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First, a few words on the State of the Union address. There will be a lot of meaningless commentary about President Trump’s speech tonight. His critics will criticize him, his supporters will praise him and pundits will throw around the word “reset.”

You can safely ignore most of it.

“State of the Union speeches have a celebrated history of not making much of an impact,” HuffPost’s Ariel Edwards-Levy wrote in 2016, when Barack Obama was president. The speeches are rarely memorable, and many of the people who watch are already supporters of the president, Edwards-Levy explained.

The most important part of the speech is the process of winnowing policy ideas that happens behind the scenes, before the speech. But Trump’s erratic and uninformed approach to policy means that he may lack that benefit, Jonathan Bernstein argues in Bloomberg View.