President Trump is expected to unveil a long-promised $1 trillion plan to renew America’s crumbling infrastructure in what officials have billed as an optimistic, bipartisan state of the union speech tomorrow night.
Mr Trump will use the 60-minute address to both houses of Congress, broadcast live to tens of millions of people, to declare that he is “building a safe, strong and proud America”, according to a senior official. He will acknowledge that America is a “nation of immigrants” and seek to reframe the limits he is seeking on legal immigration as an attempt to “protect the nuclear family”.
At least five Democratic leaders and a Supreme Court judge, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have said they will not attend. Dozens of women at the event have said that they will wear black; showing solidarity with a protest by actresses at the Golden Globes awards over sexual harassment, and highlighting claims that Mr Trump harassed or sexually assaulted women before he gained the presidency.
The president will also call for action on the opioid crisis that is ravaging large parts of the country and has been declared a public health emergency by his administration, the official said. Melania Trump is expected to attend, accompanied by members of families affected.
The speech traditionally serves as a platform for a president to set the political agenda for the coming year and reach beyond his own party, but in his first year in office Mr Trump has frequently swerved from prepared scripts to appeal to his own supporters.
Advertisement
Some Democrats have said they will invite young immigrants caught up in the row between both parties and the White House over the so-called dreamers, the 1.8 million undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children. In September the Trump administration cancelled an Obama-era programme which allowed them to remain in the country.
Mr Trump was involved in another Twitter skirmish yesterday, this time with the rapper Jay Z who had called him a “superbug” that had grown up on a rubbish bin of racism, and rejected suggestions that he ought to be grateful for low unemployment among African-Americans.
“Somebody please inform Jay Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!” Mr Trump tweeted.
The president’s supporters, no doubt heartened by his well-received performance at the World Economic Forum at Davos last week, will be hoping to hear a positive, unifying address tomorrow that highlights a soaring stock market and the Republicans’ tax reforms.
Judd Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, told The Washington Post that he hoped Mr Trump would mute his tendency to personalise every issue. “Optimism is the key word — optimism that isn’t self-congratulatory, hopefully,” he said.