Trump's next first speech to Congress is bound to have little resemblance to his last first one

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., tears her copy of President Donald Trump's s State of the Union address after he delivered it to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 4, 2020, as Vice President Mike Pence is at left. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation will hear a new president sing a far different tune in his prime-time address before Congress on Tuesday night. Some Americans will lustily sing along. Others will plug their ears.

The old tune is out – the one where a president declares “we strongly support NATO,” “I believe strongly in free trade” and Washington must do more to promote clean air, clean water, women’s health and civil rights.

That was Donald Trump in 2017.

That was back when gestures of bipartisanship and appeals to national unity were still in the mix on the night the president comes before Congress to hold forth on the state of the union. Trump, then new at the job, was just getting his footing in the halls of power and not ready to stomp on everything.

It would be three more years before Americans would see Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, then the House speaker and his State of the Union host in the chamber, performatively rip up a copy of Trump’s speech in disgust over its contents.

On Tuesday, Americans who tune into Trump’s address will see whether he speaks to the whole country, as he mostly did in his first such speech in the chamber as president, or only to the roughly half who voted for him.

They will see also whether he hews to ceremony and common courtesies, as he did in 2017, or goes full bore on showmanship and incitement.

He comes into it days after assailing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his face and before the cameras in the Oval Office for not expressing sufficient gratitude for U.S. support in Ukraine’s war with Russia. It was a display of public humiliation by an American president to an allied foreign leader with no parallel in anyone’s memory.

Jarrett Borden, walking to lunch on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, Florida, this past week, expressed ambivalence about Trump, having heard a lot of “hogwash” from him even while liking some of what he has done. Borden anticipates a good show Tuesday and will watch.

“I want to see if he’s going to leave the mic open for Elon Musk, like it’s an open mic at a club or something,” he said, citing the billionaire architect of Trump’s civil service purge. ”This is what he’s been doing recently, which is comical.”

In Philadelphia, visual artist Nova Villanueva will spend Tuesday evening doing something — anything — else. She is into avoiding politics and social media altogether these fraught days.

“Yeah, it’s kind of sad,” she said. “It’s almost like I have to be ignorant to be at peace with myself and my life right now.”

A new president’s first speech to Congress is not designated a State of the Union address, coming so close to the Jan. 20 inauguration. But it serves the same purpose, offering an annual accounting of what has been done, what is ahead and what condition the country is in, as the president sees it.

It is customary in modern times for the president to say the state of the union is strong, no matter what a mess it may be in. Trump won the election saying the state of the union was in shambles and he was going to make it right.

The Trump who addressed Congress on Feb. 28, 2017, is recognizable now, despite the measured tone and content of that speech. After all, he had already shocked the political class by assailing “American carnage” from the inaugural stage.

He told Congress that night he wanted NATO members to spend more on their armed forces, wanted trade to be “fair” as well as free, and wanted foreign countries in crises to be made stable enough so that people who fled to the U.S. could go back home. But he did not open his first term with the wrenching turns in foreign policy, civil service firings, stirrings of mass deportation or cries of “drill, baby, drill” of today.

In a line that could have come from any president of either party, Trump noted in his 2017 speech that, “with the help of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, we have formed a council with our neighbors in Canada to help ensure that women entrepreneurs have access to the networks, markets and capital they need to start a business and live out their financial dreams.”

Now he belittles Trudeau as “governor” of a land he wants to make the 51st state and is about to slam with tariffs, along with Mexico. Canadians, not known for displays of patriotism, are seething about their neighbor and rushing to buy and fly their flag.

In Philadelphia, small-time entrepreneur Michael Mangraviti cannot help but take some satisfaction in Trump’s scouring of the bureaucracy as the firings pile up with scant regard for how well people did their jobs or how those jobs helped keep services to the public running.

“He said for years and years, ‘Drain the swamp, drain the swamp,’” Mangraviti said. “But, you know, now is the time to actually drain the swamp.”

“We’ve seen time and time and time again that the government is horribly, horribly ineffective at everything it wants to do,” he went on. “The fact that they’re actually taking action on something that they say they’re going to do, the fact that they’re ready to take the ax and take it to our government, is something I appreciate.”

To Cassandra Piper, a Philadelphia instrumentalist, Trump’s move to stop making pennies was a “fine decision” — unlike everything else he has said and done.

“I comprehensively disapprove of the changes that are being made,” Piper said, stopping to speak while walking by the Liberty Bell Center. “Not that I was all too happy with the status quo beforehand in the first place, but there’s absolutely no good that can come from the inhumanity of mass deportation, something that this country has already been scarred by.”

So, too, with Trump’s selection of vaccination skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and his choice of Musk to lead the effort to “effectively plunder the government of its resources,” in Piper’s view.

In Hollywood, Florida, Borden, who is Black, said that to the extent Trump can take money that Washington spends overseas and pump it into the U.S. economy, “then you are making America great again. But do that without the racial overtones. Do that without the negative energy, and we’re going to be OK.”

“I think the world is just the world, and we should all just love each other,” he said.

Abraham Lincoln might have agreed, as he summoned the “better angels of our nature” in an inaugural speech, a month before the Civil War, that pleaded with Americans not to “break our bonds of affection.”

Trump had something to say on that subject, too, in 2017: “We all bleed the same blood.”

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Associated Press video journalists Tassanee Vejpongsa in Philadelphia and Daniel Kozin in Hollywood, Florida, contributed to this report.

Calvin Woodward, The Associated Press