Look right, look left: Trump will survey a landscape transformed in speech to Congress
WASHINGTON − One year later, it's not just the president standing at the podium who will be different.
When President Donald Trump speaks to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, the political landscape he will survey from the dais will have been transformed since a defiant Joe Biden warned in his final State of the Union address that the nation faced a choice between democracy and despotism.
This year, in the congressional ranks arrayed before Trump, four of the seats occupied by Democratic senators last year are now held by Republicans, and the GOP is in control of the Senate. The number of House Republicans has ticked down by one, still enough to hold the narrowest of margins for a majority.
And since the inauguration six weeks ago, the changes have cascaded.
The lineup of the nation's military leaders in dress uniform and medals, in front-row seats to the president's right, have been scrambled with the unprecedented purge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as well as the chief of naval operations and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Trump already had fired the Coast Guard commandant.
The alignment of the ambassadors, seated to the president's far left, has been upended by Trump's determination to end the war in Ukraine, with friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and an Oval Office brawl Friday that sent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy packing. Canada and Mexico, the USA's two biggest trading partners, have been put on notice that 25% tariffs will be imposed the day of the speech, and once-friendly nations including Denmark and Panama have been put on edge by his suggestions of territorial expansion.
Even the reporters sitting in the press gallery, behind and above the dais, face turmoil over his decision to constrain the access of Associated Press journalists at the White House in a dispute over whether the news agency will use Trump's nomenclature for the body of water the rest of the world calls the Gulf of Mexico. (He has renamed it the Gulf of America.)
The White House recently posted on the social media site X a faux edition of a Time-like magazine with Trump on the cover, wearing a crown and a grin. The headline: "Long Live the King."
"We've made a great deal of progress," Trump declared last week at a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron. "People are saying it was the best month for a president in our country's history. I hope that's right, but I feel it's right."
The tension and the drama in the House chamber will underscore how history seems be running on fast-forward since the start of his second term. Through executive orders, untested presidential authority and the machinations of billionaire buddy Elon Musk, Trump has thrown Washington into the sort of turmoil usually seen only during world war and economic catastrophe.
Reality check: The government is about to run out of money
Not all the laws of politics have been repealed.
Congress still needs to fund the federal government, which officially runs out of money on March 14, just 10 days after the speech. The House last week took the first of several steps, passing a budget blueprint that calls for slashing $2 trillion in spending and cutting up to $4.5 trillion in taxes.
But the debate was chaotic and the Republican edge so narrow that Speaker Mike Johnson could afford to lose only a single vote to win without help from across the aisle. Divisions remain in the GOP between deficit hawks who want to reduce the government's red ink and moderates nervous about gutting Medicaid and other domestic programs.
Johnson may well eventually need the support of at least a handful of Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.
"Let me be clear: House Democrats will not provide a single vote to this reckless Republican budget," House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries had vowed, standing on the Capitol steps behind a sign that said, "Save Medicaid." In the vote that followed, they didn't.
Congressional Democrats, who have been unable to do much to stop Trump's steamroller except raise their voices, are loath to agree to any spending plan without guarantees that the president won't ignore it. The administration is already enmeshed in legal challenges to his move to freeze spending that Congress had approved.
That's a question that may eventually be settled by the Supreme Court, which at the moment looms as the biggest institutional guardrail to Trump's most far-reaching assertions of presidential power. The justices, three of the nine appointed by Trump during his first term, will be sitting in front-row seats, next to the Cabinet.
The black-robed justices may be hard to read, though. They traditionally maintain poker faces during speeches by presidents of either party.
Since the State of the Union last year, the increasingly conservative high court by a 6-3 vote has granted Trump and other presidents broad new immunity from prosecution for exercising "core" constitutional powers. The majority decision, handed down in July, said it would protect an "energetic" executive willing to take "bold" action.
For Trump, good news and bad news on his approval rating
The most important audience Tuesday night isn't in the House, of course. It's the Americans watching on television or livestream, often the biggest national audience a president commands during the year.
Trump's approval ratings have been higher than at the beginning of his first term in 2017, but they continue to significantly lag the standing of other presidents after their first month in office.
In the most recent Gallup Poll, 45% of those surveyed approved of the job he is doing as president and 51% disapproved, a net negative rating of 6 percentage points. That is 15 percentage points below the average approval ratings for all elected presidents at this point in their terms since polling began in earnest with Dwight Eisenhower.
Trump was backed by almost all Republicans, at 93% approval, and almost no Democrats, at 4%. His support among independents, the voters who tend to decide elections, was tepid, at 37%. While partisans have made up their minds about Trump, independents may be taking a wait-and-see attitude.
A year ago, Biden tried to use his outgoing State of the Union address to remind Americans of the accomplishments of his administration, from the recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic to the investment in infrastructure projects and climate programs. He wanted to reset the perception that he was too old to serve another four years and to raise the stakes of what was ahead.
"In a literal sense, history is watching," he said. "History is watching."
History still is.