Soaking it up at State of the Union 2018

How Bad Does Trump Want To Give His “State Of The Union” On Capitol Hill?

Very Late Last Night The President Answers That.

Eric J Scholl
4 min readJan 24, 2019

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Tweeting:

We’ve learned never to underestimate the President when it comes to genius for publicity. So we figured he maybe would come up with some whiz-bang alternate format or location, as he’d originally threatened.

But no, as we all thought all along, he wants to give the address at the Capitol pretty bad.

But there’s another thing of interest in Trump’s late night Tweets (unless we’re reading too much into them, or he quickly reverses himself after watching Fox in the early morning, as he sometimes does): a hint of conciliation. That the shutdown will be over “in the near future”, and not last for “months or even years” as he’s suggested in the near past.

We aren’t the only ones to pick up on this. Shortly after we wrote the paragraph above, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Tweeted:

Pelosi’s referring to the dueling bills that’ll be voted on in the Senate today, day 34 of the shutdown, which was the subject of our column yesterday.

Trump’s late night internet message follows a day of dueling letters: first from the President to Nancy Pelosi proclaiming he did plan to make the trip over from the White House next Tuesday evening for the speech. Then a letter back from Pelosi saying nope, not unless/until the government’s reopened by then. Of course the President can go wherever he wants: he’s the President, but Pelosi doesn’t have to turn on the lights for him.

Prior to a White House meeting earlier in the day with Right-wing leadership, Trump said Pelosi dis-invited him because “she doesn’t want to hear the truth; doesn’t want the

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Eric J Scholl

Peabody award winning journalist. Streaming media pioneer. Played @ CBGB back in the day. Editor-In-Chief "The Chaos Report" www.thechaosreport.com