A Speech Transformed to Sport

ATLANTA — They cheered for the hero police officer and the hero soldier, for the North Korean dissident and for Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense.

But the loudest responses from the Republicans who gathered at a neighborhood grill here to watch the State of the Union speech came when the cameras cut away to glowering Democratic lawmakers in attendance. They hooted at each scene. “The faces!” someone yelled at one particularly glum tableau.

It gave the entire scene here in Brookhaven — a northern Atlanta neighborhood in Georgia’s competitive Sixth Congressional District — the mood of a televised basketball rout, with Washington’s long-faced Democrats in the role of hated rivals sitting on the losing bench. At one point, the cameras showed African-American lawmakers sitting silently as President Trump spoke of low unemployment numbers for black people. A white man here, who appeared to be in his 30s, stood up with arms raised, as if a referee had blown a call.

“That says it all,” he yelled, “if you’re not even going to clap for that!”

The watch party here was sponsored by the Atlanta Young Republicans and the Republican National Committee in a district where Karen Handel, a Republican member of Congress, fended off Jon Ossoff last year in a race that drew intense national attention.

Averi Washington, a 42-year-old African-American real estate agent, was one of the few non-Trump supporters in the crowd of roughly 60. Mr. Washington said he had come to the watch party with a friend. In 2016, he said, he did not like either candidate, and did not vote.

But he said he liked the way the economy was going under Mr. Trump. The real estate market is strong in Atlanta, and Mr. Washington said he was open to believing that Mr. Trump was taking the country in the right direction — despite all of his feuding on Twitter.

After the speech, Mr. Washington said he appreciated Mr. Trump’s rhetorical focus on results, from low unemployment numbers to tax reform. “I mean, those are impressive, because that’s how you strengthen the middle class,” he said.