Trump speech live updates: Tariff wars, Ukraine, firings to take spotlight

Democrats will counter Trump's message with a response from first-term Sen. Elissa Slotkin.

During her six previous years in the House, Slotkin earned a reputation as a moderate unafraid, at times, to challenge her party's conventions. Saying she's "looking forward to speaking directly to the American people," she's promised a rebuttal to Trump's speech focused on economic and national security.

Slotkin's guest will be Andrew Lennox, who served as a Marine in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and was fired from his job with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Read more about Slotkin and her upcoming remarks here.

Trump's address comes amid sagging approval ratings, according to recent polling data.

Trump's job approval rating of 45% (from a Washington Post/Ipsos poll last month) is the second lowest for presidents at this point in their term dating to Harry Truman, according to recent data from Gallup. The lowest was Trump himself at 40% in February 2017.

Similar polls conducted by CNN and Washington Post/Ipsos also found the president's approval rating was under 50%.

Read more here.

When Trump lays out his agenda tonight, expect nearly every Republican in the House chamber to give him a standing ovation. The heyday of anti-Trump Republicans is over, because most of Trump’s intraparty critics from his first term are no longer in Congress.

Of the 293 Republican members of the House and Senate on Jan. 20, 2017, only 121 (or 41%) are still in Congress. Some of those who left did so for normal reasons, like losing reelection or retiring due to old age. But many of them retired because they did not like the direction the party was heading in under Trump. And others, such as those who voted to impeach Trump, lost in primaries because Trump endorsed one of their challengers.

This amount of turnover was unprecedented. According to data collected by Ballotpedia and 538, more members of the president's party left the House during 2017-2020 than during any president's first term over the last 60 years.

And the Republicans who have left Congress during the Trump era were more moderate than their replacements. DW-NOMINATE is a metric that quantifies the ideology of members of Congress using their voting records, placing them on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The average DW-NOMINATE score of the 172 departed members was 0.480, but the average score of the 118 Republicans who were elected to Congress from 2017 to 2023 is 0.544.

In other words, Trump has succeeded at transforming congressional Republicans into a more conservative unit that is less likely to stand in his way.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Is a State of the Union a speech or a campaign event? Either way, there'll be a fair bit of cheerleading going on.

That's because Americans who identify with the president's party almost always constitute a plurality or even majority of viewers, according to post-speech polling. In 26 of 27 State of the Union or similar joint addresses to Congress, more fellow party identifiers watched than people who identified with the other major party -- the one exception came in 1995, when Gallup found the same share of Democrats and Republicans took in President Bill Clinton's speech. In fact, a larger share of the audience often identifies as independent than with the opposition party, even though independents tend to be less politically engaged.

The degree to which Trump's speech will attract a more Republican-tilted audience could say something about how people are engaging -- or not engaging -- with politics at the start of Trump's second term. For Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their first joint addresses to Congress featured especially lopsided audiences made up of viewers who predominantly hailed from their party. Yet in Trump's first term, his initial audience was not as overwhelmingly Republican -- perhaps because people were especially curious to see what a Trump speech in a formal setting would look like.

-Geoffrey Skelley, 538