The State of The Union Address has always represented the final results of a prolonged and fierce inner-administration battle over policy priorities. It is the stakes of the once-consequential address that have changed dramatically, according to Jennifer Grossman, a speechwriter for former President George H.W. Bush.
President Donald Trump’s State of The Union Address, like those of presidents before him, will likely reflect the conclusion of a long and often heated debate between the various competing factions that influence the direction of every White House: the president himself, his cabinet and all of the agencies with all of their attendant priorities and requests.
The central difference in 2018, according to Grossman, is that the speech’s importance will be diminished by Trump’s extremely flexible approach to policy and his insistence on maintaining a constant unfiltered line of communication with the American people through Twitter.
Grossman joined the Bush White House in 1989 as a researcher assigned to one of seven speechwriters and was quickly put to work on the upcoming State of The Union Address. She was immediately struck by how the speech sparked competition between different policy factions jockeying for position in the young “Madmen” like administration, a reference she used to describe the rampant drinking, smoking and “carousing” that defined her work experience in those years.
“The State of The Union was the most prestigious speech you could be assigned to. Not because it was an opportunity for any kind of soaring rhetoric, that was usually in crisis speeches, but because that’s where the policy turf battles were fought,” Grossman told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The overall theme of the address and its tone are determined by the director of speechwriting, the communications director, and, of course, the president. The “turf battles” Grossman referenced are fought by the 50 people who have a hand, to one degree or another, in crafting the speech. They represent every government agency and every conceivable policy priority, each lobbying the president and his closest advisors to give their pet project more prominent placement in the address.
Grossman began the roughly four-month speech writing process by interviewing Bush on his priorities. Then, once the communications director and the president examined the first draft, the staffing process began.
“Thats when the fireworks begin and people start to fight over what is going to be in, what is going to be first, what is going to be highlighted,” Grossman said of the period when the circle of four or five “cooks” began to expand exponentially by the day.
While the president usually concerned himself with “the broad strokes” and avoided editorial commentary, it was not uncommon for arguing staffers to threaten a call to the Oval Office as a way of asserting their proximity to the president and, as a result, their authority.
“If you don’t take that out I’m going to call the president,” was a common refrain, according to Grossman, who described her defensive coworkers as “wasps.”
A similar battle appears to be playing out in the Trump White House, where moderates advocating a conciliatory tone are taking on immigration hardliners like Stephen Miller. Miller, likely energized by the government shutdown, is leading the White House speech writing team. The team has completed a draft of the speech, which will be delivered Jan. 30, but its overall tone remains undetermined, one White House official told Politico.
The White House did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment on the drafting process.
While the arguments currently taking place in the White House are undoubtedly intense, Grossman argues they need not be. In the Bush era, disagreements over the contents of the speech were heated because the State of The Union Address was bound to serve as a policy outline for the coming year. Grossman is adamant that this is no longer the case.
“During that administration, you could take that speech and for the rest of the year that was the agenda,” she said, comparing that reality with the current White House, which thus far has struggled to maintain message discipline. (RELATED: Trump Struggles To Stay On Message — Contradicts Advisers On Three Policy Issues In A Week)
She predicts that Trump’s penchant for tweeting and his lack of true ideological commitments, combined with the overwhelming speed of the current news cycle, will spell the end of the State of The Union as a policy blueprint for the coming year. With that comes the end of the address as a constraint on an administration’s future decision making, because, during Grossman’s time, “if somebody had a disagreement you could back and say but this was in the State of The Union.”
“Whatever he said on Twitter that morning matters more than what’s going to be in the State of The Union,” Grossman said of Trump. “And his base doesn’t care what’s in the State of The Union, they’ll care what he tells them was in the State of The Union.”
“Speeches now, with the news cycle, are like the morning dew, they’ll just evaporate in terms of significance,” she added.
In addition to the discord between various agencies sewn by the address, it also exposed a more fundamental question: who gets the final say on its contents — the writers or the policymakers?
Bush came up with a simple, if somewhat childish, strategy to clearly illustrate the hierarchy: he banned speechwriters from the White House mess hall and relegated them to a remote corner of the executive office building.
“It was a clear message, the speechwriters are not in charge and it was going to be the policy wonks that would set the agenda. The speechwriters could do their best to just make it pretty but they weren’t driving the train, because when they did it was bad,” Grossman explained, citing Bush’s infamous line — “read my lips, no new taxes” — as the prime example of speechwriters run amok.
“It was a disaster,” Grossman said of the inauguration speech line, which was later held up by then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton as the epitome of hypocrisy, since Bush did indeed raise taxes.
The former speechwriter has a generally humble view of the role and its relationship to policy: translate policy into rhetoric.
“Writers do not make good speechwriters. Speechwriting is a craft, it’s not poetry, its really about trying to listen and capture what somebody’s’ voice is and put in to a draft,” Grossman said. “The less you have attached to it as a writer the better your chances of doing your job well.”
Grossman, who currently serves as the C.E.O. of the libertarian advocacy organization The Atlas Society, relished the experience, but she does have some regrets about how the address was received and what it meant for Bush’s political career.
“By being conciliatory he was still working in the shadow of Reagan,” Grossman said. “He was still trying to be the not Reagan. It was not what the voters wanted.”
Toward that end of the process, Grossman set up a bed in the White House because she found herself unable to leave in the chaotic weeks leading up the all-important address.
“I actually had a bed set up at the White House and there were times when I never left because this was such a great opportunity. I’m in the freaking White House, I’m never going to leave; body odor what’s that,” Grossman joked. “I just didn’t even want to fall asleep it was so exciting to be there. It was very intense.”
Despite the long hours, brash atmosphere and intense pressure, hearing words she wrote come out of the president’s mouth made the experience unforgettable.
“I remember watching the speech and hearing whatever lines I put in being read by the president of the United States, it’s like getting your first hit of crack cocaine, you just want more and more of it,” Grossman said. “You’re just a nobody, just a kid, and you’re able to have that kind of influence. It felt very electrifying.”
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