Former special assistant to President Trump Marc Lotter on Tuesday said the president will likely look for common ground with Democrats in his State of the Union address, despite the divisiveness plaguing Washington.
“The Congress came together in the first two years,” Lotter, who also served as Vice President Pence’s press secretary, told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton, referring to Trump’s first two years in office, in which Republicans dominated both houses of Congress.
“They passed major legislation dealing with the opioid crisis. They passed major bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation,” he continued in an appearance on “Rising.”
“There is an opportunity there, and I think the president will look for areas like infrastructure, like lowering prescription drug costs, things where both parties have said they want to address the issue.”
“[Trump’s] going to say, do we want to do great things or do we want to choose to do resistance? It’s really going to be up to the members of Congress and the Democrats to see if they want to work with the president in areas where we even agree,” he said.
The White House said last week that the theme of the State of the Union is “Choosing Greatness,” and that the president will push for compromise on various key issues, including immigration and trade.
Trump will deliver his address to a divided Congress for the first time.
The address comes on the heels of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which was started over a dispute between the White House and Democratic leadership on funding for Trump’s proposed border wall.
Relations between the White House and Democrats have since appeared to deteriorate.
Trump said in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is “very bad for our country.”
— Julia Manchester
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