The economy, infrastructure and immigration are likely topics as the president speaks before Congress and a number of notable guests

Donald Trump will deliver his first State of the Union address at the Capitol in Washington at 9pm ET on Tuesday. Here is what we can expect him to say, who we can expect to be in attendance and who will say what in response.

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Economy

He may or may not be statesmanlike but Trump will definitely be salesmanlike. Working on the premise that the chief business of the American people is business, he will make the case that he, the first businessman president, has brought the economy “roaring” back to life and set the stock market soaring.

A tweet last Sunday offered a flavour: “Our economy is better than it has been in many decades. Businesses are coming back to America like never before. Chrysler, as an example, is leaving Mexico and coming back to the USA. Unemployment is nearing record lows. We are on the right track!”

Anxious to reach beyond his base with an eye on November’s midterm elections, Trump is likely to note that the African American unemployment rate has fallen to a record low of 6.8%. Critics, however, will be quick to counter-claim that whereas 2.06m jobs were created in 2017, about 2.24m jobs were created under Barack Obama in 2016; that Trump’s sweeping tax cut benefits millionaires and big corporations rather than the middle class; and that the administration is carrying out a savage assault on labour rights.

Infrastructure

In his address to a joint session of Congress on 27 February last year, Trump announced that he would be asking Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1tn investment in infrastructure.

“Crumbling infrastructure,” he said, “will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land.”

But in June, a so-called national infrastructure week was overshadowed by several mishaps and the fired FBI director James Comey’s testimony on Capitol Hill. The plan will feature again heavily in the State of the Union address, but details are not expected to be unveiled until mid-February. Infrastructure is seen as having potential for bipartisan support, but the administration is now planning to spend $200bn over the next 10 years, hoping states, cities and private investors will deliver the lion’s share of $1tn or even $1.7tn.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, told a Washington Post event on Monday: “The president has always talked about infrastructure, but it’s also, just as with immigration, been a moving kind of target.” Democrats are also worried about Trump slashing environmental regulations to make way for construction.

Q&A What is the State of the Union? Show Hide The State of the Union is the president’s yearly address to Congress and the nation. This is when the president gives his or her view (so far only his) on how the country is doing – and usually how well he is doing – while also outlining the legislation he will focus on in the coming year. The practice was established in article two, section three, clause one of the constitution – the clause states that: “[The president] shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The first address was given by George Washington in 1790, in the then provisional capital of New York City. Washington and John Adams, his successor, both gave the speech in person, but the third president, Thomas Jefferson, decided to give a written message instead. Subsequent presidents followed suit until Woodrow Wilson personally addressed Congress in 1913. Since then almost all addresses have been given in person, some serving as key historical signposts. • In 1862, Abraham Lincoln used his State of the Union message to call for the abolition of slavery – something he said was integral to the survival of the country. • In his 1972 State of the Union speech Richard Nixon called for an end to the Watergate investigation. Seven months later he had resigned over the scandal. • George Bush introduced the fateful term “axis of evil” in his 2002 address to Congress, four months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush used the term to tie together Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Adam Gabbatt

Immigration

Trump said on Monday he would address his proposed immigration overhaul in the speech – and it would have to be bipartisan “because the Republicans don’t really have the votes to get it done in any other way”. In the State of the Union he will promote “four pillars” of reform: border security, including the wall; Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) legalisation; ending extended-family “chain migration”; eliminating the visa lottery and moving towards a merit-based system of immigration.

Tone and nuance will matter here as the president tries to sell a deal to both Democrats and immigration hardliners in his own party: save the Dreamers but pay the price of a draconian crackdown on immigration, both legal and illegal. The signs so far are that neither side is happy. Meanwhile Trump has called for changes to the H-1B work visa programme widely used to employ foreign tech workers in the US and could return to this issue.

National security

A senior administration official said: “The president is going to talk about rebuilding our military, returning to a policy of peace through strength, returning to clarity about our friends and our adversaries, and his efforts to defeat terrorists around the world.”

Trump is likely to declare total victory over Islamic State and claim that his aggressive stance towards North Korea’s nuclear programme is working: it is unknowable whether he will be tempted to stray into rhetoric such as “Little Rocket Man” to describe Kim Jong-un.

American forces in Afghanistan currently number around 14,000 – a 75% increase from the 8,400 there under Barack Obama as of December 2016. The president is expected to ask for $716bn in defence spending, a significant increase, when he unveils his 2019 budget next month, according to the Washington Post. But diplomacy, the state department and human rights are not expected to figure prominently.

Trade

Trump said on Monday his speech would cover his efforts to lower trade barriers around the world for American exports. “We have to have reciprocal trade,” he told reporters. “It’s not a one-way deal any more.”

Within days of moving into the Oval Office, Trump pulled the US out of the 11-country Trans-Pacific Partnership. He is renegotiating Nafta, a decades-old agreement with Canada and Mexico, as well as a separate, bilateral trade pact with South Korea.

Last week the president imposed steep tariffs on imports of washing machines and solar energy cells and panels. Some hardliners in the administration are itching to do likewise to steel and aluminum from China as part of their “America first” agenda. But it is thought that the National Economic Council director, Gary Cohn, and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have restrained this tendency, appealing to Trump by warning that such a move could hurt his cherished stock market.

The address may offer a clue as to whether Trump’s exposure to the global business elites in Davos has softened his approach or at least introduced a note of pragmatism.

Any other business

Last February Trump urged Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act: it was a long and tortuous process that ended in failure. The burning health issue is opioids, the deadliest drug crisis in American history, killing about 90 people every day. Trump has set up a presidential taskforce and declared a health emergency but not yet unlocked additional funding.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump speaks to ITV’s Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan. Photograph: ITV/PA

The speech’s appeal to patriotism and greatness may well including rumination on Nasa, space exploration and a mooted return to the moon. But a detailed plan for combating climate change seems unlikely from a man who last week told the interviewer Piers Morgan: “There is a cooling and there is a heating, and I mean, look: it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming … That wasn’t working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, OK, they’re at a record level.”

Mood music

After Trump honoured the widow of a navy Seal killed in Yemen during his address to a joint session of Congress, the political commentator Van Jones memorably declared: “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.” How long will it be on Tuesday night before a pundit uses the word “presidential”? Even if Trump stays on script, as he did last February and last week in Davos, critics say that merely showing the ability to read from a teleprompter is setting the bar too low and risks normalising a dangerous demagogue.

For sheer theatre, it will be difficult to top Trump – accused of sexual misconduct by 19 women – being confronted by the sight of many female Democratic members of Congress following the lead of entertainers at this year’s Golden Globe awards by wearing black. Meanwhile, at least eight Democrats are boycotting the event: Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, John Lewis of Georgia, Frederica Wilson of Florida, Gregory Meeks of New York, Maxine Waters of California and Bobby Rush and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will also be missing.

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Such is Trump’s caprice that there is always the chance that he will be goaded into an outburst that upends the entire event, or that he will undermine his message with an undisciplined tweet soon after (he followed his congressional address by tweeting the unfounded claim that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower).

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W Bush, told the Associated Press: “He has little message discipline. Virtually every time he moves the ball far down the field, he seems to derail himself with a tweet days later instead of building on the momentum.”

Guests

The White House says Melania Trump, who has kept a low profile since reports emerged that her husband had an affair with the pornographic actor Stormy Daniels a decade ago, will be in attendance, along with all the president’s children except his 11-year-old son, Barron.

The administration has also invited guests including Corey Adams, a welder in Dayton, Ohio who plans to invest his extra savings from the tax overhaul plan into his daughters’ education fund; Elizabeth Alvarado and Robert Mickens, the parents of Nisa Mickens, whose killing in 2016 was attributed to the MS-13 gang; the retired corporal Matthew Bradford, who stepped on a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007 then after surgery re-enlisted in the Marine Corps and became the first blind double amputee to do so; Jon Bridgers, founder of the Cajun Navy, a nonprofit rescue and recovery group that provided aid to people in Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey; and Ryan Holets, a policeman in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who with his wife adopted a baby from parents who had an opioid addiction.

Democrats have invited victims of sexual assault and dozens of young immigrants, or “Dreamers”, including an aspiring nurse, Karen Bahena, of San Diego, and a Virginia high school student, Nicolle Uria, who was brought to the US as a one-year-old.

Also expected are Randy Bryce, a union iron worker and Democratic challenger to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, in his congressional district in southern Wisconsin (invited by the congressman Mark Pocan); Staff Sgt Patricia King, a transgender infantry soldier (invited by the congressman Joe Kennedy III); Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan in hurricane-hit Puerto Rico and critic of Trump (invited by the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand); Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born physician who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in American football players (invited by the congressman Ami Bera); Christine Levinson, the wife of the FBI agent Bob Levinson, who went missing in Iran more than a decade ago (invited by the congressman Ted Deutch); and Bill Nye the Science Guy (invited by congressman Jim Bridenstine, Trump’s nominee to serve as the next administrator of Nasa).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Kennedy III speaks to supporters outside the Capitol. Photograph: Pete Marovich/Getty Images

Responses

Joe Kennedy III, a 37-year-old Massachusetts congressman who is a grandson of former senator and attorney general Robert F Kennedy and great-nephew of John F Kennedy, will deliver the Democratic response from a vocational high school in Fall River, Massachusetts, a former textile hub outside Boston.

“From healthcare to economic justice to civil rights, the Democratic agenda stands in powerful contrast to President Trump’s broken promises to American families,” Kennedy said this week.

His speech will be followed by a Spanish-language response delivered by Elizabeth Guzman, one of the first Latina women elected to the Virginia house of delegates. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, the congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, and the former Maryland congresswoman Donna Edwards will also offer their takes.

Souvenirs

Tickets for the address had to be reissued after a misprint: “Address to the Congress on the State of the Uniom.” The congressman Raul Grijalva of Arizona made fun of the education secretary, tweeting: “Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking ... #SOTUniom”

Any ticket to Trump’s first State of the Union could become a collector’s item. The late-night TV comedian Stephen Colbert said on Monday: “He’s not scheduled to appear in front of Congress again until the impeachment hearings.”