I gave my verdict — the speech was effective, and expensive – elsewhere.
Two other things: 1) In one part of Trump’s speech he argued that he had inherited a difficult economic situation. As part of his case, he cited the 94 million Americans out of the labor force. There are many statistics Trump could cite to show that we have serious labor-market problems — such as the ones Nicholas Eberstadt reports in the new Commentary. The one he used, though, is misleading. Tens of millions of the people he’s talking about are retirees; several million more are students or mothers who are outside the paid labor force to take care of their children full time. At least this time he didn’t call all of those people “a silent nation of jobless Americans,” as he did during the campaign, making their situation sound much more dire than it is.
2) Michael Grunwald notes something I hadn’t known:
There was a telling moment last night when Trump recalled how Harley-Davidson employees visiting the White House told him they’re getting crushed by foreign tariffs, and Trump vowed to fix that. “They weren’t even asking for change—but I am,” he said. In fact, Harley-Davidson’s CEO has asked for change in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade deal that would have drastically reduced some of those tariffs, the very same “job-killing” deal that Trump boasted about scuttling in his speech.