President Trump will address the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night at 9 p.m., expected to lay out his aggressive agenda for remaking the federal government and shifting U.S. foreign policy during his first televised prime-time speech of his second term.
Mr. Trump is expected to speak about the sweeping staff firings affecting nearly every corner of the federal government. He is also likely to address the strained relationship with Ukraine after the Oval Office blowup with the country’s leader last week, as he has sought to improve ties with Russia while pushing through a critical minerals deal with Ukraine.
The president may mention his administration’s crackdown on illegal border crossings that coincided with a drop in the number of migrants across the Southern border, as well as his legislative push for tax and spending cuts that together could increase the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Here’s what you need to know.
Where can I watch?
The New York Times will stream the address at nytimes.com with live analysis from reporters. The speech will also be carried by major television networks and on cable.
Who will deliver responses?
Democrats have chosen Senator Elissa Slotkin, a first-term Democrat from Michigan, to deliver their response to Mr. Trump’s address. Ms. Slotkin, 48, narrowly won her Senate seat in November in the swing state that Mr. Trump carried. She was first elected to the House in 2018 with other centrist Democratic women who had backgrounds in the military or intelligence and who were recruited as a counterweight to Mr. Trump. Ms. Slotkin worked as a C.I.A. analyst and in national security posts for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.
Representative Adriano Espaillat, Democrat of New York, whose Hispanic-majority district includes Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, will deliver a Spanish-language response to Mr. Trump’s speech. He is the first Dominican American and the first immigrant who was previously undocumented to serve in Congress. As a state lawmaker, Mr. Espaillat strongly supported the New York policy that allows undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The Trump administration has sued the state over the state policy.
Progressive Democrats have picked Representative Lateefah Simon of California, who was elected to an open seat in the East Bay area in November, to deliver their response. Ms. Simon, the first member of Congress to have been born blind, will give the response from the Working Families Party.
Who will attend?
The president and first lady typically invite guests to sit in the first lady’s box during the speech.
Melania Trump, the first lady, has invited Elliston Berry, a teenage victim of A.I.-generated pornography, along with Ms. Berry’s mother and stepfather. Lawmakers from both parties have been pushing for a bill that would criminalize the act of publishing explicitly sexual images without consent and require social media platforms to remove those images.
Speaker Mike Johnson has invited Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s “border czar” at the White House, and Olivia Hayes, whose husband, Wesley Hayes, was killed in a car crash that involved an undocumented immigrant who drove under the influence of alcohol, according to the speaker’s office. Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said she planned to invite Scott Root, the father of Sarah Root, who was killed in 2016 by a drunken driver who was in the country illegally.
At President Joseph R. Biden’s State of the Union address last year, Republicans wore pins and T-shirts depicting Laken Riley, the nursing student killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant, in support of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
Democratic lawmakers have invited those affected by the Trump administration’s rapid and indiscriminate firings of federal employees. Senator Tina Smith, Democratic of Minnesota, will welcome Kate Severson, one of around 1,000 National Park Service employees who were abruptly dismissed on Feb. 14. Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois will bring Adam Mulvey, an Army veteran of 20 years who was fired from a health care facility for military veterans last month.
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