(US President Donald Trump seen Tuesday night after delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress from the floor of the House of Representatives.REUTERS/Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool)
The address President Donald Trump gave Tuesday night was approximately the speech one would write to sell Trumpism to a broader audience.
This speech was still very Trump, focusing around the theme of putting American interests ahead of global ones. It had the same usual deviations from Republican orthodoxy — calling for paid family leave and a big infrastructure package while ignoring entitlement programs, criticizing free-trade agreements, and taking a harder line on immigration than most establishment Republicans want.
But it placed those themes in terms that seemed somewhat less aimed at inflaming his base and somewhat more aimed at convincing people that his policies are good for a majority: that tighter immigration will raise wages for all sorts of workers or that crime-fighting policies will make life better in cities like Baltimore, where he received few votes.
This is a smart political shift, and I honestly thought Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer looked rattled discussing the speech on television, as though he had expected the speech to be less strategically competent.
Still, there are at least three significant challenges facing Trump.
One is whether he can implement the policies he's promising.
Trump's failure to staff up his administration hinders both his ability to influence Congress and his ability to change policy through executive action.
The ideas Trump floated on healthcare and taxes are vague. In theory, Congress is supposed to move major legislation on both issues this year. But as Matt Yglesias notes, Trump gave no guidance to resolve the big disagreements on these issues that exist among Republicans in Congress.
As Schumer said, Trump talks about the need to spend big on infrastructure but has not advanced any formal proposal. The news website Axios reported last week that he may not even introduce one until 2018.
A second issue is whether his policies will provide the improvements he has promised, even assuming he gets them enacted.
Trump promised to "expand choice, increase access, lower costs, and at the same time, provide better healthcare." A major reason Republicans can't come to terms on a healthcare reform package is the impossibility of doing all these things at once while lowering government expenditure.
Trump has promised good jobs and higher wages, but the immigration crackdown Trump expects to drive wages up could also cause the economy to shrink and raise consumer prices, as could new trade restrictions.