President Donald Trump reached for the reset button Tuesday night after five initial weeks of tumult and controversy that badly shook Republican confidence on Capitol Hill in his leadership abilities. As he addressed a joint session of Congress, Republicans offered a clear show of unity while Democrats, for the most part, sat in stony silence.

If Americans were hoping for a shift in tone from the doom and gloom that hung over Trump's "American carnage" inaugural address, they didn't get tremendous relief. Some of the speech was, in fact, more upbeat. But his calls for unity across party lines were canceled out by unfair jabs at his predecessor and outlandish calls for massive spending and tax breaks.

Trump floated a vague idea of a new "merit-based immigration system" and "real and possible immigration reform." Considering the criticism he previously directed at Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their efforts to accomplish immigration reform, Trump appears now to recognize the folly of his promises to solve the immigration problem by deporting the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally.

Many Trump supporters might be scratching their heads over his promise to cut the corporate tax rate while simultaneously providing "massive tax relief for the middle class," while also promising "one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history," along with more spending on veterans affairs, while also boosting spending on infrastructure upgrades by a whopping $1 trillion.

Trump suggested in an interview with Fox News earlier this week that he would pay for all of this with "a revved-up economy" boosted by a 1 percent to 3 percent increase in gross domestic product. That's a fine aspiration, but it's not a plan for debt reduction or even balancing revenue with expenditures.

And Trump seemed not to recognize the irony of introducing his own lavish spending plan, which would dramatically increase the national debt, while he simultaneously condemned Obama for having "put on more new debt than nearly all other presidents combined."

Trump pledged new efforts to fight "the criminal cartels that have spread all across our nation" and helped create a national epidemic of addiction. Yet he did not mention any effort to combat the entirely domestic addiction problem fed by doctors' over-prescribing of opioid pills that have dramatically boosted the illicit heroin trade.

And when Trump moved to address the growing violent crime problem in the country's urban centers, he bizarrely focused on the victims of crime committed by illegal immigrants, which constitute a tiny fraction of the total crime occurring in the country today.

For his first address to Congress, Trump presented more of the disciplined presidential demeanor we've been hoping to see. But his spending plans are heading quickly into a brick wall of bipartisan congressional opposition.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST LOUIS POST DISPATCH