Samantha Granville
BBC News
It’s the first night of the Rodeo in Houston, Texas – usually an unmissable event in the city.
But gathered at an Irish pub in the suburbs of the city are a group of young Republicans who don’t want to miss President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to Congress.
About a dozen members of the party have piled into the back room of the pub while Fox News blares on surrounding TV screens.
People have come out wearing red, white and blue, with flag pins and scarves to accessorise.
Before the speech started, members of the club told me how excited they were to hear Trump’s policy proposals.
If they had to give him a grade on the first 44 days in office, it was a unanimous “A+”.
“He’s already surpassed all expectations,” one person told me.
As the President took to the podium, the group chatter stopped, but the cheering and laughing did not.
Sporting a Trump-Vance baseball cap, Evan Howard, 26, raised his glass every time the President said something he agreed with. And that was a lot.
“He’s going to crack down on crime and be tough with cartels. He’ll stop a lot of American bloodshed,” he said.
But Evan conceded that 44 days in, he’s not feeling the benefit of President Trump being back in office. At least, not yet, and he’s happy to wait.
“I’m not too much better off, to be honest, but I like what he’s doing,” Evan said. “I see the work that’s being done, and I understand that some of these changes that he’s putting through are not going to go through right away, and that we will see their effects in the future.”
Seated across from Evan was Brittany, who was far less expressive throughout the event than the rest of the table. A 31-year-old black woman, she’s new to the Republican Party.
“I think he did great. I thought it was a very unifying message,” she said. “He pointed out a lot of things that the Democrats, who I used to feel really connected to at one point, have failed to press on.”
“[The Democrats] tend to advocate for certain things that don’t really apply to Americans as a whole. Americans are struggling. You have issues with crime, you have people losing their home, you have people becoming homeless. And the liberals want to talk about pronouns.”
Mentions of pronouns, gender, and “wokeness” garnered a lot of cheers and claps from the crowd on Tuesday night.
The boos came every time the cameras panned to Nancy Pelosi, or Democrats holding signs in the crowd, or any lawmaker looking sleepy in the crowd.
The only feedback for President Trump tonight? Maybe talk about Joe Biden a little less.
But otherwise, the parting message from this group is: promises made and promises kept.
