How Trump can start over

It’s not hard to imagine how a president, fresh from a midterm pounding and a shutdown debacle, could use the State of the Union to strike a new tone. He could graciously, even humorously, acknowledge the loss of the House. “It looks like a good many of you have moved over to the left since I was here last,” Harry Truman told the newly Republican Congress in 1947. He could pledge to keep the government running. “I challenge all of you in this chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again,” Bill Clinton said in 1996.

President Donald Trump could even, on Tuesday night, echo Clinton’s 1999 call for “civility,” uttered a month after the House had impeached him. Or he could remind the Congress, as George W. Bush did in 2007 after losing the House and Senate the previous November, that “our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on—as long as we’re willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.” He might even concede that at times, it might be better to tweet a little less.

But to imagine those possibilities is to recall what a widow said to her daughter after a long, unhappy marriage: “We could have had a wonderful life, if only your father had been a completely different person.” For Trump and his speechwriters, the challenge at the State of the Union will be to put his opponents on the defensive without using we’re-all-in-this-together rhetoric that would cause his audience to erupt in laughter.