State of the Union

President Donald Trump addresses the Congress the evening of February 28

There is no Constitutional requirement for a State of the Union address, only that the president "give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union" and it does not have be done annually; the interval specified is "from time to time" (Article II, Section 3, Clause 1).

History.com has a very good rundown of how presidents have complied with this requirement. George Washington was the first president and he delivered the first in-person SOTU speech to Congress in 1790, but his successors in office simply sent written summaries to Congress until Woodrow Wilson made the message a speech in 1913. Speechifying was hit or miss until Lyndon Johnson "gave the first State of the Union ever aired in primetime TV, in order to draw a bigger audience," and it was off to the races for every president since. The last time a president sent a letter instead of making a speech was Jimmy Carter in 1981, who basically said bag it, I'm outta here anyway.

Several media outlets seem intent on explaining why President Trump's speech last night was not a SOTU speech. NPR, for example:

The president gives remarks at the invitation of the speaker of the House — in this case, Rep. Paul Ryan — and it's up to the speaker what the speech is called, says Gerhard Peters, co-director of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ryan invited Trump to give an "address" and not a State of the Union speech. That's mainly out of tradition: Trump, like his predecessors in the first year of their presidencies, is assumed to be too new to the job of running the country to authoritatively describe the state of the nation.

And this is CNN:

President Donald Trump is set to give an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday -- but it technically won't be his first State of the Union address.

Trump isn't shaking up any traditions -- as he is known to do -- but instead following what past presidents have done before him. His speech will be known as an "address to a joint session."

Don't you love that word, "technically?" Because CNN is wrong. It either is or is not a SOTU message and there's no "technically" about it. If Trump had wanted to say he was fulfilling the requirement of  Article II, Section 3, there's nothing Paul Ryan or anyone else could have done about it, no matter what they wanted to call it.

But Trump didn't for the reasons CNN also explained.