[central_va]

That doesn’t explain the professional punditry(both left and right) praising the SOTU speech that was more or less the same speech he’s delivered 50 times already. I still don’t get that angle.

[SamAdams76]

They pretty much had to praise the speech. There was literally nothing about the speech with which to criticize and as most of American was watching, they did not have their usual opportunity to filter it and make it seem "dark".