Trump is latest to give State of Union in time of turmoil

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump is the latest chief executive to deliver a State of the Union address at a time of turmoil.

But others may have had it even worse. Abraham Lincoln delivered a written report during the Civil War, Richard Nixon spoke while embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and Bill Clinton gave one of his State of the Union speeches just weeks after he’d been impeached in the very same room.

Despite all of that, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley called Trump’s upcoming address on Tuesday “a strange and bizarre State of the Union.”

There’s the continuing federal investigation into Trump campaign contacts with Russia, calls for Trump to be removed from office and the president’s own threat to again close down parts of the government if Congress refuses to spend billions of dollars to build his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Plenty of State of the Union addresses have unfolded in turbulent times.

Two decades ago, Democrat Clinton delivered a State of the Union speech not long after the Republican-controlled House impeached him in December 1998 on grounds that he had lied to a federal grand jury and had obstructed justice in the wake of his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

And just hours before Clinton delivered his speech – in the same chamber where he had become just the second president ever to be impeached – White House lawyers opened their defense of the president in a Senate trial in which they argued he was innocent of the charges and “must not be removed from office.”

No president had ever delivered a State of the Union address under such extraordinary conditions.

The Senate acquitted Clinton the following month.

Decades earlier, Nixon devoted much of his final State of the Union speech in January 1974 to the country’s energy crisis. But near the end of his remarks, he added a “personal word” about Watergate. Nixon called for the investigation to end, declaring “one year of Watergate is enough” and said he had no “intention whatever” of resigning.

But the Republican reversed course and stepped down that August, becoming the only president ever to resign.

Lincoln faced a situation “more grim than it is now, by far,” said Brinkley, referencing the Civil War.

In December 1861, eight months after the war began, Lincoln noted in his State of the Union address – they were written in those days – that “a disloyal portion of the American people have during the whole year been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union.”