One year later, it’s not just the president standing at the podium who will be different.

When President Donald Trump speaks to a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, the political landscape he will survey from the dais has been transformed since a defiant Joe Biden warned in his final State of the Union address that the nation faced a choice between democracy and despotism.

This year, in the congressional ranks arrayed before Trump, four of the seats occupied by Democratic senators last year are now held by Republican ones, and with them control of the Senate. The number of House Republicans has ticked down by one, still enough to hold the narrowest of margins for the GOP.

And since the inauguration six weeks ago, the changes have cascaded.

The line-up of the nation’s military leaders in dress uniform and medals, in front-row seats to the president’s right, have been scrambled with the unprecedented purge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., as well as the chief of Naval Operations and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Trump already had fired the Coast Guard commandant.

The alignment of the ambassadors, seated to the president’s far left, has been upended by Trump’s determination to end the war in Ukraine, with friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and an Oval Office brawl Friday that sent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy packing. Canada and Mexico, the USA’s two biggest trading partners, have been put on notice that 25% tariffs will be imposed the day of the speech, and once-friendly nations including Denmark and Panama have been put on edge by his suggestions of territorial expansion.

Even the reporters sitting in the press gallery, behind and above the dais, face turmoil over his decision to constrain the access of Associated Press journalists at the White House in a dispute over whether the news agency will use Trump’s nomenclature for the body of water the rest of the world calls the Gulf of Mexico. (He has renamed it the Gulf of America.)

The White House recently posted on the social-media site X a faux edition of a Time-like magazine with Trump on the cover, wearing a crown and a grin. The headline: “Long Live the King.”