The State of the Union as 1970s Variety Show

For Trump, it's all about the special guest stars

Donny and Marie Osmond and Florence Henderson join the Mac Davis Show in 1975

Ronald Reagan had two guests to his State of the Union Addresses during his first term. One was Army Sergeant Stephen Trujillo, who risked his life during the Grenada invasion to bring medical aid to wounded fellow soldiers. Another was Lenny Skutnik, who dove into the icy Potomac River to save passengers of the commercial airliner that had just crashed into the 14th Street Bridge. Reagan highlighted these people at the end of his 1982 and 1984 addresses to highlight a spirit of American volunteerism and selflessness. Those were the only guests he had at those two addresses, and he was the first president to do this sort of thing.

This week, Donald Trump had, by my count, 12 acknowledged guests at his State of the Union Address. These included a World War II veteran, the widow of a conservative activist, the parents of a slain National Guard member, a little girl badly injured in a car accident caused by an undocumented immigrant, a woman receiving IVF treatment, and the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team, among others. Twelve was actually a fairly small number of guests for Trump.

The figure below shows the number of guests presidents have had in person during their State of the Union Addresses since 1981. The data through 2024 come from UCSB’s American Presidency Project. I assembled the most recent two years from news coverage. (I am counting the hockey team as one guest, rather than counting each team member.)

From this figure, it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump is a significant outlier. He averages about 14 guests per speech; other presidents averaged about 4.

But he’s not just an outlier in the number of guests; he also utilizes them very differently. Other presidents have typically used their guests to illustrate policies they champion or to inspire Americans to heroism. The guests bring the President’s speech to life.

With Trump, it’s almost the reverse. The guests aren’t really there to help sell the speech; the guests are the speech. He puts a few words in to introduce them and tell their stories, but he mainly wants to show the range of people he’s been able to assemble. Yes, to some extent, he’s using them to highlight beliefs he has — military heroes are good, trans people are bad, fertility is good, etc. But his addresses have come to feel more like a 1970s TV variety show, with a cavalcade of special guest stars who go together about as well as Cher and David Bowie. They’re there to produce an array of emotional responses in his audience, from inspiration to anger to pity.

This ties into a point that Julia Azari made on our very long and late live coverage Tuesday night: unlike other presidents, Trump isn’t really going before Congress to ask them for anything. He doesn’t have much of a congressional agenda, and mostly uses the address to talk about all the things he’s doing without them, and also to shame Democrats.

In some sense, none of this should be a surprise. Trump is, at his core, an entertainer. And it was Reagan, another entertainer, who first brought in the idea of spotlighted guests at the State of the Union. This can be seen as a part of a long progression of making the event more public-facing since Woodrow Wilson proposed transforming the constitutional requirement of reporting on the country from a written statement to an in-person speech.

And while these speeches are not quite the mass draw they once were, Trump has been a bit more successful than other modern presidents in drawing an audience. The question is, to what end? To tell Congress what he wants of them? He’s just not doing much of that. To rally public opinion to his side? The SOTU has never been a great vehicle for that, and Trump isn’t particularly skilled at that task. Or is it just to rally his base in what increasingly looks like a campaign rally in front of a stodgier than usual audience? His speech gives them some images they can use — Democrats sitting down at the wrong time, him looking proud and defiant, a hero being decorated, etc. — but its shelf life can be measured in hours. Which was all variety shows were.