Performance theater and the ‘State of Disunion’ address

On Feb. 24, President Donald Trump gave his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. He gave the speech because the U.S. Constitution requires it. Sort of.

While presidents have delivered an annual State of the Union speech to Congress nearly every year since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, the Constitution requires neither a speech nor an annual report of any kind.

Rather, Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that 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.” This is the entire mandate for the president’s duty to report on the “State of the Union.” It neither requires that the “information” be delivered in a speech, nor that it be provided annually.

The tradition of delivering an annual report of the state of the union began with President George Washington. Given no instruction about the frequency or form of the report, in January 1790 Washington made the decision to travel to Federal Hall (in the temporary capital New York City) and deliver the first of his eight speeches.

This first “Annual Message to Congress” (as it was called until FDR called his first message “the State of the Union” in 1941) was a very brief speech of 1,085 words, only slightly longer than this column. In contrast, President Trump’s 2026 speech was almost exactly 10 times longer, at 10,600 words, taking an hour and 47 minutes to deliver.

John Adams followed Washington’s precedent, also delivering a speech to Congress in each of the four years of his presidency. The practice of an oral speech came to end, however, when President Jefferson delivered the first Annual Message of his presidency in a written letter in December 1801. This practice was followed for 111 years, through the presidency of William Howard Taft. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson revived the practice of delivering the Annual Message in a speech. Presidents Coolidge and Hoover briefly returned to the written report, but since FDR in 1934, the practice has been to give an oral speech.

It’s time to stop. The purpose of the “State of the Union” address is no longer “to give information to Congress of the State of the Union,” as the Constitution prescribes. Rather, the address has become an annual political campaign speech, designed to tout the policies and accomplishments of one party while embarrassing members of the other. Given the consistent political posturing and pandering of the State of the Union addresses over the past several presidencies, the speech is now the means to divide Americans, not to report on the state of our supposed union.

The irony could neither be richer nor crueler. The State of the Union address has become the annual cause and reminder of the disunion of American public and political life. Its purpose is no longer to inform Congress, but rather to cajole, humiliate and embarrass members of Congress in the opposing party. Whether by special guest invitations or direct verbal stunts, the speech is now used to illustrate our division, not to celebrate our union.

And, as such, it has become nothing more than shrill, partisan theater — a clown show, with the president baiting his political nemeses, who readily take the bait in increasingly embarrassing spectacles of partisan name-calling. We have an overabundance of political poseurs, performers, panderers and pretenders. With a few exceptions what we lack are seriously moral and reflective statesmen and stateswomen.

In one of his most famous speeches (in 1858, before he became president), Abraham Lincoln invoked the synoptic Gospels in declaring that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” How far we have come from a cry for unity in 1858 to annual addresses to Congress whose purpose is to divide that very house.

If we persist in making it nothing more than partisan political theater — a measure of the disunion of America — it might be time to return to the practice of Jefferson and others, and quietly deliver an actual report rather than a red-meat partisan speech.

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