Why wasn’t there a State of the Union last year?

Socially distanced speech will come on eve of 100 days of being in office

President Joe Biden is slated to deliver his first State of the Union speech on Tuesday after more than a year in office.

Mr Biden offered a similar speech last April on the eve of his 100th day in the White House, where he touched on a range of issues including the coronavirus pandemic.

However that speech, before both houses of Congress, was labeled a “joint address” instead of a State of the Union (SOTU), in accordance with tradition for previous US presidents.

SOTU addresses take place in the later years of a presidency because in theory, a president is unable to speak about the state of the union after only a few weeks of being in office following inauguration.

Typically, the annual speech from the president to Congress — whether in the form of a joint address or a State of the Union — takes place in February.

But following the 6 January Capitol riot and continuing Covid restrictions, Mr Biden’s first speech in 2021 was delayed to April.

His first official SOTU will take place around the standard time on Tuesday, 1 March.

Mr Biden was reportedly forced to rewrite the address at the 11th hour in response to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s assault on Ukraine last week.

Mr Biden was reportedly planning on refocusing on his domestic agenda after Sen Joe Manchin effectively killed his signature Build Back Better legislation. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain reportedly told Democrats that the president would focus on inflation, which is at a 40-year high amid the pandemic.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has scrambled these plans. While Ukraine has yet to fall to Russia, it has taken heavy bombing and has led to the international community coalescing to make Mr Putin a pariah.

“The magnitude of the visceral reaction to what’s going on there is so significant that it’s just hard for me to imagine him just relegating it to point number five,” former Clinton administration speechwriter Michael Waldman told The Washington Post. “Biden needs to rally the democrats — with a small ‘d’ — against the autocrats worldwide, and he cares a lot about that.”

Similarly, Mr Biden is not expected to focus heavily on his nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Mr Biden was already reportedly working on the speech for months as deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed coordinated the policy outlines while aide Mike Donilon and chief speechwriter Vinay Reddy took the lead on writing and framing the speech.

“He can speak with great confidence about his ambition to, once again, bring back the alliances that are critically important,” former Sen Chris Dodd, a close friend of Mr Biden, told The Post. “And frankly, this event by Putin has probably done more in the last four days to reignite those alliances than any speech that could be given by any president.”