President Donald Trump, fresh off a humbling defeat in November’s midterms and a humiliating retreat in the shutdown standoff with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month, opted for a bipartisan message in Tuesday’s State of the Union address. “Together, we can break decades of political stalemate,” he told lawmakers. “We can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make.”



We’ve been here before.

Trump struck a similar note in his first State of the Union address. “Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people,” he said last January. The moment didn’t last. His Twitter insults of political opponents never abated, and his much-touted dealmaking skills yielded no compromise with Congress. By December, he had triggered a self-destructive shutdown of the federal government in a failed bid to secure funding for a wall on the southern border.

There was no reason to think this year’s State of the Union would change anything either, but that didn’t stop some observers from speculating that it might. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote on Tuesday that he was more interested than usual in Tuesday night’s address because the president “may try to pivot, and if so, it will it be interesting to see if it’s a full-fledged pivot or a half-assed one.” The idea that Trump will normalize holds an irresistible allure for some. “If he wants to do something legislatively in 2019, this sets the table,” The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis wrote. “If he’s ever going to ‘pivot,’ this is his last chance.”

This was too optimistic by far. To the extent that Trump has ever pivoted, it’s almost always toward his worst impulses. In last year’s address, he laid out a four-point plan for immigration reform, pitching it as a middle-of-the-road compromise. Since then, his policies have only become more draconian. His administration provoked near-universal outrage for cruelly separating migrant families on the border over the summer. As the midterm elections drew near, Trump deployed military forces to the border in what appeared to be a nakedly political stunt. He issued executive orders aimed at reducing asylum claims and revoked temporary protected status for thousands of longtime U.S. residents.