We begin today’s roundup with Ed Kilgore at New York magazine: who writes about Stacey Abrams and her “golden opportunity” to deliver a truly impactful State of the Union response:
Abrams will speak as the messenger of a newly confident party fresh from a big midterm win and a successful post-election joust with Trump over his border-wall fetish and his mismanagement of an appropriations fight. She will also benefit from the almost certain knowledge that Trump will devote much of his address to an ex-post-facto justification of his decision to shut down the federal government and his imminent declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for his precious wall, both dependent on an entirely bogus border “crisis.” The opportunity to explode the myth of this crisis should overcome any temptation to ignore immigration policy as enemy turf, particularly for a speaker as talented as Abrams.
And about that other speech, Donald Trump’s State of the Union, Jonathan Allen at NBC News provides context for what is sure to be a Trump standard speech, filled with the same lies we’ve come to expect from the White House:
Trump is coming off a five-week partial government shutdown that he once promised he would be "proud" to force, in what turned out to be an ill-fated attempt to gain leverage over congressional Democrats in his quest to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.
Despite continued economic growth, his approval ratings have cratered in recent weeks, dropping under 40 percent in many surveys.
With all of that as a backdrop, he will, for the first time, address a joint session of Congress in which one of the two chambers — the House — is under the control of rival Democrats. His relations with them, already strained, deteriorated during the shutdown to the point that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., forced him to delay the State of the Union until after shuttered federal agencies had reopened.
