By: Susan Page, USA TODAY
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 has 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
Republican ones, and with them control of the Senate. The number of
House Republicans has ticked down by one, still enough to hold the
narrowest of margins for the GOP.
And since the inauguration six weeks ago, the changes have cascaded.
The line-up 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, ten 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 so far 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 an issue 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.
So far, 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, 51% disapproved, a net negative rating of
six 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.
