensive accounting of the executive branch’s actions. Instead, we can expect a throaty defense of his administration that will be heavy on the rhetoric but light on the details.
While some presidents — including Cleveland, who also used his 1893 report to argue for tariff cuts — occasionally pressed Congress hard on policy in their annual messages, the mostly apolitical trend continued until Woodrow Wilson in 1913, who resumed the practice of delivering the speech in person.
“Wilson was less enthusiastic about the constitutional system of separation of powers and thought that his presence could help to bend Congress to the president’s will,” Ubertaccio said.
The political aspects only grew as the message started being aired on radio with Calvin Coolidge in 1923, and then TV with Harry Truman in 1947, and then moved to prime time with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
“As these have become bigger and bigger spectacles, I think the percentage of the public who pays attention has declined. I suspect Trump’s might get an uptick in viewership just because of the chaos,” Ubertaccio said. “But for most Americans, this has just become partisan noise. Partisan Americans might delight in it, but the rest of us ignore it.”
While historians note that Cleveland — the first Democrat elected to the White House after the Civil War — reclaimed some of the presidential power that his recent predecessors had ceded to Congress, he by no means espoused the unitary executive theory Trump has embraced, said John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Woolley pointed to how Cleveland began his address.
“The constitutional duty which requires the President from time to time to give to the Congress information of the state of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient is fittingly entered upon by commending to the Congress a careful examination of the detailed statements and well-supported recommendations contained in the reports of the heads of Departments, who are chiefly charged with the executive work of the Government,” Cleveland wrote.
Cleveland also ended on a conciliatory note. “In conclusion my intense feeling of responsibility impels me to invoke for the manifold interests of a generous and confiding people the most scrupulous care and to pledge my willing support to every legislative effort for the advancement of the greatness and prosperity of our beloved country,” he wrote.
“It’s hard to imagine anything as gentle-sounding and almost sweet emerging from the current White House,” Woolley wrote in an email.
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