9pm EST
Tonight, the president is addressing a joint session of Congress. This is not a State of the Union, as that's kind of a silly thing to do your first year. However, it'll probably still play out in a similar fashion, laying out the agenda for the year and maybe the term as a whole. Why is this happening? Who the fuck knows with this administration. It's probably a very shallow attempt to act as if everything is fine within the administration, and that Trump totally knows what he is doing (spoiler: he doesn't).
For you non-Americans (and Americans that did poorly in government), a joint-session just means that the entire federal legislative will be the audience. For a normal State of the Union, this also includes the Judicial branch (the Supreme Court attends) and the top brass of the military. I have no idea if they'll be in attendance tonight, but it wouldn't be surprising. This is generally an opportunity for the president to directly speak to Washington as well as the general population, allowing for succinct descriptions of the planned agenda moving forward. It's hard to say how much this will veer from the norm, because this is NOT something President typically do in their first term.
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Donald "Darkest Timeline" Trump
President of the United State of America
Speech Guy
Your main event for the night. Trump giving a speech will be a bit...weird. He's very good at speaking to his audience, but that audience isn't actual politicians. When he's clearly on a script he's mostly very stiff and boring because he simply isn't interesting in the actual job. Trump wants to bloviate about how he awesome he is and how great he's going to make everything. When it comes time to sit down and actually map out a way to Make America Great Again, he seems to be miserable. The big topics will likely be him trying once again to get his immigration ban going, as that was a huge black eye for the administration early in his campaign. The big question is whether or not he'll finally lay out Republican's planned replacement for the Affordable Care Act, or if he'll just continue speaking in generalities while doing nothing. At this point members of his party are starting to get pissed, so he'll have to do something.
Expected Topics: Immigration, jobs, the administration, and that fucking wall
Steve "Affordable Care" Beshear
Governor of Kentucky
Democratic Response
Democrats will get a chance to respond to Trump's speech afterwards, which is a something of a bigger deal than usual. The election was a surprise defeat for democrats, and people are seeing how the party is going to regroup. With all three branches of government under Republican control, along with holding most of the state legislatures and governor's mansions, democrats are at their weakest in many years. With Perez winning DNC chair, seemingly running things jointly with Keith Ellison, this will be the first real public appearance of Perez's DNC. I would be surprised if you see any specific agenda set forth by democrats (since it wouldn't get implemented anyways), and their focus will instead be contesting whatever crap Trump coughs up tonight.
Expected Topics: Essentially an item-by-item rebuttal of Trump's speech, but diversity and compassion may be emphasized.
I don't think there's any other responses tonight. The Tea Party got their guy in office, so no more amateur hour fun, and I haven't heard anything from the Socialist Party. This isn't all that unusual given the very strange circumstances.