2024-03-08 01:53:27
The State of the Union in the United States is one of the main annual events that brings together the people and their leadership, where the president delivers a speech reviewing the country’s achievements and presenting its future challenges. In this report, we review prominent points in the history of the State of the Union in the United States, from its beginning as a traditional annual message to controversial events.
The State of the Union address varied from time to time, and was originally called the annual message, according to the Brookings Institution website.
First message
The first message was presented by President George Washington before Congress in 1790, and the message was delivered in writing until the beginning of the twentieth century. Then the State of the Union speech moved from radio to television to the Internet, and the aspects of the Union’s speech and its salient points multiplied.
The Four Freedoms and the Axis of Evil
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address in which he pointed to the “four freedoms” — freedom of speech, worship, and freedom from want and fear — as a powerful justification for what America’s role was to become in a world at war.
War on poverty
Then there was Lyndon Johnson’s declaration in his 1964 State of the Union address that the next Congress would be remembered as the one that “declared an all-out war on human poverty.”
Axis of Evil
More recently, in his 2002 State of the Union address, in the wake of the 9/11 disaster, President George W. Bush declared North Korea, Iran and Iraq an “axis of evil.”
Reagan’s innovation…a hero next to the First Lady
Ronald Reagan also created the tradition of sitting a worthy American in the balcony next to the First Lady in order to make a point.
In 1982, he called Lenny Skotnik, the hero of a helicopter crash into the Potomac River, and said of him: “We witnessed the heroism of one of our young public servants, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman losing her grip on the helicopter line, dove into the water and pulled her to safety.”
Fourteen years later, Bill Clinton presented another hero for America, and he was able to score political points at the same time when he presented Richard Dean, a Vietnam veteran who played a role in the Oklahoma City explosion that killed 169 people. Clinton described him as returning to… The building four times and saved the lives of three women, and was praised for his heroism.
Ford’s confession
While most State of the Union addresses are well-engineered and coordinated and assert, whether true or not, that the State of the Union is sound, in his 1975 State of the Union address President Gerald Ford departed from this script to declare that “the State of the Union is not well.”
Most State of the Union addresses are exercises in partisanship; Where the president’s party stands and applauds his words, and the other party sits glued to their seats in protest, sometimes, someone boos or shouts an insult, but most of the time, the ritual of standing and applauding, or not, is the maximum.
Nancy and tearing up Trump’s speech
But in 2020, following Donald Trump’s speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi engaged in an unprecedented theatrical performance.
The State of the Union address fell one day before the end of Trump’s impeachment trial, which Donald Trump did not mention.
At the end of the speech, as Trump looked from side to side to applaud, Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seated behind the president as usual, stood up. While Pence was applauding, Pelosi looked at her desk, took a few pages from the president’s speech, and slowly tore them out. And deliberately.
After that, she said: “He tore up the truth, and I tore up his words. What we heard last night was a disgrace.”
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