After backing down to the Democrats and agreeing to a continuing resolution without a border wall, the president has never looked weaker. Both the GOP-controlled Senate and his own intelligence chiefs rebuked him last week, and as my Monkey Cage colleagues noted, “Trump is failing to build support for his policies, within his own team and with Congress.”

Trump’s relations with Congress seem pretty fraught. Senators are growing concerned about the dearth of Trump appointees and the surfeit of acting secretaries running Cabinet departments. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has warned Trump that declaring a national emergency would split his caucus in the Senate, likely leading to majorities of both houses of Congress rejecting Trump’s premise of a state of emergency.

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It is not just his intelligence chiefs and senior GOP members of Congress who have been busy rebuking Trump. Staffers in both the White House and in the intelligence community have also been busy providing damaging leaks against the president. Someone at the White House leaked the president’s daily schedules for three months to Axios’s Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan. The schedules show that “Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured ‘Executive Time.'" The White House, while unhappy about the bad optics, seems far more concerned that someone ostensibly loyal to the president actually leaked it.

Just a day earlier, Time’s John Walcott got high-ranking intelligence officials to tell him what it’s like to brief the president. It’s not a flattering picture at all: “The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.” Perhaps most disturbing, “Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public.”

These stories are doubly damaging. They paint a very unfavorable portrait of the president. More importantly, however, is that the staffers who interact most frequently with Trump also feel no compunction whatsoever in blabbing these kinds of unfavorable details to the press.

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It is unsurprising that my Post colleagues Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Toluse Olorunnipa report that the mood at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is super-grim:

Trump dealt himself a political defeat with the 35-day partial government shutdown. He has secured no funding to construct a border wall and is preparing to declare a national emergency to fulfill his campaign promise. He is again at odds with the nation’s intelligence chiefs and some senators in his own party. The Russia investigation, which has ensnared several of the president’s allies, appears to be nearing its conclusion. New congressional oversight investigations will start soon. And the race to defeat him at the ballot box has kicked off in earnest. . . . The challenges mount at a moment when Trump is as unchecked and isolated as ever. Inside the White House, aides describe a chaotic, freewheeling atmosphere reminiscent of the early weeks of Trump’s presidency. Power has consolidated around presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, a senior adviser who is functioning as a de facto White House chief of staff. With counterweights like ousted chief of staff John F. Kelly gone, some advisers say the West Wing has the feel of the 26th floor of Trump Tower, where an unrestrained Trump had absolute control over his family business and was free to follow his impulses.

Any time Kushner is running the show, there should be serious doubts about it playing out well for the Trump White House.

That said, it is worth asking whether Trump can use the State of the Union to turn things around. There are some arguments in Trump’s favor. After all, the economy continues to look pretty good, which should help buoy his numbers. The speech could jump-start an effort to at least pretend to be bipartisan. Senior administration officials have signaled that Trump will make some solid bipartisan gestures in his speech, such as a theme of “choosing greatness” that will include a “policy agenda both parties can rally behind.”

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Trump himself told reporters, “I really think it’s going to be a speech that’s going to cover a lot of territory, but part of it’s going to be unity.” Plans to halt HIV transmission by 2030 would fall into the bipartisan category, echoing George W. Bush’s SOTU promises that eventually led to the creation of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Another reason this could work is the continuing, aching need by some in the press to treat Trump’s performance at moments like these as evidence that he is growing into the presidency. This is not about political bias; this is about the human impulse to see the world return to something approaching normality after years of upheaval. Remember, it was after Trump’s 2017 address to Congress that CNN’s Van Jones declared it to be the moment when he became president. Even as recently as George H.W. Bush’s funeral, in December 2018, some reporters declared that Trump was growing more disciplined at the job.

On Monday, the New York Times’s Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman pointed to the SOTU as a rare example of Trump acting like a conventional president. He was practicing his speech multiple times, “because it is one instance where he usually sticks to it,” they wrote. “For all of the president’s fabled norm-busting, there are aspects of the conventional presidency that appeal to him, none more so than standing in the hallowed halls of Congress, with all eyes on him speaking to the nation.”

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Combine a good, bipartisan speech with the inevitable dead-cat bounce Trump will get in the polls from the government reopening, and one can see the narrative of a rebounding Trump come into focus.

That said, one has to squint pretty hard. Karni and Haberman also report that “White House officials have . . . conceded that immigration will be a major theme of the night, and that the speech-writing process has been directed by Mr. Miller, his hard-right adviser.” Any time senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is involved with the speechifying, the results have rarely been bipartisan in nature.

More importantly, however, is that Trump might not even have this move in his arsenal. As Michael Tackett and Maggie Haberman noted in the New York Times, Trump’s principal gambit as president has been to intimidate his bargaining partners, to little avail in most cases. They quote presidential historian Michael Beschloss as saying, “It’s almost as if he only has one tool in his toolbox.”

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