Since entering office, Trump has promised to promptly end the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine. But his approach to doing so has alarmed many U.S. allies, as his administration recently opened up talks with Russia and signalled openness to peace talks that could potentially embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and sideline Ukraine. Plus, a disastrous meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week has left the U.S. alliance with Ukraine in question, once again putting Trump at odds with European leaders.

That would be a shift not only from U.S. policy under Biden, but from the outcome most Americans say they want: Americans have been sympathetic to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country three years ago. A strong bipartisan majority of Americans, 70 percent, said the U.S. should call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine that “guarantees Ukrainian security,” per an Ipsos poll from Dec. 13-15. Meanwhile, a Morning Consult poll in December found that while a growing number of Americans (as well as Europeans) believe the war could end soon, 47 percent said the U.S. should not push Ukraine into territorial concessions, even if that means lengthening the war.

Of course, there’s always been a limit to what Americans think the U.S. should do to aid Ukraine: Fifty-eight percent in the Ipsos poll said the U.S. can’t afford to take any military action in Ukraine, and polling by Pew Research Center has found that a growing percentage of Americans think we’ve committed too much support to Ukraine as the war dragged on. Unsurprisingly, that split has grown especially along party lines: A plurality of 47 percent of Republicans said the U.S. is providing too much support to Ukraine while a plurality of 35 percent of Democrats said we weren’t providing enough, in a Pew Research Center survey from Feb. 3-9.

Partisan splits are likely to keep shaping U.S. opinion on the issue as well. A Morning Consult poll from Feb. 21-24 found that only 26 percent of Republicans viewed Zelenskyy favorably and 39 percent view him unfavorably, while in contrast half of Democrats viewed him favorably and 14 percent viewed him unfavorably. And 37 percent of Republicans thought the U.S. should push Ukraine to let Russia keep the territory it’s gained in order to end the war, a jump up from the 28 percent who said the same in December; the numbers for Democrats were 20 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

—Monica Potts, 538

Democrats will counter Trump's message with a response from first-term Sen. Elissa Slotkin.

During her six previous years in the House, Slotkin earned a reputation as a moderate unafraid, at times, to challenge her party's conventions. Saying she's "looking forward to speaking directly to the American people," she's promised a rebuttal to Trump's speech focused on economic and national security.

Slotkin's guest will be Andrew Lennox, who served as a Marine in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and was fired from his job with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Read more about Slotkin and her upcoming remarks here.

Trump's address comes amid sagging approval ratings, according to recent polling data.

Trump's job approval rating of 45% (from a Washington Post/Ipsos poll last month) is the second lowest for presidents at this point in their term dating to Harry Truman, according to recent data from Gallup. The lowest was Trump himself at 40% in February 2017.

Similar polls conducted by CNN and Washington Post/Ipsos also found the president's approval rating was under 50%.

Read more here.

When Trump lays out his agenda tonight, expect nearly every Republican in the House chamber to give him a standing ovation. The heyday of anti-Trump Republicans is over, because most of Trump’s intraparty critics from his first term are no longer in Congress.

Of the 293 Republican members of the House and Senate on Jan. 20, 2017, only 121 (or 41%) are still in Congress. Some of those who left did so for normal reasons, like losing reelection or retiring due to old age. But many of them retired because they did not like the direction the party was heading in under Trump. And others, such as those who voted to impeach Trump, lost in primaries because Trump endorsed one of their challengers.

This amount of turnover was unprecedented. According to data collected by Ballotpedia and 538, more members of the president's party left the House during 2017-2020 than during any president's first term over the last 60 years.

And the Republicans who have left Congress during the Trump era were more moderate than their replacements. DW-NOMINATE is a metric that quantifies the ideology of members of Congress using their voting records, placing them on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The average DW-NOMINATE score of the 172 departed members was 0.480, but the average score of the 118 Republicans who were elected to Congress from 2017 to 2023 is 0.544.

In other words, Trump has succeeded at transforming congressional Republicans into a more conservative unit that is less likely to stand in his way.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538