WASHINGTON—President Donald J. Trump loves the song “My Way,” bristles at the slightest alterations in his daily routine, and lashes out when the world won’t accept him on his own terms.
Then, when that does not work, he tries something completely different. Trump’s well-received address to Congress on Tuesday night, a conciliatory speech in which the word “we” outnumbered the word “I” by 3-to-1, represented precisely that kind of shift.
Just last week, Trump shouted himself hoarse branding the news media “enemies of the American people” at a time when he was working on an address that invoked the better angels of his own nature, national unity and an “end to trivial fights”.
This does not represent a pivot, it is not a fundamental change of approach, and it does not mean that Trump plans to abandon his tweet-first-and-ask-questions-later style.
But it is a recognition by the White House, from Trump on down, that what it had been doing was not quite working and that a softer sales tactic was needed to sell the same hard-edge populist agenda he campaigned on, people close to Trump said.
“It was not a reset speech,” the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters on Wednesday, as Trump’s team basked in its best news cycle since he took office 41 days ago.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a Trump ally and adviser, said, “The thing people don’t get about Trump is how quickly he learns—he moves fast—so he’s going to be using different approaches.”
“He started out with a set of attitudes and assumptions, and he’s gradually learning which ones are worth keeping and which ones he needs to throw out,” Gingrich said. “On Tuesday he rose to the occasion because he knew the country was watching. That doesn’t mean next Tuesday he won’t have a 20,000-person rally where he strikes a different tone.”
Striking that presidential tone, as Trump did on Tuesday, was an important political move for a commander in chief facing historically low approval numbers and skepticism from fellow Republicans.
Republican Senate and House members were cheered by the president’s optimistic message. But in private, they are becoming increasingly anxious about the administration’s reluctance to present a detailed plan on how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, as well as offer a more specific budget document than a brief outline circulated last week, a $1-trillion infrastructure package that is still in the theoretical stage, and an as-yet vague proposal to cut corporate taxes.
Some Republican senators noted in private that nationalist edges on illegal immigration still cut through the speech, despite all the cushioning of the language.
Democrats were even less charitable. “Come on, there was no pivot, and there isn’t going to be one,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrat-New York, the Senate minority leader. “The speech wasn’t as harsh as some other ones, but it was basically the same things he’s been saying all along. It had the same terrible policies on immigration and other issues.”
The speech on Tuesday, current and former Trump staff members said, was conceived as a bookend to the inaugural address, which was intended to be short and businesslike—to project the new president’s impatience in enacting his America First agenda that included quickly killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and beefing up border security.
Aware that Trump would be speaking to the largest television audience since his inaugural, his messaging team—led by his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon; his top policy adviser, Stephen Miller; and the speechwriter Vince Haley, with input from his counselor Kellyanne Conway, his spokesman Hope Hicks and a handful of others—took pains to soften his often incendiary language.
And they were pleased with the contrast between his slashing, improvisational speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference last Friday and his dignified delivery on Tuesday—all of which showcased Trump’s political range, according to one person close to the team. Trump also resisted any instincts he may have had to ad-lib.
But Trump faces weeks of significant governing challenges that might soon overshadow the success of the speech and the weeklong schedule of follow-up events around the country by him and Vice President Mike Pence.
Two people briefed on how Tuesday’s speech to Congress was crafted said the lack of details was an intentionally evasive maneuver, using phrases that allowed different groups to read in what they wanted. It buys the president more time to change the narrative that his White House is short-staffed and in disarray.
But none of a dozen people in Trump’s orbit said they had expected him to sustain the tone of measured magnanimity in the speech.
Inside the White House, the success of the address—three-quarters of respondents polled by CBS approved of Trump’s message—was greeted with relief after weeks of controversy over the president’s reported ties with Russia, the botched rollout of his immigration executive order and the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.
Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night drew an audience of about 47.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
Trump’s speech—which was broadcast in prime time on all the major cable news channels and the four broadcast networks—had about 16.4 million more viewers than President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union Address last year. But it trailed the 52.4 million viewers that watched Obama’s first address to a joint session in 2009.
More than 20 percent of the total viewers for Tuesday’s address were watching Fox News, which had 10.4 million viewers between 9 and 10:15 p.m. NBC led the broadcast networks with roughly 9 million viewers; the network probably benefited from its 8 p.m. lead-in, the return of The Voice, which was the No. 1 broadcast network show of the night, with more than 11 million viewers. Among the cable channels, MSNBC had the smallest audience, with 2.6 million viewers, compared with CNN’s 3.8 million. Univision had 3.4 million viewers, 2 percent more than Obama’s 2009 address.
The viewership for Trump’s address was much larger than the audience for his inauguration, which drew about 31 million viewers. The figures from the inauguration and Tuesday’s address do not include streaming data.