President Donald Trump turns after handing copies of his speech to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., and Vice President Mike Pence as he delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Standing before a Congress and nation sharply divided by impeachment, President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address Tuesday to extol a “Great American Comeback” on his watch, three years after he took office decrying a land of “American carnage” under his predecessor.

The first president to run for reelection after being impeached, Trump received a raucous but divided response from Congress with Republicans in the House of Representatives chanting “Four More Years” while Democrats stood mute.

“America's enemies are on the run, America's fortunes are on the rise and the America's future is blazing bright," Trump declared. “In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America's destiny. We are moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago, and we are never going back!"

Setting a yardstick for success and then contending he'd surpassed it, Trump has now gone from an inaugural address that decried “American carnage” to extolling the “Great American Comeback", offering the nation's economic success as a chief rationale for a second term.

Trump spent much of the speech highlighting the economy's strength, including low unemployment, stressing how it has helped blue-collar workers and the middle class, though the period of growth began under his predecessor, Barack Obama. And what Trump calls an unprecedented boom is, by many measures, not all that different from the solid economy he inherited from President Barack Obama. Economic growth was 2.3% in 2019, matching the average pace since the Great Recession ended a decade ago in the first year of Obama's eight-year presidency

Trump stressed the new trade agreements he has negotiated, including his phase-one deal with China and the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement he signed last month.

The main suspense was whether he would address the charges against him.

Trump spoke from the House of Representatives, on the opposite side of the Capitol from where the Senate one day later was expected to acquit him largely along party lines. The first half of his nationally televised speech was largely optimistic, not mentioning the impeachment trial that has consumed Washington in favor of a recitation of accomplishments and promises.

This is an excerpt of an article that will appear in Wednesday's Butler Eagle,. To read the full story and learn more about the President's speech, pick up Wednesday's Butler Eagle or subscribe online.