State of the Union Preview: Will Trump Stick to the Script?

When Mr. Trump delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress last February — not technically a State of the Union speech — he offered a mostly optimistic vision of America, speaking soberly and almost verbatim from a prepared text.

But former speechwriters said traditional State of the Union speeches were a poor fit for Mr. Trump because they tended to be long lists of policy proposals, cobbled together over months in a process that involves agency employees across the federal government. During his first year, the president showed only a sporadic interest in the nuts and bolts of policymaking.

Jonathan Horn, who was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit could undermine the political benefits of the speech. Hovering over the address is an accelerating Russia investigation and a congressional stalemate over spending.

“The next day there could be a tweet, and then the work on a very, very long speech is overshadowed by 280 characters,” said Mr. Horn, who was part of a team that drafted Mr. Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address.

Other presidents have sought to maximize the political benefits of the vast State of the Union audience — 48 million people watched President Barack Obama deliver his first address in 2010 — by holding events across the country in the days after the speech. White House officials declined this past week to say whether Mr. Trump would do the same.

Mr. Trump’s address could be a crucial moment in the debate over his immigration plan, which has been condemned by both sides since it was delivered to Congress on Thursday.

Immigrant advocates have called the proposal — which would end decades of family-based migration policies and bring a vast crackdown on immigrants living in the country illegally — a cruel plan to shut the country’s borders. Critics, latching on to the proposal to pave the way for citizenship for so-called Dreamers, have derided it as amnesty for lawbreakers.

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Tuesday’s address will be an opportunity for Mr. Trump — and Stephen Miller, his chief speechwriter and the architect of the White House immigration plan — to respond to critics.

Senior White House officials said the president would spend a significant amount of time in the speech reminding viewers how much his administration has accomplished since he first promised to challenge the establishment and confront what he called “this American carnage.” In doing so, he will rebut criticism that his first year was light on major legislative accomplishments, despite having a Republican Congress.

As he has repeatedly done before, Mr. Trump will point to record stock market highs, his deregulatory agenda, the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, passage of a $1.5 trillion tax cut, the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and a record-low unemployment rate.

Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said he hoped Mr. Trump would offer a vision for how the country could build upon his past successes to seek more growth and opportunity.

Part of that, Mr. Bradley said, should be a forceful case for infrastructure spending, including a dedicated revenue source like an increase in the federal gasoline tax to fund transportation improvements.

“We’ve been patching over the problems in that system,” Mr. Bradley said. He said public-private partnerships, like the ones the administration has considered, can save money for taxpayers, but he added, “If we really want to rebuild our infrastructure and modernize, we can’t keep patching it over, and we can’t do it on the cheap.”

Mr. Trump is also likely to call for more efforts to combat the opioid epidemic. But aides declined to say whether Mr. Trump would talk about health care in the speech, a subject of debate among administration officials for weeks.

The White House is proud of the fact that Republicans were able to repeal even a small part of the Affordable Care Act — the penalties for people who go without health insurance. The president could take credit for that and for regulatory efforts to dismantle other parts of the law that Republicans dislike. But his party appears far away from its yearslong goal of doing away with the law entirely.

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It is also unclear what Mr. Trump might say about the high cost of many prescription drugs. Mr. Trump said last year that drug companies were “getting away with murder,” but he has not taken many steps to solve the problem.

Consumer advocates and employers, who pay the bills for drug coverage, are hoping to hear more from the president, who could at least point to the work of the Food and Drug Administration to speed the approval of lower-cost generic drugs.

On national security, Mr. Trump’s aides said the president would make his case for a bigger military, more secure borders and fair trade, which critics say is a euphemism for protectionist policies.

Mr. Trump can point to seminal policy shifts, like his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as evidence of his global impact. But it is less clear how the president will address challenges like the nuclear threat from North Korea and the Iran nuclear agreement, which he has thrown to Congress with a threat to tear it up if lawmakers fail to tighten its terms.

“The president should highlight success,” said Elliott Abrams, who served in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

In addition to Jerusalem, Mr. Abrams checked off the administration’s decision to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, its imposition of harsh sanctions on North Korea and Mr. Trump’s criticism of NATO, which he said had prodded members to spend more on their militaries.

Mr. Trump, he said, also needed to “analyze frankly the greatest threats to the United States from opponents,” which the administration has done in the National Security Strategy it issued last month. It listed China and Russia as the nation’s biggest geopolitical foes.

“There’s an opportunity to explain his thinking on policies that people are concerned about,” said James Jay Carafano, the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, who worked on Mr. Trump’s transition. “These guys have cranked out a lot of policy.”

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For lawmakers, the Iran deal is a particular source of concern. This month, Mr. Trump gave Congress and European allies 120 days to overhaul the terms of the agreement or, he warned, he would nullify it. There are wide gaps between Democrats and Republicans on the issue, and little sign yet that they can bridge them by Mr. Trump’s deadline.

Mr. Carafano said he did not expect Mr. Trump to outline a new approach to foreign policy that goes beyond the “America First” credo he articulated during the campaign. But he said the president might elaborate on his distinctive view of globalism — one that places heavy emphasis on a world of sovereign, strong and independent states.

“You might see him focus on the ‘peace through strength’ theme, and call on Congress to support spending for the military,” he said.

Cody Keenan, the chief speechwriter for Mr. Obama during his second term, said he would be watching to see whether Mr. Trump tries to speak to people who might not have supported him during the campaign, after a year in which the president’s actions have seemed focused more on shoring up his base than courting new backers.

“Is there any sense that he wants to speak to people who didn’t vote for him?” Mr. Keenan asked.

“Spoiler alert, he’s going to look presidential,” Mr. Keenan added. “That’s the most presidential thing that a president does, with all the pomp and circumstance. The question is, will what he says be presidential?”

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Senate Democrats Seek to Protect Mueller From Being Fired

The latest Democratic efforts would require cooperation from Republicans, who control the Senate and the House, as both parties negotiate over must-pass legislation to fund the government. The deadline for passing the spending plan is Feb. 8.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said on Friday that Congress should now pass the legislation to protect the special counsel, urging his Republican and Democratic colleagues to work out any differences in approach to make it happen.

Mr. Warner, speaking on CNN, said that he could not think of any reason “why you wouldn’t want to pass that legislation if you respect the rule of law.”

“Our oath of office was to the Constitution,” he said. “Quite honestly, history is going to judge how we act here.”

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In August, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, proposed legislation that would, among other things, require a court hearing if Mr. Mueller were fired. If the firing were found to be improper, the judges could reinstate him.

“Special Counsel Mueller is a career professional respected by both sides of the aisle for good reason,” Mr. Tillis’s office said in a statement on Friday. “He should be able to do his job without elected officials trying to score cheap political points for their own partisan gain.”

Democratic aides said they hoped Republicans would join their call to include such protections for the special counsel in budget negotiations. They said lawmakers would be working during the next several days to merge the best parts of previous legislation that sought to do so.

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One measure, sponsored in part by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, would require a judge’s review to ensure a special counsel is fired for cause and not for political reasons.

The proposal introduced by Mr. Tillis would also require a Senate-confirmed official at the Justice Department to discipline or fire a special counsel. That measure was introduced in the summer, when Mr. Trump had privately and publicly disparaged his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Some feared Mr. Trump would fire top officials at the Justice Department until someone carried out his orders to fire the special counsel.

“This remarkable report makes scarily clear that we need this protection right away for the special counsel,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said on Friday. “It’s necessary now to send a signal to the president that political interference and firing the special counsel simply is totally unacceptable, and there’s bipartisan unanimity that it would be unconscionable and unacceptable.”

Mr. Blumenthal said that some Republican senators have told him that they support such protections. He did not name them.

Even as some Republicans have tried to discredit the Russia inquiry, some senior members of the party have said that they would not support the firing of Mr. Mueller.

A spokesman for Speaker Paul D. Ryan, of Wisconsin, said on Friday that Mr. Ryan’s position had not changed since he said in June that Mr. Mueller should be left alone to do his job.

And a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said that Mr. Cornyn still believed that it would be a “mistake” to fire the special counsel.

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, reiterated Friday that Republicans in the House would oppose any attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller.

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“It would just be a political firestorm, and you would just be presumed guilty whether you are or not,” said Mr. Cole, who had hired Mr. McGahn to be his counsel when he was the chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. “It’s easier to rebut the outcome than deal with suspicions about why you fired somebody. It would be taken as a confession of guilt. And every analogy would be Nixon and the Saturday Night Massacre.”

Mr. Trump denied on Friday that he had ordered Mr. Mueller’s firing and called reports of the episode “fake news.” His comments came during a trip to Davos, Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, a gathering of world leaders and global business executives.

The Times report was based on four people who were told of the matter. On Thursday, Ty Cobb, who manages the White House’s relationship with Mr. Mueller’s office, declined to comment.

The June episode could emerge as an important part of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, part of which is looking into whether Mr. Trump or anyone in the White House or associated with his campaign obstructed justice by trying to impede investigators examining the possibility of campaign-related collusion with Russia.

Mr. Trump’s order to fire Mr. Mueller came a month after the president dismissed the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, later citing the Russia inquiry as the reason for the decision. At the time, Mr. Comey oversaw the F.B.I.’s investigation into collusion with Russia during the election. The firing of Mr. Comey in May directly led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment.

Mr. Trump’s denial of the June episode echoes repeated statements by the president and other White House officials that he had never considered firing the special prosecutor.

“I haven’t given it any thought,” Mr. Trump told reporters in August. “Well, I’ve been reading about it from you people. You say, oh, I’m going to dismiss him. No, I’m not dismissing anybody.”

John Dowd, the president’s personal lawyer, said that same month that firing Mr. Mueller had “never been on the table, never.”

But four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation, said Mr. Trump ordered the firing, citing what he believed were three reasons that Mr. Mueller has a conflict of interest that should prevent him from leading the Russia investigation.

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Those included claims about a disputed payment of fees by Mr. Mueller at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.; the fact that Mr. Mueller worked at the same law firm that represented the president’s son-in-law; and Mr. Mueller’s interview with the president to be F.B.I. director before he was appointed to be the special counsel.

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