Hello from Washington, I'm Chuck Todd, and this is the Chuck Todd cast.

So last night was the State of the union and given all of the anxiety that many sort of

democratic donors and members of the progressive press and even some elected officials anonymously were nervous, were ringing their hands.

The Obama people used to call these folks the bedweters.

And let's just say they're all very happy on this Friday morning because Joe Biden

made a lot of folks feel a lot better about his ability to fight.

What's fascinating about his State of the Union is that they didn't pretend it was not a campaign speech.

He started immediately off and started it off with a contrast and in some ways it was almost a response to Donald Trump winning the nomination on Tuesday

night and in fact we've had quite we now know we have the framing the general election started this week

Donald Trump accepted that is you know

unofficially accepted the nomination on Tuesday

declaring Joe Biden the worst president ever and essentially Joe Biden responded with the state of the union

to carrying Donald Trump a threat to American democracy

and so there was not it was was it as polite of a state of the union as perhaps in the pre-Trump era we were used to

But one could argue this is the political environment that Donald Trump has created and

Joe Biden is choosing to fight fire with fire.

So with all that I thought the best way to understand what goes into make it a speech, how this

speech played out,

is to talk to one of the great speech writers that I've known for a long time.

It's Jeff Nussbaum.

He is somebody who's written his share of campaign speeches,

presidential speeches, and then some.

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