(CNN) — The last time President Donald Trump climbed the rostrum in the House chamber to deliver an address to Congress, he arrived freshly impeached, a mysterious new virus was beginning to spread and Democrats had just begun the process of nominating his challenger.
Five years later, the political landscape has shifted dramatically.
Since taking office a second time, Trump has overseen a dramatic reshaping of the federal government, much of it at the hand of his top adviser Elon Musk, and Republicans are in full control of Congress. He has upended the geopolitical order and shaken US alliances as he pursues a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine — a topic he said Monday he’d address in the speech.
But four months after becoming the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote, Trump faces a new reality of needing to tackle some of the most stubborn challenges awaiting any new president and deliver on his campaign promises to lower prices.
Trump’s advisers are acutely aware how quickly political winds can shift in Washington and have made speed their priority in pushing his agenda. Trump himself has taken a lesson from his first term not to wait for the right moment to execute on his promises. Instead, he signs executive orders almost every day, sometimes deciding only in the minutes beforehand which to put his signature on.
His speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night will act as an extension — and explanation — of the whiplash-inducing 43 days of his new term. He will also face his biggest audience yet to spell out demands for Republicans to turn his agenda into law, the outcome of which will ultimately shape the success of his presidency.
“Tomorrow night will be big,” Trump wrote Monday on social media. “I will tell it like it is.”
How to watch
When: Tuesday, Mar. 4 at 6 p.m. PT
Where: The following networks will be streaming the speech live: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NPR, PBS and USA TODAY
Musk, the world’s richest man who has emerged as one of the most visible and influential advisers to Trump, will be in the House chamber for the speech, a White House official told CNN, and will be held up as a leading example of the administration’s swift action to change Washington.
Entire agencies — which in a previous age would be sending their priorities to the White House for inclusion in the speech — have been gutted in the new Trump era. Tens of thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs. The row of generals who typically sit at the front of the House Chamber are now handpicked by Trump, their predecessors summarily dismissed.
While the president’s speechwriting team has been working on multiple drafts, aides said Monday that Trump has spent little time on the address — aside from a few theatrical moments that are intended to resonate with the audience on television and inside the House chamber.
Unlike during Trump’s first term, top adviser Stephen Miller hasn’t taken the lead in crafting this speech, leaving the task to other speechwriters. However, he and Trump’s other senior aides will all be involved in edits heading into Tuesday evening.
The president’s address comes amid a persistent disagreement among House and Senate Republicans over how to enact a budget that aims to reduce spending, protect Social Security and make permanent the signature tax cuts from Trump’s first term. He is poised to rally Republicans behind his agenda, advisers said, without offering specific guidance for how to achieve it.
One Trump adviser said a goal of the president’s speech would be connecting his rapid-pace actions so far to average Americans who may not yet comprehend the motives behind them. So, too, is Trump likely to address his plan to lower prices, although the specific contours of his speech were still coming together Monday.
Trump is expected to take a victory lap, touting his election win — something he argues delivered him a mandate to enact sweeping change, despite its relatively small margin — as well as lauding what one senior White House official referred to as the “successes and accomplishments” from his first six weeks in office.
The speech will be heavily focused on his domestic agenda, the official told CNN, with Trump previewing his core policy proposals for the next four years.
Still, one of the main areas of interest is how the president uses the global stage to address the wars abroad, specifically between Russia and Ukraine.
Trump has discarded decades of American foreign policy orthodoxy, forging ahead in pursuit of new deals with countries like Russia — while other allies like Ukraine are left as collateral damage. Foreign ambassadors who customarily attend the address have been scrambling to explain the changes to their capitals.
It was only a year ago that Biden administration officials tried to get Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukraine’s president, to Washington as a guest at the 2024 State of the Union speech (she couldn’t make it, citing scheduling conflicts). Trump’s address comes four days after Trump castigated her husband in the Oval Office.
Trump said a day ahead of the speech that he would address the Ukraine situation.
“Well, I’ll let you know. We’re making a speech, you probably heard about it tomorrow night, so I’ll let you know tomorrow night,” he said. “But no, I don’t think so. I think, look, it’s a great deal for us.”
On the campaign trail, Trump frequently spoke highly of authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling them smart and tough and lauding their close relationship. He’s continued to use that language in office, speaking favorably of Putin while publicly dressing down Zelensky.
Whatever ends up in his final speech text will be subject to the usual Trump caveat: what appears in the teleprompter isn’t always what the president says. A major question heading into his speech is whether Trump hopes to appear presidential and calls for unity, or follows his impulse to appeal to his base.
In his 2020 speech, Trump staged a surprise reunion with a soldier and his family and bestowed the presidential Medal of Freedom upon conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh.
An open question is how Democrats respond in the room. Party leaders are still scrambling to settle on a message and a plan for how to present a counterbalance to Trump, mindful of the drubbing that Democrats took in the November elections. The party has tapped freshman Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan to deliver the formal rebuttal, an often thankless task that can still elevate a junior politician’s profile.
Back in 2020, Trump’s rivals felt emboldened. After his address that year, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could be seen on camera ripping up a copy of Trump’s speech when he concluded.
For now, Trump has mostly plowed through much of the organized opposition to his agenda. And although lower-courts have paused some of his administration’s efforts to dismantle the government, legal battles are likely heading to the Supreme Court, whose justices – who usually sit stone-faced during the presidential address – count three of Trump’s own nominees in their number.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who will sit behind Trump’s left shoulder, has proven more than willing to accommodate the president’s whims.
“There is no daylight between the House Republicans and Senate Republicans,” Johnson told CNN. “We all have exactly the same idea and mission and that is to deliver the America First agenda.”
That is not to say all Republicans are fully on board. Some lawmakers been bombarded with constituent phone calls and berated at town halls by voters irate at the dramatic cuts to the federal government.
Most broadly support Trump’s mission to slash federal spending and reduce the size of the government. It’s the methods they object to, and have spoken out against.
Ahead of the speech, multiple measures of Trump’s performance showed the negative outpacing the positive. Forty-eight percent of Americans said they approved of his job performance in a CNN poll released Sunday, compared to 52% who disapproved. (The poll was conducted before his Friday meeting with Zelensky.)
When asked whether Trump has the right priorities, 40% of the respondents said yes, compared to 52% who said no. Doubts about the president’s priorities extended to a small but notable share of those who expressed support for the president on other measures in the poll: 12% of those who approve of the way Trump has handled the presidency say his priorities haven’t yet been in the right place.
Trump’s overall 48% approval is ahead of where he stood before his first address to congress in 2017.
But if he’s hoping for a boost, he may be disappointed. Trump’s appearances before Congress during his first term did little to move the needle on his approval rating.
This story has been updated with additional comments from Trump.
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