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Trump Is Delivering his First State of the Union Address. Watch Live

President Trump's First State of the Union

A dispute over infrastructure.

President Trump called for an infrastructure that would leverage federal dollars, state and local government contributions and private sector funds to total $1.5 trillion.

But Democrats, who have pressed for infrastructure spending since Barack Obama was president, were not satisfied.

“President Trump is saying he has a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan. He actually has an infrastructure plan with only $200 billion in federal funding over 10 years. He expects states, localities, and the private sector to come up with $1.3 trillion on their own,” said the office of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

A Twitter record for the Twitter president.
Tonight’s speech just became the most Tweeted #SOTU or #JointSession address ever, passing last year’s record of 3 million Tweets, according to Twitter.


“Beautiful, clean coal.”
In his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump returned to a phrase he has used many times before: “beautiful, clean coal.”

But it has never been entirely clear what he means by it.

Our colleague Brad Plumer wrote in August that the term “clean coal” typically refers to “coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks and bury it underground as a way of limiting global warming.” Only one coal plant in the country uses that technology, which is very expensive. And even with it, coal plants still produce far more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than renewable energy sources.

— Maggie Astor

Guantánamo Bay stays open.
Mr. Trump has announced, as expected, that he has signed an executive order to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison open. Essentially a symbolic act, it brings official executive branch policy into line with what it has effectively been all along: the prison remains open for business, at least for those detainees who are already there.

“I just signed an order directing Secretary Mattis to re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay,” he said.

Specifically, Mr. Trump’s order revokes an ill-fated January 2009 order signed by former President Barack Obama directing the government to close the prison within a year — a goal Mr. Obama failed to achieve. He did, however, winnow down the number of detainees, from the 242 he inherited from President Bush, to the 41 remaining there when Mr. Trump took office.

Mr. Obama also refused to bring any new detainees to the prison. Mr. Trump vowed during the campaign that he intended to fill it back up “with some bad dudes,” but to date his administration has not added any newly captured terrorism suspects to the inmate population, instead following the Obama approach of using law enforcement procedures and civilian courts to handle them.

The order Mr. Trump signed had a long bureaucratic history. Its first draft, circulated days after he took office, would have gone much farther, including laying the groundwork for reopening the Central Intelligence Agency’s defunct “black site” prisons, where it formerly tortured high-value detainees during the Bush administration.

After an uproar in Congress, including pushback from Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Mr. Trump shelved that idea. The executive order went through various further drafts, eventually being pared to little more than repealing Mr. Obama’s defunct directive.

In August, Mr. Trump was on the cusp of signing it when he appointed the John Kelly, a retired marines general who formerly oversaw the prison operation as the leader of Southern Command, as his chief.

One of Mr. Kelly’s first acts was to send the draft order back to national security agencies and departments for further reworking. Among the apparent changes in the final document was a direction that Mr. Mattis to establish criteria about what should be done with newly captured terrorism suspects.

What are those purple ribbons?
Some members of Congress were wearing purple ribbons for Mr. Trump’s speech to raise awareness about opioid addiction. The lawmakers want Congress to take more aggressive action to combat the epidemic.

Trump backs new declaration of force against ISIS
Mr. Trump appeared to throw his support behind having Congress enact legislation to update the 16-year-old statute that provides the legal basis for most counterterrorism operations around the world, making it explicitly cover the Islamic State — also known as ISIS.

“I am also asking the Congress to ensure that, in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists — wherever we chase them down.”

Congress enacted the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or A.U.M.F., in September 2001. It authorized war against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and those who harbored or aided them – that is, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But in 2014, the Obama administration stretched it to justify combat operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, without new Congressional sanction.

That step was legally contentious because even though Islamic State grew out of an Al Qaeda affiliate, the two organizations had split and gone to war with each other. One of the reasons the Trump administration has not brought any Islamic State detainees to the wartime prison at Guantanamo is warnings by legal specialists that doing so would risk giving a judge an opportunity to rule that the A.U.M.F. does not cover the group, jeopardizing the broader war.

The Obama administration had fruitlessly asked Congress to enact a specific military force authorization for the Islamic State as well, while also saying it was legally unnecessary. But disputes over what it should say – including whether it should contain limits on duration, geographical scope, or the use of ground forces – prevented any consensus.

Last fall, Mr. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the Trump administration did not support Congress overhauling the war authorization law.

A Kennedy gives the Democratic response — from Fall River, Mass.

Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, will emerge on the national stage to give the Democratic response — from “a proud American city, built by immigrants.”