Politics astheatre

resident Donald Trump's State of the Union address to the US Congress looked less like a governing report card and more like a campaign rally that happened to be held in the nation’s most formal chamber.

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What is striking is how openly the speech treated politics as theatre and theatre as strategy, at a moment when the country’s problems are stubbornly untheatrical.

The setting did most of the work. Medal-winning athletes, decorated veterans, and heroic first responders were brought forward as living symbols of national grit. These gestures are not cynical by definition; honouring service is a worthy tradition.

But when such moments become the spine of a speech rather than punctuation marks, they start to substitute for argument. The message becomes emotional rather than explanatory: feel proud, feel defiant, feel reassured. The question of how policy connects to those feelings is left mostly untouched.