The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Plays To Base, Calls For Unity In State Of The Union

Episode Date: January 31, 2018

President Trump delivered his first State of the Union Tuesday night — a call for unity, peppered throughout with language and themes aimed at his base, on immigration, the economy and national security. This episode, host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, political editor Domenico Montanaro and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello NPR, my name is Chris, I'm from Connecticut. This podcast was recorded at 11.34 p.m. on Tuesday the 30th of January. Thank you. to local public radio. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with another special late night edition. President Trump delivered his first State of the Union address Tuesday night. The state of our union is strong because our people are strong. The overarching theme was a call for unity, but embedded in it all, there were hints of the division that dominated Trump's first year in office. Because Americans are dreamers too. We've got an all-star team here to walk through the big speech. Literally very big.

It was an hour and 20 minutes long. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. All right, Sue, you are over in our spacious booth on the House side of the Capitol, and you were there in the chamber for the speech. So what was it like? about the president's speech and the party out of power tends to sit there a little bit more glumly.

This year was no different than that. It just felt a little bit more enhanced in that Republicans were more animated and Democrats were totally flat. And at times, particularly when the president was talking about immigration, outwardly hostile, booing and hissing the things he said. And you could kind of feel that in the mood in the building leading up to today. Was there anything about this speech that was surprising, like on a policy front? Or was there anything that jumped out at you and you're like, whoa, I wasn't expecting that? I don't think that there were a lot of surprises. I thought what was interesting is that he lived up to the advance billing on the speech, which was that he was going to hit a lot of bipartisan notes. And he did do that, saying, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, seek common ground. But balanced with that was still a pretty strong speech to his base, which is what Trump usually does. He described immigrants as people who are basically coming

here to kill us. You know, he spent a long time talking about gangs and singled out parents who'd lost their children to violent acts by illegal immigrants. And even when he was talking about the premier policy issue that he is supposedly seeking a bipartisan compromise on and laid out some of his criteria for that and said, this is a straight down the middle compromise. He talked about dreamers in a very unsympathetic way, almost resentful. You know, Americans are dreamers, too. So I thought it was interesting. I thought there were a lot of bipartisan notes, but the undercurrents were still divisive and geared to the base. You know, infrastructure is still the thing that gets held out there as this sort of carrot leading the bipartisan horse along this path or something, because, you know, nothing has happened with it. It's the one thing everyone seems to agree on. It continues to be the thing that no one can agree on how to fund, but they can sort of let

it be on the horizon like it's going to be this thing that they all work on. But kind of fat chance in an election year. You know, President Trump wants to talk about gleaming roads that we're all going to have, and everything's going to be fine. But there isn't really an infrastructure plan that the White House has put forward. There isn't a bill that's really in the works. So that's just sort of hanging out there. And like Mara said, you know, using the dreamers as a kind of rhetorical cudgel to say Americans are dreamers, too. You know, the dreamers who are in this country, the children or the people who are not children anymore, but people who are brought to the U.S. illegally as children, you know, would very much consider themselves Americans, even though they're not citizens. Can I push back against Domenico for one thing about infrastructure?

There is going to be a bill and there are specifics. They're just underwhelming. It's not that they don't exist. It's just not the big plan that we were led to believe. It's just something that generates $1.5 trillion. It includes a lot of deregulation and speeding up the permit process. There is going to be a plan. It's just not going to be very big one. And again, though, the key is how you pay for it. And there has been going to be a plan for almost an entire year. From President Trump, last year in his speech before a joint session of Congress, he delivered almost the exact same line about gleaming roads and highways and

bridges that he delivered tonight. Interestingly, a year ago, he said it was going to be a $1 trillion plan or that it would generate $1 trillion of investment in infrastructure. Now it's $1.5 trillion. But still no, at this moment, clear indication of where that money would come from. The thought is that it would be a relatively small investment of federal dollars and then somehow leveraging it. But we haven't seen the details. And there was a lot of thought that they would release that before the State of the Union, but that did not happen. The president also rattled off a list of a lot of things that he would like to do that cost a whole lot of money and no real indication of how he intends to pay for it,

especially on the heels of just passing this major tax legislation that he touted at the top as a major accomplishment of his administration, but also leaves a lot less money for the federal government to play with. I mean, one, you're talking about this infrastructure bill, which they haven't really described how much they would put into it. But the federal government has some skin in that game. He was talking about paid family leave, which was a nod to his daughter Ivanka's sort of personal issue about on that. He was also talking about increasing defense spending. I mean, down the line, a lot of the things he put forward today or tonight cost a lot of money. And I would

say that while a lot of this stuff, even lowering the cost of prescription drugs was another thing that he talked about, that often requires some element of government investment. So while I think some of the stuff he puts out there are the kind of things we point to as things that have bipartisan agreement in Congress, I just don't think there's a lot of will out there to be able to do this stuff because Congress doesn't want to pay for it. And the interesting thing is, Donald Trump is, this is the curtain raiser for his second year in office. And it's a totally different type of year, because he's not going to be able to pass anything he wants with just Republican votes. That era is over, at least for the moment. I mean, they tried to—they used reconciliation for the tax bill and for getting a lot of judges and a bare majority vote to get a lot of judges on the bench.

That's just not going to happen with immigration or infrastructure. He's going to have to work with Democrats to get anything passed. And as Sue said, it seems like that bipartisan effort is not making progress. So he wanted to strike these tones of unity. And he seemed more relaxed, I have to say, than last year. And he seems to be getting more comfortable in reading a teleprompter, kind of fitting into his role a little bit more as president. And those optics certainly matter because when Mara talks about him talking to the base, there's a calculated reason for that. The fact of the matter is that these audiences for State of the Unions happen to

be mostly people who support the president, who wind up overwhelmingly watching these events. Really? Yeah, they don't wind up being... So like Democrats don't watch Republican States of the Union and Republicans don't watch Democratic state of the union? Yes. Democrats are less likely to watch states, state of the unions that are Republican presidents and vice versa. The same thing happened under President Obama, where you didn't have that many. I mean, Gallup looked at this, for example, and they noted because audiences for the state of the union tend to be heavily tilted toward the president's existing supporters,

for example. Last year, the audiences, by the way, are on decline. They don't have the same levels of audience that they had in past years. They're still huge audiences. Last year, President Trump got something like 47.7 million people to tune in. That's more than double the Game of Thrones finale, for example. And on average, something like 20 million tune into Sunday Night Football on NBC. So those are big numbers, but still 47 and a half million or so is way more than that. When you think about the number of votes, though, that President Trump got and Hillary Clinton got, it's a lot less. So not everyone is tuning into this. And a lot of people who don't like this president or didn't like President Obama or didn't like President Bush simply do something else.

All right. So for those of you who did not tune in and are counting on us to tell you what was actually in this hour and 20 minute long speech, let's run through the bits of news that President Trump made on policy. Sue, what jumped out at you? A couple of things jumped out at me all over kind of the map. I thought that he did seem to make a little bit of news tonight in announcing a new executive order to essentially reverse what President Obama was trying to do and close the military facility at Guantanamo Bay. I am asking Congress to ensure that in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And in many cases, for them, it will now be Guantanamo Bay. He kind of gave a little bit of a red meat rousing speech about keeping that facility open, ordering it open, and that we're going to continue to send terrorists there.

Complete reversal from the Obama administration. Which is completely in line with everything President Trump has tried to do in the last year. Yes, and that Obama was continually shut down by Congress on Guantanamo Bay. He tried to do it and Congress wouldn't let him. So I think the president, his announcement tonight, has the support he needs in Congress. And also his comments about nuclear powers in North Korea and his statement that he wishes there was a better world. But until we can get there, that the U.S. needs to essentially, in his words, rebuild and modernize our nuclear arsenal. As part of our defense,

we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression by any other nation or anyone else. Which is a break from U.S. foreign policy from every administration, Republican and Democrat since World War II. The policy of every American president has been nonproliferation, has been reducing nuclear weapons around the world, not just in the U.S. So to hear that from an American president at the State of the Union as a matter of foreign policy, I think, was a moment. The most surprising thing to me was when he said that he was calling on Congress to empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people. So tonight I call on Congress to empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to reward

good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people. Now, if he's really talking about that kind of radical civil service changes, that is huge. I mean, one of the pillars of a liberal democracy is strong civil service protection. So you don't purge the government and have waves of people who are true believers and that leads to corruption and everything else. And that's a hallmark of our system that we have strong civil service protections. He already has done this in the VA. And that was very popular. Popular, bipartisan. But to do it throughout the federal government to make it easier, for instance, for him to remove people that he doesn't like, we're already seeing this play out at the Department of Justice. That would be a very big change. I think they call that on Infowars rooting out the deep state. One thing that stood out from the speech, almost from the first moments of the speech,

was President Trump's reference to people sitting in the first lady's box, real people telling their stories. And now every president does this, but there was a lot of that. He likes to break records. And Donald Trump broke a record tonight, I think, and he broke the record for the number of Skutniks in the hall. And what Skutniks are is named for Lenny Skutnik, who was the first person who filled this role. Ronald Reagan singled him out. He was a federal employee who I think basically ran the Xerox machine in some Reagan, singled him out. He was a federal employee who I think basically ran the Xerox machine in some agency, but he turned out to be a real American hero because when there was a plane crash in the Potomac on an icy winter day, he dove in to save

a woman who had lost her grip on the helicopter line. And Ronald Reagan singled out Lenny Skutnik. And ever since then, presidents have given their State of the Union and have populated the first lady's box with people they want to single out. Donald Trump had a lot of them, and some of the stories were incredibly moving. One family that President Trump referenced was this family from New Mexico where the father is a police officer and saw a woman, a pregnant woman about to shoot up heroin. And somehow he and his wife ultimately ended up adopting her baby. And that baby was named Hope and was there in the audience with the parents. That was another really powerful moment of the Skutniks. And then there was also a man from North Korea who, just a remarkable story, escaped North Korea, had a limb amputated,

and yet still carries around his crutches from that time. And he held up those crutches in the room. And it was just quite a moment. His story, the president was highlighting to talk about sort of the depravity of the North Korean regime. And also Otto Warmbier, I believe I'm saying his name right, but he was the University of Virginia college student who was captured and essentially tortured to near death by North Korea and was sent back to the country to the U.S. and died a few days later. And his parents were also guests of the First Lady and another one of these really emotional moments where they cut to his parents and they were crying. And it was a very somber moment inside the chamber. Yeah, there were a lot of these people that, it was intensely emotional as the chamber turned their attention to them. Also, the parents of

some girls who were killed in gang violence, the gang being MS-13. Yeah, and that family, I also think, spoke to Domenico's point that while the president can be really provocative about these immigration policies, that family and his message about, you know, these teenage girls who are murdered by the hands of MS-13 gang members. I, you know, I think politically he this is something that a lot of Americans agree with the president on. They hear stories like that. And that really does inflame sort of a public anger and an outrage. And I think the public was is on the side of parents like that who are really frustrated in immigration laws that they believe led to the deaths of their children. Whether or not those laws did is a matter of debate. But they are very sympathetic people in this debate. These are the themes and that Donald Trump ran on. You've seen that at debates. You see it at every state of the union.

You know, I don't know. You don't see it a lot from Trump, right? I mean, Trump was, I alone can fix it. One of the best received moments in Donald Trump's first address to Congress last year was when he singled out the widow of a Navy SEAL who had lost his life in an operation in Yemen. And it got very positive reaction. And I think he decided more is more. But that is a tonal shift, right? I mean, he is not he is someone who tends to take credit, not to give credit. That's right. To use his speech to highlight others and the contribution of others. And sort of this like, it's not about me. It's about you message, I think was different for Trump. It's not something we hear from him a lot. And that's a really important point, because usually he talks about how I fix this. I'm

responsible for the great stock market. And he was talking a lot about you and the American people. So, yes, that was a change, change in tone. And that really that really stood out when he was trying to sort of urge Congress to have a bit of humility in reminding them that they and defending the American way. They work in every trade. They sacrifice to raise a family. They care for our children at home. They defend our flag abroad. And they are strong moms and brave kids.

They are firefighters and police officers and border agents, medics and Marines. But above all else, they are Americans. And this capital, this city, this nation belongs entirely to them. Although I did have to say that my biggest like, oh, come on moment in listening to this speech was at the beginning where one of these very moments where he talked about Congressman

Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip who was shot at the Congressional Baseball practice. The legend from Louisiana. Yes, the legend from Louisiana as he called it. It's a very well-known story. But he used that anecdote to say, to kind of, he said, calling upon all of us to set aside our differences, seek common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people we're elected to serve. But if the president's supposed

to lead by example on these things, I mean, come on. To me, Trump just doesn't do that. I mean, this is someone who uses his Twitter feed and his interactions with members of Congress. He insults people regularly. I mean, just recently in these immigration led negotiations alone, referring to the Senate minority whip Dick Durbin as Dickie Durbin on Twitter. At least like five percent of the people in that room have some sort of negative nickname on Twitter now from the president? But the idea that Donald Trump, who is so has been such a divisive president, who is such a divisive candidate, who we've spent so much time talking about his rhetoric and and doing the opposite of unifying the country to then use the State of the Union to say we all need to do better. We all need to do these things. And he doesn't do those things. So come on. But that's the question. Is this speech the beginning of something completely

different? A real pivot? Yes. Well, our experience has been every time he of something completely different, a real pivot? It's not, though. Our experience has been every time he does something like this, like when he has a 55-minute broadcast meeting at the White House where he says he'll sign anything that Congress comes up with, the next day he's back to hardline rhetoric on immigration. I mean, generally, these things don't last for very many minutes. But that's the point. That's the whole point. Like you get he gets an audience that's unfiltered and unchallenged and he gets to be unchallenged and gets to deliver whatever tone and whatever framing and whatever narrative he wants. He can hop off the dais and do whatever he wants after that. As long as it's not broadcast, it basically didn't happen. But at that end, I just don't think he has a lot of credibility, at least with the people that were in that room. And let me just

talk about unity and coming together and then trying to cut things like an immigration deal and not doing the things that it takes to do that. So like last year, he also talked about we've got to get past the partisanship. We have to have unity. Let's do this thing. And then it all fell apart. And and there was no attempt at unity. The president and Republicans in Congress went through and basically enacted their agenda without a single Democratic vote with Republican votes alone on so many different things for an entire year. And then they come back and they're like, no, this year, this speech, we really should do bipartisanship this time. Right. And the biggest audience he has is what he just delivered tonight, probably for the entire year. And if nothing happens, well, you know, this town or the swamp, you know, it's their fault.

And when the same pundits, you know, lament that he's not living up to the realities of the promises that he could that he committed to, you know, the president and his allies will just blame the media. They'll say they're not touting the real stories of the success of this presidency. Everyone will go back to their corners. The dust will settle. The show will be over. Everyone will be back to square one. And two or three days later, we'll be closer to a DACA deadline. And there will be some tweet about something or the Nunes memo will be released and the news cycle will move on.

Look, my fellow cynics, I would just like to say that we're going to find out if you're right or wrong. The guy hasn't tweeted in, I think, over 48 hours. Getting close to it. I mean, he was able to restrain himself for the last three weeks of the campaign as, you know, Hillary was suffering various difficulties. And, you know, definitely the history of Trump has been he tends to step on every moment of bipartisanship with an angry, divisive, belittling, insulting tweet. But we have to wait and see if that happens again. I will say this is the big danger for Democrats, because when you talk about him being able to restrain himself when it comes to Twitter, you know, in the last three weeks of the campaign, and then he's able to do it before a large audience tonight. What our pollsters had said

from Marist is that actually, when you ask, who do you want to control Congress, it's pretty volatile and kind of based on how the president has comported himself. So it was, you know, a five point advantage for Democrats in our most recent poll, but it's been a double digit advantage in a lot of other polls. And there's a difference depending on how the president comports himself. So if he's, you know, calm and restrained in the last few weeks of the campaign, it's not going to be as wide of a margin as Democrats are hoping for. So you expect this speech to shrink the generic ballot advantage for Democrats even more? Not necessarily.

I mean, Mars, right? Maybe Trump starts talking a different tune on all these things. Consider me the cynic in that conversation. But again, I think he contradicts himself in his own state of the union in which he starts off by saying we need to find common ground and unity and the things that unite us. But in the same speech, he still uses the kind of language that is very inflammatory to the people he's trying to cut deals with, to negotiate with. Well, and also there was that callback to his big fight or whatever, the feud that he launched against NFL players. Right. And there was this callback to the kneeling during the national anthem, which was conflating the MS-13 gang violence with of the immigration debate is the kind of Then there's the way this speech is going to get reported and the bites or the key phrases that Americans who didn't listen to the whole thing tonight are going to hear over the next couple of days and form their opinions.

For instance, the front page of The Washington Post tomorrow, the big headline is a call for bipartisanship, not, you know, Trump continues his red meat rhetoric on immigration. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that red meat rhetoric on immigration. Let's hear a little bit of what he had to say. But as president of the United States, my highest loyalty, my greatest compassion, my constant concern is for America's children, America's struggling workers, and America's forgotten communities. I want our youth to grow up, to achieve great things. I want our poor to have their chance to rise.

So tonight, I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, to protect our citizens of every background official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American dream. Because Americans are dreamers too. So how was that received in the room, Sue? I was keeping track of the applause lines and how they were received on both sides of the aisle.

And when he said that line, this was one of those lines where Republicans stood up and cheered and Democrats essentially stayed pretty quiet and seated, with the exception of Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia who is up for reelection in 2018 in a state where Donald Trump remains very popular. I will say, though, you know, I think that he's gambling that a lot of these lines that some of us, you know, will look at as divisive are pretty popular. Things like standing for the anthem. Oh, that's definitely popular. That's been proved. Thing to say that you want to reduce the number of people coming to the country with extended family. You know, people are in favor of, you know, spouses and children being able to stay. But when they hear about cousins or other family members that came in, that's when a lot of people say they're not for that. And that's what the

president is proposing. Right. But the thing is that so it's popular with his base, might be popular with other people, too. But what Sue is raising the question is, is this going to help him? Is this there's the audience outside the room and then there's the audience in the room? Is this going to help him convince the audience in the room who he has to make a deal with? He's not making a deal with voters. He's making a deal with members of Congress from both parties. Is that going to help him accomplish this? One of those Democrats that he's trying to cut that deal with, Dick Durbin, who's the number two Democrat in the Senate, when Trump was making his remarks about immigration and family based immigration, Durbin had his head hung and was just shaking his head.

No, no, no, no, as Trump was talking. And that, to me, sort of summed up how Democrats were receiving the immigration message in that speech. Yeah, and the bet that the White House is making, at least in the pitch they've made to me, is that they aren't necessarily going to win over the Durbins of the world, that they are aiming for some different coalition than has ever voted.

Mara is making faces at me. Well, like, what is, yes, I wonder which one they're thinking of. Well, they're thinking of a coalition that has never existed before. I get that they think that Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham is not enough. As Stephen Miller would say, that's just the left wing of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the Republican Party. I get it has to be bigger. But a deal that Dick Durbin can't accept is just not going to get done. And I'm not sure who that helps. You know, if immigration is dead and nothing happens for DACA recipients and nothing happens for the wall, how that plays out, I'm not sure, because, you know,

a lot of Democrats... Gives everybody something to campaign on in 2018. Well, it puts a big, big dilemma in front of Donald Trump. He has to start deporting these people as of March 5th or not. It puts a dilemma in front of Trump, but it also, you know, puts Democrats on their heels, too, because you have a lot of activists blaming Democrats at this point, you know, for not being able to hold the line and get something done on this. And one more thing. Fashion. Can we do fashion? We have to. Yeah, right. Like we do. So Melania Trump was there in the chamber. She has not been in public view in recent days or weeks. She did not accompany President Trump to Davos, Switzerland,

as she had originally been scheduled to do. Apparently there was a scheduling conflict. She showed up tonight wearing a white pantsuit. A familiar looking pantsuit. No, it was a different looking pantsuit. Familiar in theme. When you hear politics and white pantsuit, what do you think of? I think of many Tuesdays in 2016 of my life watching Hillary Clinton give an acceptance speech. Hillary Clinton's convention speech in which she wore a white pantsuit to honor the suffrage movement was the first thing I thought of when I saw Melania enter the chamber wearing a white pantsuit. Was it kind of off-white? No, it was gleaming white. I think it was not off-white.

It depended on which television you were watching. And of course, everybody is now watching Melania for any kind of coded message that she sends with her clothing or with her travel choices because there is reported to be a lot of family drama ever since the story was reported that Donald Trump's lawyer paid a porn star to not talk about an alleged affair she had with Donald Trump right before or after Melania gave birth to Barron. So people are wondering if Melania is mad at him. Is that why she didn't go to Davos? Traveled by herself to Florida?

And now she wore a white pantsuit, for whatever that means. I'm just annoyed she stole my blazer. And she looked good. She looked great. It was very chic. I mean, First Lady's always impressed at these events, and she's no different. I do think, though, that First Lady fashion is political, right? They make statements with it.

I think Melania made a statement on Inauguration Day when she wore that pale blue suit that very much channeled Jackie Onassis. You know, like First Ladies use these moments to make statements. A lot of times they use it to highlight different designers or American fashion makers or to make a statement of some kind. I think a white pantsuit was making a statement. What that statement is will be a matter of some Twitter debate, I have no doubt. So the State of the Union response this year, I mean, there were actually like five different Democratic State of the Union responses, but the official one came from Congressman Joe Kennedy III from Massachusetts.

And what's the family tree here? He's the great- He is the great- Great- Nephew of Ted Kennedy and JFK. Yeah, right. And so his grandfather was RSK? Was Robert F. Kennedy.

Yeah. And he looks the part. And he was at a technical school in Massachusetts with a crowd of people to cheer and have audience interaction. He had a car behind him because it was some sort of auto shop kind of class thing. And he delivered a pretty rousing speech. Folks, it would it would be easy to dismiss this past year's chaos. Partisanship partisanship as politics. But it's far, far bigger than that. This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us, they're targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection. For them, dignity isn't

something you're born with, but something you measure. By your net worth, your celebrity, your headlines, your crowd size. Not to mention the gender of your spouse, the country of your birth, the color of your skin, the God of your prayers. Overall, it was a pretty good speech. It was a decent backdrop. It was a decent place to hold the speech. You know, seeing vocational in the, you know, the sort of seal that was below him was a nice dovetail to the president's call for having more vocational training that got a pretty big applause, especially from the Republican side. There was the one thing that sort of distracted a lot of people, which was this kind of excessive amount of lip gloss or chapstick that he had.

Every time he turned his head, you could see something shiny there. Just like in the corners of his mouth. There's always something with these responses. These things in some ways have been cursed through the years. But overall, I think that a lot of Democrats who want to hear something hopeful and like the name Kennedy thought it was a pretty good speech. OK. And he also delivered sort of a message that was direct to to the dreamers. You know, he he delivered a response on immigration. And to all the dreamers out there watching tonight, let me be absolutely clear.

Ustedes son parte de nuestra historia. Vamos a luchar. Vamos a luchar por ustedes. Y no nos vamos a alejar. You are part of our story. We will fight for you. And we will not walk away. He did something smart in this response that I'm surprised that other Republicans and Democrats who have had this absolutely thankless job in the past haven't done is he delivered this before a live audience.

And I think it changed just the atmospherics around it, because so often when they cut away and go to the response, it's sort of the single shot person staring and talking into the camera. And it gave it a dynamism that I think that these responses are just usually lacking and fall really flat. I do also think there's a little bit of a joke to be made here that part of the official Democratic response is saying we need next generation, new leadership, new faces in the party. And it's a Kennedy, one of the most famous political dynastic families in American history, to be the new face, which is just kind of funny. Need change, but I mean, not too much change. Not like too much, too fast. A change we kind of know.

Yeah, like change you like that looks familiar. Well, yeah, but it's skipped a couple generations. But he did deliver a speech in moral terms where he tried to ground the critique of Trump in values, not in identity politics. And I thought he offered a pretty good roadmap for Democrats as they try to figure out what's the best, most effective way to push back against Trump. And he's also 37, so he's pretty young. I wouldn't expect that this would be somebody who's, you know, a 2020 kind of candidate. But, you know, with some polish later, potentially you could see him run. He was young and he had a good Democratic message and he didn't fall flat on his face. And I would

say Democrats are probably heaving a sigh of relief. But Mara, isn't the problem here that there was five Democratic responses? I mean, doesn't it kind of raise the question of who's in charge here? Well, this is the official one, but that's been going on for a while. I mean, doesn't it kind of raise the question of like, who's in charge here? Well, this is the official one, but that's been going on for a while. I mean, Bernie Sanders just does it every time. He does his own. Maxine Waters did one. Yeah, but this was the official response. But, you know, the Tea Party sort of broke the mold on this where they wound up having those, you know, those additional responses. And I think this is the first time the Democrats have had this many responses. And, you know, if that speaks to the fractiousness of the party and the potential division among the progressive left, that is a potential problem for Democrats,

too, because who are they listening to is the real issue. And you can just choose your news, choose your news. I'm glad that y'all chose us. That is a wrap. We'll be back in your feed Thursday with our regular weekly roundup. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. And our colleagues and some of us in this room did a live annotation and fact check of President Trump's speech. There's a lot of stuff in there. Please check it out.

It's on NPR.org. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.