Making the most of the room where it happens

Can Democrats use a presidential address to yank attention away from an autocrat?

“He [the President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

So reads Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which spells out the second of only two explicit legislative powers (the other is the veto) the document gives to the president. State of the Union addresses take place in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is Congress inviting the president over to their place to give them his sense of what’s going on in the country, what our main challenges are, and how he thinks they should go about fixing them.

Even though a lot of Americans usually watch it, The State of the Union Address is not usually the most exciting affair. But the stakes for this year’s address, which takes place later tonight, are potentially pretty high.

I don’t need to recount the many ways in which President Trump, with an assist from Elon Musk, has upended and more or less broken the federal government during his first six weeks in office. But the ship of state veered in yet another unsettling direction towards uncharted waters last Friday, when Trump — egged on by Vice President and guy-you-dread-having-to-speak-to-at-a-party J.D. Vance — publicly raged at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, embraced a Russian dictator, and kicked Zelenskyy and his Ukrainian diplomatic corps out of the White House. It was about the most appalling piece of American diplomacy (if we can call it that) that any living person can remember, and represents a huge no-going-back point in America’s relationship not just with Ukraine, but with our closest European allies.

It’s for this reason, and all the others Trump has accumulated so far, that make tonight’s address — and in particular, the response to it — so pivotal. The State of the Union address one of the only political events that, because it’s simulcast on all the major TV networks, becomes the locus of the public’s attention for 24 hours, even in the Internet age. Because I’ve just had the pleasure of finishing up Chris Hayes’s excellent new book, The Sirens’ Call, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about attention recently (and will be writing a great deal more about it in the coming weeks). It’s a resource for which the Democratic Party, and really anybody who isn’t Donald Trump or Elon Musk, are wanting these days.

The Democrats (as they constantly remind us) are out of power. They are a minority in both chambers of Congress, control a minority of state legislatures across the country, and have no real national leader right now; no one voice who can stand up and offer a clear, attention-getting rebuttal to a president who is likely to take at least an hour of primetime television to make the case for his chaotic agenda to the public.

But the pomp and circumstance of the State of the Union Address, and the House chambers in which it is delivered, provide just such an opportunity to disrupt the Trump Show. The room has deep history and an aesthetic gravitas. It’s been in use by the House since before the Civil War. The Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in this chamber. Like all great spaces of history, it also has its darkness: segregationists railed against race-mixing in that chamber; and federal marshals and Capitol Police barricaded the doors to the chamber on January 6th, 2021, with guns drawn. They were defending the body of representatives the chamber was designed to contain against a president it would welcome back with open arms just four years later.

The question for Democrats, therefore, is this: how do you use this heavy historical weight, and the space where it lives, to your advantage? How do you leverage this unique moment of political attention to wrestle the mic away from the the leader of the decreasingly-free world? This is the question Democrats (serious Democrats, anyway) have been asking themselves all week.

If history is any indication, it’s going to need to be something big.

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Whatever they do, it wouldn’t be the first time members of Congress wrestled attention away from the commander-in-chief during this major address.

Let’s hop in the time machine to September of 2009, as President Barack Obama delivers his first joint address to Congress. When speaking about the health care plan he’s pushing, which would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, Obama asserts (probably for the 400th time that week) that the benefits he’s proposing would not apply to those who reside illegally within the U.S. In the pause after that sentence, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouts “You lie!” into the silence, drawing jeers and consternation from most everybody else in the chamber. Obama, as became his custom, kept his cool and moved on with the speech, only retorting quietly “It’s not true.”

But the murderous look on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s face over Obama’s left shoulder tells us what we need to know about the scandalous nature of this outburst.¹ I can’t emphasize enough how big of a deal this kind of interruption was when it happened. At the time, Politico reported that the only such interruptions that ever came close to this were in 2004, when Democrats led a “chorus of boos” over President Bush calling to renew the Patriot Act; and in 2005, when they “howled, hissed and shouted ‘No!’ when Bush pushed for Social Security reform.” But this — a lone voice loudly calling proclaiming the President of the United States to be a liar — was something entirely new.

It might have seemed at first like this was an aberration. The pundits largely agreed that in many ways, this was just a glitch in the system that a post-racial presidency was likely to solve. The pundits weren’t counting on Donald Trump, the lines he would repeatedly cross, and the ire he would draw from his opponents, who would need to start getting more creative.

With apologies, I’ll fast forward us to January of 2020. This was the start of a new decade, but it also represented a significant landmark in American history: the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted universal voting rights to women. As a gesture intended to celebrate the pioneering suffragists who led the way to the passage of this amendment in the early 1900s, Democratic women in both the House and the Senate opted to wear all white to the president’s address in a show of gender solidarity. The sea of white rolling across the chamber was particularly noteworthy in the chamber this year, following the record number of women who were elected to the House of Representatives in 2018, a vast majority of them Democrats.

House Democratic women wearing white at the 2020 State of the Union Address.

But the gesture was one not just of celebration, but of protest. The suffrage milestone was of particular importance to many Democratic women specifically because of the president who would be addressing them that night. Trump, in his public statements and actions both before and during his presidency, had made a number of (to put it mildly) controversial and offensive remarks about women with whom he had publicly clashed in the past. He had also been credibly accused during his campaign of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women, and since then has been found legally liable for sexual assault.

And so, the decision to wear white served a dual role: celebrating women’s right to vote, and not-so-implicitly rebuking a president with a detestable personal history with women. A few House Democrats took it a step further and boycotted the address entirely in protest of the President. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio actually got up and conspicuously walked out of the chamber in the middle of it.

These actions did not, of course, stop the president from forcefully advocating for his policy agenda. Just as Democratic women had made their representational opposition statement clear through their clothing, the Republicans in the chamber made their loyalty just as clear with loud chants of “four more years!” as the President entered the chamber. Between his fawning congressional allies and his white-clad stalwart opponents, according to one reporter, the address felt much more like “a campaign rally rather than an affair of state.” Rep. Ryan referred to it as a “professional wrestling match.”

The night was capped by Speaker Pelosi dramatically tearing her copy of Trump’s address into several pieces after the President finished speaking. "He shredded the truth,” Pelosi explained later, “so I shredded his speech. What we heard last night was a disgrace… it was a courteous thing to do considering the alternatives.”

This is why wearing white — and why tearing up the speech at the end — worked. The barrage of white clothing overwhelmed the space and made the women of the 117th Congress impossible for the camera, and thus the viewers, to ignore. And Pelosi’s shredding of Trump’s speech, knowing full well that she was a full third of the camera frame (along with Trump and Vice President Pence), made it possible — just for one hot second — to look away from the train wreck that was President Donald Trump.

While it would soon be forgotten in the haze of a pandemic that arrived in earnest just over a month later, not to mention the chaotic presidential election that took place later that year, the 2020 State of the Union Address was a hinge-point of resistance against Trump that, at the time, did not go unnoticed by the press or the public.

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Since Trump left office the first time, Republicans stepped up their own protest actions, repeatedly heckling President Biden during his term in office; particularly in 2023 and 2024 as his eventually-abandoned reelection campaign was heating up. Now, though, with a president who crosses rubicon after rubicon of embarrassing leadership, new forms of protest are called for, and Democrats have been hemming and hawing about how to deliver it.

(I’ll add here that I wrote most of this post on Sunday, March 2; so if some grand strategy emerges by the time this hits your inboxes, that’s why!)

In Democrats’ defense, making a splash in the midst of a State of the Union Address — in which a president necessarily has a huge spotlight advantage — is not just hard to do, but much harder to do than usual for a collection of reasons. Of course, Trump is just a difficult person to tug the microphone away from; a complete deficit of personal shame can have that effect. At the same time, this has always been true, and isn’t likely to change anytime soon. More important for Democrats to consider is the state of the current media and attention markets, and the unique effect this is likely to have on how Americans take in this or any future State of the Union addresses.

For context, take a look below at the viewership trends for the address going back thirty years (Democratic presidents in blue, Republicans in red).

A lot of this pretty clear downward trend obviously coincides with Americans’ changing television-watching habits: “cord-cutting” done mainly by folks in my generation and subsequent ones, the rise of streaming content, and the sea of distractions found on social media and other quarters of the internet have likely played a role here.

But the fact that so many such distractions exist only make it more imperative that whatever Democrats do, they need to do so with the current information environment in mind; not the one from the Obama years, much less the Clinton years. For Rep. Joe Wilson in 2009, tearing attention away from President Obama was easy, because only one person was expected to be speaking that evening; plus, even Obama was competing only with everything else that was on television that night. Any president hoping to “break through” during a State of the Union Address — and any member of Congress looking to upstage him, however briefly — needs to do more than cheer or boo.

Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times columnist and guy I generally think is correct about most things, has suggested not just a limited boycott, as some members did in 2020, but a mass defection from the event entirely:

I do think a mass boycott dramatizes things nicely, especially if Democrats purposely forget to tell everyone in advance that they aren’t coming (oops!). But one thing that worries me about this is that if they do broadcast their intention to not go, Republican leaders in Congress will just fill the hall with administration officials and it’ll become a MAGA party — not one that I’d ever want to go too, but a party nonetheless, and the speech continues unabated. I also worry that empty seats send a message, but potentially the wrong, unintended one: “We quit,” perhaps, or “We’re taking our ball and going home.”

Bouie also shouts out another strategy and (correctly, in my view) dismisses it as not impactful: that Democrats should attend, but they should bring as their guests former federal workers and other sympathetic figures whose lives have been uprooted by Trump’s (and Elon Musk’s) mass firings of the federal bureaucracy. There have been reports already that at least a few Democrats are planning to do this. This is substantively the right thing to do, and the stories do need to be told; but it doesn’t tell them in a way designed to draw attention. Bringing guests to the State of the Union to make a point is a time-honored tradition, and as a result won’t get Democrats the spotlight they’re searching for.

One of my favorite BlueSky accounts, The Process Party, raised a few other interesting options:

In my view, Option A doesn’t get Democrats what they want; the public would be likely to interpret it as just more shouting and political conflict that they don’t have an appetite for. And Option D is, at this point, unconscionable.

My answer here, ultimately, would be option C (for the first half of the speech), followed by B (a dramatic walkout) while Trump is in the middle of a sentence. What I like about this option is that not only is it attention-getting to the viewing audience, but it’s bound to attract Trump’s attention from up on the dais and get him distracted. More specifically, it really might trigger him into saying something so deranged and off-putting that it becomes an even bigger story than not just the Democrats’ protest, but the speech itself.

Then again, I’m not a political consultant, and Democrats didn’t ask me. All I know is that the situation we’re in currently isn’t sustainable. I’m an expert on Congress, and right now, Congress is giving over every last power they have to the Executive Branch. It frankly is both professionally and personally devastating to me. Tonight, Congress is inviting into their chamber the man who tried to ransack and overthrow it four years ago. The very least they could do to preserve some of their dignity is to take back the guy’s lunch money.

1. Wilson, I should note, apologized immediately for the outburst.