State of the Union address – live: Trump and Greene to troll speech as Biden expected to make case for 2024

Ms Greene posted a video of her walking around with the large white balloon on Tuesday, along with the caption “It’s just an innocent balloon…#SOTU.”

Graig Graziosi has the story.

Plenty of politicians in Washington are looking forward to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, but at least one will not be in attendance at all.

Abe Asher reports.

Apparently “by popular request” former president Donald Trump will be giving a “live and full ‘play by play’ analysis” of the State of the Union address tonight.

Buckle up.

Andrew Feinberg reports on the origins of the tradition of having a low-level Cabinet member at a secure location during a joint session of Congress in case tragedy strikes.

While White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was able to flag the Biden administration wins during an appearance on ABC’s The View ahead of tonight’s State of the Union address, she also faced a grilling over the president’s poor poll numbers.

Co-host Sara Haines noted that an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 40 per cent of Americans felt worse off since Joe Biden took office — the highest that number has been in decades.

Ms Jean-Pierre conceded it had been a hard couple of years, the president has also “transformed” how we think about the economy from “trickle down” to “bottom up, middle out”.

She also dismissed poor polling adding that the number fluctuate too much to prioritised.

Alyssa Farah Griffin also asked about polling data saying that 58 per cent of Democrats or Democrat-leaning voters would prefer a different candidate to the president in 2024.

Noting she is unable to comment on the president’s plans for 2024 except by repeating what he has said, she said: “He intends to run.”

9/11 first responder and activist John Feal has blasted George Santos for inviting a volunteer firefighter to the State of the Union following his alleged lies about the tragedy – as he claimed the congressman has made further false claims to survivors of the terror attacks.

Speaking to The Independent on Tuesday morning, Mr Feal said that the disgraced Republican congressman is “using the 9/11 community for his redemption tour” and is “disrespecting” all the lives that were lost and continue to be lost because of that day.

“Every time George Santos says 9/11 it disrespects those we lost and those we continue to lose,” he said.

Rachel Sharp has the story exclusively for The Independent.

Alex Woodward reports.

US President Joe Biden’s public approval rating sat at 41 per cent — close to the lowest level of his presidency — as he prepared for a major speech on Tuesday that is expected to serve as a blueprint for a 2024 re-election bid, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.

The three-day national poll, which closed on Sunday, also showed 65 per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track – up from 58 per cent a year earlier.

In a presidency buffeted by soaring inflation and a persistent global health crisis, Biden began 2023 buoyed by unexpectedly strong midterm election results for Democrats and signs that consumer price increases were ebbing.

But he has also faced new criticism over a probe into classified documents found in his home in recent months, after he had condemned former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents when he left the White House in 2021.

Biden’s 41 per cent job approval is essentially unchanged from the 40 per cent recorded three weeks earlier. The Reuters/Ipsos poll has a margin of error of three percentage points either way.

It is an unpopularity that has proved remarkably persistent, drifting as low as 36 per cent in May and June of 2022 but holding near 40 per cent for most of the last year.

In past decades, presidents only occasionally went through extended periods with approval as low as that of Biden, although Donald Trump spent much of his 2017-2021 presidency with similar levels of approval and at points sank even lower, hitting 33 per cent in December 2017.

Biden, 80, is expected to launch another run for the White House in the coming weeks, and his State of the Union address on Tuesday is likely to highlight massive infrastructure and inflation laws he signed in his first two years in office.

The president urged lawmakers to send the bill to his desk by 25 May, 2021, one year after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered Floyd, whose death was captured on bystander video and sparked mass nationwide protests calling for justice for the killings of Black people by law enforcement and demanding police reforms.

But an expansive policing bill in the hands of Congress – which sought to overhaul use-of-force policies nationwide – did not meet the president’s deadline. Bipartisan negotiations stalled. And from 2021 through the end of 2022, more than 2,200 Americans were killed by police.

As Biden prepares for his second State of the Union, Alex Woodward explains where the bill stands: