Biden's revealing silence at SOTU

What he didn't say says as much as what he did

President Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

The best way to understand President Biden's State of the Union address is to think about what he didn't say.

There was no mention of Afghanistan, even though troop withdrawals began almost exactly a year before Biden delivered his remarks Tuesday night. There was no mention of his predecessor in the White House or the ongoing congressional investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Climate change barely came up. Neither did "equity," discrimination, or other aspects of race politics. Biden even managed to announce his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson without mentioning that, if confirmed, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court — a historic first that another Democrat facing different political conditions likely would have trumpeted. And there was no tribute to Biden's chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, or other public health officials. While Biden continued to warn against the risks of COVID-19, the maskless faces of the audience announced the administration knows the emergency phase of the pandemic is over.

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.