PITTSBURGH — By the end of President Donald Trump‘s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Democrats decided not to applaud a child battling brain cancer, the mother of a woman who was murdered by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who entered the United States illegally, the passage of a sports bill that would have kept biological men from competing with girls, a western Pennsylvania man released from prison in Russia to his 95-year-old mother, and a newly admitted student to a U.S. military academy.

They sat stone-faced on their hands, some playing with their iPhones, during all of these moments — moments that had many bathed in tears.