What to Watch for in Trump’s Speech

Trump returns to Capitol Hill.

Attendees watch as then-President Barack Obama enters the House chamber for his 2010 State of the Union address. (Photo by the White House)

The most unpredictable of presidents will return to one of the more familiar presidential settings today, as Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress¹ for the first time since 2020.

Trump’s speech comes at a dramatic crossroads for his presidency, as he considers his next steps in the Ukraine war after an explosive meeting with the country’s leader — and as he ratchets up his trade wars, implementing the highest tariffs that the U.S. has set in decades. And, of course, it all follows weeks of whiplash cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.

Here are the topics I’ll be watching for Trump to address tonight:

Ukraine

After Trump’s Friday meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky blew up, many Republican lawmakers expressed confidence that U.S. ties to Kyiv could still be salvaged. “Obviously last week was a missed opportunity,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters. “But I think if people are operating in good faith, I think we could get things back on the rails.”

“We are 100% getting this train back on the tracks,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) wrote on X after speaking to Zelensky’s chief of staff. The minerals deal which was set to be finalized on Friday “will be signed in short order,” Fitzpatrick added.

But despite what members of his own party have been saying, Trump has only moved to further throw the U.S.-Ukraine relationship in doubt: the White House announced on Monday that he had ordered a pause on all future U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

“The order applies to all U.S. military equipment not currently in Ukraine, including weapons in transit on aircraft and ships or waiting in transit areas in Poland,” according to Bloomberg. “While the extent of the affected weapons isn’t immediately known, Trump had inherited from former President Joe Biden the authority to deliver $3.85 billion in weapons from U.S. stockpiles.”’

Meanwhile, Ukraine — backed by Europe’s “coalition of the willing” — is racing to try to get back in Trump’s good graces, with Zelensky telling the BBC that he is still “ready to sign” the minerals deal. According to CNN, “Trump and his senior aides are seeking an acknowledgement from Zelensky — potentially in the form of a public apology — before moving ahead” with the agreement.

The tone Trump strikes tonight could be an important gauge of his plans moving forward, whether it’s conciliatory (representing willingness to return to the table with Zelensky) or defiant (signaling no intention to back down from the blowup with an ally).

Tariffs and inflation

Lowering prices was one of Trump’s key promises on the campaign trail. “Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods,” he said in August.

But since taking office, he has shown less interest in tackling inflation: “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump explained days after being sworn in. “I said, ‘I disagree.’ I talked about inflation too, but how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

Perhaps the president has tired of talking about prices, but they remain an important issue to many voters, including many of the Americans who put him in office — so I’ll be watching closely how Trump tries to communicate his progress (or lack thereof) on lowering inflation. Will he mention products like eggs, the prices of which his team mentioned constantly during the campaign, but which have continued to soar during Trump’s term?

Relatedly, pay close attention to how Trump describes his new 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, as well as his 20% tariffs on Chinese imports, all of which took effect at midnight. The president may not put it this way — but tariffs are charged to American companies seeking to import products from those countries; those firms often pass the costs off to consumers in the form of price increases. Accordingly, economists expect the heightened tariffs to only worsen inflation for products like electronics, cars, and produce that the U.S. imports in large numbers from Canada, China, and Mexico.

“I think our constituents are going to do what it takes to get America back on track,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told CNN when asked if voters would be willing to countenance price increases that will likely come with tariffs. “We’re tired of countries taking advantage of us.” Perhaps Mullin is right, but for a party defending a slim House majority in 2026, it’s a risky bet.

Expect Trump to focus less on price increases, and more on announcements from companies like Apple and TSMC that they invest hundreds of billions of dollars more in U.S. production, which the Trump administration has said is proof that the tariffs are working.

Elon Musk and DOGE

Musk will be in the House chamber during Trump’s address tonight, just as he has been omnipresent at Trump’s side throughout most of his second term.

Unfortunately for Trump, however, that placement hasn’t exactly been a popular one: as I wrote last week, several polls show Elon Musk’s favorability well below the president’s — while also showing voters displeased by the level of Musk’s influence in the administration.

There are two ways to think about this: either Musk is a political liability for Trump, and eventually the president’s approval rating will catch up with Musk’s (it’s already heading in that direction), or Musk is a useful heat shield for Trump, allowing the president to remain relatively popular (by his standards, at least) while Musk chief absorbs any blowback from the cuts imposed by DOGE.

It will be interesting to watch how Trump talks about DOGE — and how (or if) he shouts out Musk personally — tonight. Trump will likely boast about DOGE’s cost-cutting, but be warned: the initiative has had to correct its list of savings multiple times, after several errors inflating the group’s work were exposed. The president is less likely to address the large number of actions DOGE has had to reverse: the USAID contracts restored, the avian flu and nuclear security workers re-hired.

And that’s not even mentioning the flurry of actions that have been put on pause by federal judges, including the firings of thousands of probationary employees. Will Trump echo Musk’s calls for judicial impeachments while speaking in front of the only people with the power to make it happen?

Border and immigration

According to a White House statement, several of the guests that will join First Lady Melania Trump in the balcony during tonight’s speech² have ties to border security, including the mother and sister of Laken Riley (a nursing student was killed by an undocumented immigrant in Georgia), the mother of Jocelyn Nungaray (a 12-year-old who was sexually assaulted and killed by two undocumented immigrants in Texas), and Roberto Ortiz (a veteran Border Patrol agent who has been shot at by cartel members in the course of his duties).

With each of those guests in the audience, expect Trump to spend significant time talking about the border and his aggressive moves since taking office to clamp down on illegal immigration.

As I wrote over at The Preamble last week, Trump has some immigration victories he can point to in his second term, most notably attempted border crossings reaching a historic low, according to the White House. At the same time, however, the Trump administration has been deporting people at a slower rate than Joe Biden, despite his promises of mass deportations on the campaign trail.

I’ll be watching to see whether Trump previews new immigration actions to try to turn around his lagging deportation count, which has reportedly been a source of frustration for the president throughout his second term.

Legislation

Trump’s speech tonight will bring him face-to-face with members of Congress, the very branch of government he has sought to run roughshod over by refusing to spend money they’ve appropriated and attempting to dismantle agencies they’ve created.

Typically, presidents use addresses before Congress to lay out a list of requested legislation they hope lawmakers will pass — I’ll be watching to see if Trump follows that pattern tonight, or if he merely moves forward with previewing executive actions he plans to take. (So far, Trump has signed just one piece of legislation in his second term, a bill named for Laken Riley, compared to eight he had signed by this point in his first term.)

If Trump doesn’t take the opportunity to articulate a legislative agenda, it may be a missed opportunity. Republican lawmakers are still far from consensus on a planned tax/border/defense/energy package, and are looking for guidance from Trump, who is likely the only figure in the party with the power to stitch together the disparate GOP factions to support a compromise.

At the same time, we may be only 10 days from a government shutdown, with a looming March 14 deadline to extend government funding. As Democrats consider whether to force a shutdown in protest of Musk’s cuts, it will be notable to see whether Trump lays down a gauntlet in the funding fight, publicly calling on Democrats to fund the government and daring them to spark a shutdown.

HOW TO WATCH TONIGHT

Trump is set to start speaking at 9:10 p.m. Eastern Time. The address will be aired on all the major broadcast and cable networks, but here’s a link to the C-SPAN livestream if you want to watch online:

The address will be followed by a Democratic response by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

If you’re not able to watch tonight, I’ll have a full inside-the-room recap for you in tomorrow’s newsletter.

1. Every new president since Ronald Reagan in 1981 has spoken from the House chamber in their opening months in office, but had their speech stylized as an “address to a Joint Session of Congress” rather than a “State of the Union address,” which is what it’s typically known as when the president speaks to Congress in other years of his term.

There isn’t really a good reason for this distinction, and tonight’s speech will look exactly like State of the Union addresses you might have seen in the past: same audience (lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, diplomats, etc.), same figures flanking the president (the speaker of the House and the vice president), same call-outs to presidential guests in the First Lady’s balcony, same opposition response at the end, and all the same pomp and circumstance in between.

2. It’s traditional for a carefully selected list of guests to set with the First Lady during a State of the Union; the guests often align with themes in the president’s speech, and the president generally name-checks them during the address, while the camera pans over to them in the gallery. Here’s the full list of guests tonight, which also includes the family of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who was killed during last year’s assassination attempt against Trump, and Marc Fogel, the history teacher who was released last month after being imprisoned in Russia for three years.

Fun fact: these guests are sometimes known as “Lenny Skutniks,” after the first such guest to be name-checked during a State of the Union address. Lenny Skutnick was a Congressional Budget Office employee who dove into frozen water to rescue the life of a passenger after a plane crashed into the Potomac River in January 1982. Two weeks later, he sat next to First Lady Nancy Reagan at President Reagan’s 1982 State of the Union address.