This is Words Matter with Elise Jordan and Steve Schmidt.

Welcome to Words Matter. I'm Elise Jordan along with Steve Schmidt.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Words have power and words have consequences.

Well, this has been the most that the country has talked about the state of the union and

the run up to a state of the union in recent memory.

Certainly, when I was in the White House speech writing office, we were obsessed with state

of the union and preparation started very early, pretty much in November.

And it was all encompassing and we'd end up with an annotated book of, you know, hundreds

of pages documenting every single fact in the exhaustive state of the union.

And I guess today Nancy Pelosi made the point that no one in the country cares about the state

of the union, but I actually think that this has been the wrong approach.

The state of the union exercise is probably the only time that the Trump administration really

thinks about their policy priorities and the act of putting together a state of the union forces

an administration to think about what their priorities are going to be.

And I think it's negligent on behalf of other politicians in the public to let the White House

off the hook a little bit on this one. What do you think, Steve?

I don't know. Here where you're coming from, I guess where I would default to is that for much

of the history of the country, the state of the union was delivered in writing to the Congress.

The spectacle that we see today with the applause lines designed to incite half the chamber to stand

up and applaud and to incite the other half to sit on their hands over and over again.

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