State of the Union: what to watch for as Joe Biden addresses the nation

President Joe Biden will address a joint session of Congress Thursday night in his last state of the union speech of his presidential term. He’s expected to highlight his legislative record in office, with the rapidly-approaching election raising the stakes.

Biden’s state of the union address is scheduled for 9pm ET/6pm PT tonight – 7 March – and will be broadcast on most major news networks, including ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. It will also be carried by CSPAN and streamed live on the White House website here.

Biden will likely portray this election as he did in 2020: a contest between democracy and Trump, whose authoritarian rhetoric has escalated since he lost the 2020 election to Biden.

Biden has been consistently been polling behind Trump and will likely cast himself as the last line of defense against autocracy.

It is unclear how Biden will position himself on foreign policy. His administration faces mounting pressure from the right to abandon its support for Ukraine, which for more than two years has been fighting a Russian ground invasion. And he faces calls from a progressive anti-war movement to push for a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military campaign. During his speech, Biden is expected to announce the creation of a port on the coast of Gaza to deliver more aid to the besieged enclave.

A week ago, Biden and Trump made dueling visits to the US-Mexico border, underscoring the centrality of immigration policy to the 2024 race – and the shift to the right that Biden and other Democratic politicians have made on the issue. During his speech in Brownsville, Texas, Biden called on Trump to support the bipartisan bill to restrict immigration on the southern border, which