The truth-squad website PolitiFact crashed just 30 minutes in. A C-Span shot of Representative Nancy Pelosi, scowling and clad entirely in black, quickly became a meme. And the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, making her debut as a prime time NBC political analyst, declared that President Trump “did a fine job — but I think he’s going to tweet something and we’ll forget all about it.”

Depending on your news venue of choice, Mr. Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday was pronounced “gloomy” (ABC’s Martha Raddatz), “well-confected” (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews), “way too long” (Fox News’s Chris Wallace), or “amazing” (Sean Hannity). The Drudge Report blared, “Trump Shows Heart,” and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC called the speech “lumbering.”

If the White House had previewed Mr. Trump’s 80-minute address as a gesture toward uniting a divided nation, the sharply divergent reactions among journalists on Tuesday suggested that the president may have fallen short, at least among the partisan pundit class.

The general public had a lot of opinions, too: Twitter said that the speech generated upward of 4.5 million tweets, making it “the most tweeted” of any presidential State of the Union or joint address to Congress.