US president strikes triumphant tone in annual speech but faces legal setbacks and hurdles in Congress as midterms approach.

Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has hailed the first 13 months of his second term as nothing short of “transformative” during his State of the Union address, a message of victory the White House says he will continue to take on the road as he seeks to build support for his Republican Party before the midterm elections in November.

But the speech on Tuesday also underscored uncomfortable political realities for Trump, laying bare the vulnerabilities of a president who has relied on a flood of executive orders, unilateral actions and emergency declarations to build his agenda.

The Supreme Court’s ruling against his signature tariff policy – just days before the speech – underscored just how quickly Trump’s most brazen and signature actions could disintegrate amid a mountain of legal challenges.

“It was a speech to shore up his base of supporters,” said Aaron Kall, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies presidential messaging, “as opposed to extending olive branches to Democrats or trying to attract new supporters”.

It is a potentially constraining approach for a president who will need congressional support – including from vulnerable Republican lawmakers facing punishing re-election campaigns and centrist Democrats – to achieve many of his objectives in the months ahead.

“In some ways, Trump’s political fate and future relies upon getting some kind of buy-in or cooperation,” Kall said.

Trump’s most substantial legislative victory of his second term came in the form of a sweeping bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in July. He gave it top billing in his speech on Tuesday.

The legislation, dubbed by the president his “Big Beautiful Bill” and by critics as Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill”, codified several of Trump’s top agenda items from his campaign, including populist economic pledges to alleviate taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits.

The bill included a raft of other top Trump agenda items: temporarily extending certain tax cuts that had been set to expire; deeply cutting funding for welfare, healthcare and foreign aid programmes; raising the national debt ceiling; rolling back clean energy incentives; and surging billions of dollars to both increase enforcement at the southern border and support Trump’s mass detention and deportation drive.