State of the Union live updates: Joe Biden to address Congress tonight

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins talks to the courageous Kate Cox below, a guest of the first lady at tonight’s State of the Union address.

Speaking of SOTU guests, this prediction feels eerily accurate.

Here’s Andrew Feinberg on Team Biden’s quiet confidence that the president will be able to turn his incumbency into an electoral advantage between now and the 5 November election.

President Joe Biden is set to order US forces on an “emergency” mission that will see them construct a seaport on the Gaza coast to allow a new influx of much-needed humanitarian aid into the territory amid the continuing Israeli war on Hamas.

A senior administration official said Mr Biden will announce the new aid mission on Thursday evening when he delivers his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

The official said Mr Biden will tell Congress that he is “directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a port in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters”.

“This is an initiative that will get underway here when the President makes the announcement and issues the orders,” the official said, adding later that the building of a bespoke temporary seaport in Gaza is part of continuing efforts to “get life saving humanitarian aid into Gaza to alleviate the suffering of innocent Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas”.

On Truth Social, Trump kept it short and sweet in thanking the outgoing Senate minority leader for his support.

The veteran Republican’s decision did not come without its fair share of awkward questions on Capitol Hill, however.

Here’s Gustaf Kilander’s report.

Trump vice presidential wannabe Elise Stefanik is rightly being ridiculed for claiming on Wednesday that the US was “better off” four years ago at the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic that killed tens of thousands of people and slammed the planet into lockdown.

Kelly Rissman has this report on her witless grandstanding as the House of Representatives passed a $460bn package of spending bills to keep the money flowing to key federal agencies through the remainder of the budget year.

Ready for a throwback to a simpler, gentler time?

Well I’m not sure that 2016 qualifies but here is a resurfaced clip of a younger Nikki Haley, then governor of South Carolina, delivering the Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address.

Unfortunately, the “loudest voice in the room” drowned her out yet again just yesterday.

The president has been on Zoom with a number of actors who have played American presidents in movies, including Morgan Freeman (Deep Impact), Geena Davis (Commander in Chief) and Michael Douglas (The American President), Bill Pullman (Independence Day), to get their advice on how best to deliver his speech tonight.

Also over on the former president’s social media channel, he’s been deriding Nikki Haley after she finally dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination yesterday and belatedly making an appeal to her supporters, whom he has previously worked pretty hard to alienate – as the Never Trump campaign ad below helpfully illustrates.

President Biden also wasted no time in offering disappointed Haley boosters a home yesterday.

Here’s more on the carve up from Gustaf Kilander.

You can watch a live feed of Fed boss Jerome Powell taking questions from senators on the US economy below via IndyTV’s YouTube channel.

The youngest Republican woman to serve in the Senate will deliver the response to President Biden’s State of the Union address today.

Alabama Senator Katie Britt is set to give the remarks – a rebuttal speech to the president’s address made by the opposing party – which she has promised will be a “candid discussion about the future of our nation”.