This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagine you’re Donald Trump — or maybe you’re one of Donald Trump’s political advisers or kids or someone who doesn’t want to lose the midterms and have his crypto and A.I. trades investigated by congressional Democrats — and you’re planning out the State of the Union address.
What would you do?
Well, you’d probably start with a problem that you need to solve: The issues that got you elected in 2024 have turned into huge vulnerabilities in 2026.
Go back to February 2025: Immigration is your strongest issue. All those weenie liberals looking at your approval ratings get it right there in Nate Silver’s poll tracker. Your net approval on immigration is around 10 percentage points. That means 10 percent more of the country approves of the job you’re doing than disapproves of it.
Fast-forward a year: Your net approval on immigration is -13.7 percentage points. Immigration has gone from your strongest issue to the reason the country dislikes you.
Or take the economy: In early February 2025, you were doing pretty well — plus 7 percentage points. But then came the tariffs. Now your net approval on the economy is -17.7 percentage points. And it gets worse: On trade, it is -23.1 percentage points. On inflation, it’s -30.8 percentage points.
So now it is State of the Union time. You have this rare opportunity to address the entire political system, the entire country. What do you do?
Do you tell the American people that you’re working on it, that you know there’s disruption and tumult, and it’s just going to take some time for all these policies to pay off? Do you tell the American people you hear them? That you’re going to change course? You’ve got a new plan?
Or do you tell the American people they’re wrong? That everything is actually going great? That they should believe you — not their lying eyes and empty wallets and the videos of chaos in their streets?
Tuesday night at the State of the Union, Trump decisively chose door No. 3. At more than one hour and 45 minutes, this was the longest State of the Union address in recorded history. Trump had a lot of time to make his case, and what he said, again and again, was that the American people don’t know what they’re talking about.
Archival clip of Donald Trump: Today, our border is secure. Our spirit is restored. Inflation is plummeting. Incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before. And our enemies are scared. Our military and police are stacked. And America is respected again, perhaps like never before. [Applause.]
I’m not going to go through a fact-check of the president here. Trump is not a truthful man. People did not vote for him believing him to be a truthful man. They voted for him believing he could solve their problems.
What I have increasingly wondered over the last year isn’t whether Trump is being truthful with us but whether he is being truthful with himself — or whether the people around him are.
What does Trump know? What doesn’t he know? Because in his second term, he’s surrounded by yes men and sycophants. He presides over these cabinet meetings where one agency head after another tells him how great he is doing, how unbelievably well his presidency is going.
Trump doesn’t read lengthy briefing books. We know that he doesn’t preside over normal policy processes.
Trump communicates on a social media site he owns and that is filled with people who like him. He throws himself parades. He has adopted the clichéd authoritarian habit of forcing people to sit through his record-length speeches. And yes, it is an amazing show of dominance to make Speaker Mike Johnson nod and clap and grin for that long. But the question here is: What if Trump believes all of it?
What if he believes everybody in that room — or at least the Republicans — like nodding and grinning and clapping for that long? What if he believes what is being said at his cabinet meetings?
Because authoritarians always face the same problem: Everyone is afraid to tell them the bad news. The people around them can compete for their favor by flattering them and telling them good news — whether or not it’s true.
What usually saves authoritarians is their control over the system: their power, their ability to repress elections, opposition parties, the media. If you have enough power, you can bend politics to fit your reality.
But Trump isn’t an authoritarian — not yet. Not that kind. He’s a wannabe authoritarian who doesn’t have the power to engage in that kind of systematic repression. He just lost a major tariff case at the Supreme Court. Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air. Americans are, thankfully, unafraid to criticize their president, and Republicans are losing elections left and right.
So it is a big political problem for this president and for the Republican Party that Trump is lecturing the American people rather than listening to them. What Trump spent almost two hours saying with the State of the Union Tuesday night must have been music to Hakeem Jeffries’s ears. Trump said he doesn’t have an answer to the problems facing his presidency — because there are no problems facing his presidency. Everything is going great.
And who around Trump will dare tell him otherwise?
Joining me now is my great editor, Aaron Retica, to pepper me with some questions about what actually got said in the State of the Union address, what it means and how we should think about it.
Ezra Klein: Aaron, welcome back to the show.
Aaron Retica: Hi, Ezra.
Where do you want to start?
I want to start at the very end, after Trump spoke, before we heard from Abigail Spanberger. I was listening to the feed that kept going after he was done, as he moved through the Capitol. And it was absolutely incredible.
Everybody was like: Attaboy, you’re the best! That was incredible! Amazing!
And then there was a truly stellar moment when someone said: That was a home run, sir! It was a grand slam!
Whatever else that was, it wasn’t a grand slam. In his speech, he seemed to be living in a reality that is not the one we’re actually living in.
What do you make of that disjunction? He’s in one place. America is in another.
I think he believes his own [expletive]. And I think that is an important skeleton key at this point to understanding the Trump administration.
Do you remember when The Times — Times Opinion, in fact — published during the first administration the famous, incognito: We are the resistance inside the Trump administration?
Of course, I remember.
Yes. It reflected an extreme version of something that was more broadly happening inside that administration — that there were a lot of people who were not bought in, in a loyalist, sycophant way, to Trump himself.
They were serving under him. They understood themselves as serving partially him, partially the country.
They understood him as having some good ideas and some bad ones, and so there was some normal structure around him that was built to somewhat restrain.
Can I interrupt you for one second? You know what’s so interesting about that? The guy who wrote that, and of course, he’s out and about talking about it now, was in D.H.S.
The Department of Homeland Security.
The Department of Homeland Security. Which I think is very significant, actually, in terms of what you’re talking about. The people who were there were, in some ways, the people who were the most skeptical.
Yes. And if you were looking at the first State of the Union — the State of the Union a year into Trump’s first term — who would the Speaker of the House have been? Paul Ryan — another senior Republican who did not owe his career to Donald Trump, who was not fully bought in on Trump.
Trump has fully taken over the Republican Party. His administration is truly stacked with loyalists. There is a complete submission all around him to the rules of winning his favor — which is to say: You tell him things he wants to hear. You flatter him.
I thought one of the both funny and dark refrains of the speech was when he kept saying that it wasn’t his idea to name the savings accounts Trump Accounts.
Archival clip of Trump: Brand-new Trump Accounts. And I didn’t name it. Nobody believes me, but I did not name that.
It wasn’t his idea to name the website TrumpRx.
Archival clip of Trump: Website called TrumpRx.gov. And I didn’t name that one, either, by the way.
He didn’t say this in the speech, but he said elsewhere that it wasn’t his idea to put his name on the Trump Kennedy Center.
People around him know one way that you curry favor with him is you name things after him and present it to him. And he’s like: Oh, what? For me? You want to name it after me?
And when the world around you has bought into manipulating you that way, and you have an ego like he already has, and you don’t have rigorous modes of thought or policy process, it is actually impossible that you will maintain a normal connection to reality.
It’s hard enough to do that — for any president. But he is not going to be able to do it, and sure enough, he is not doing it.
Yes. It’s even true of the speechwriters. They can’t come and say: Oh, do a Carter-type speech, where you acknowledge the pain people are suffering, where you talk about problems.
He loves to talk about bloody difficulties, but we’ll get to that later. Because it was really a blood-filled speech.
But they can’t do that. They can’t present him with material that is at variance with his conception of the world.
So it actually makes their task very difficult. If we’re talking about whether it was boring or interesting — it was not super-interesting, right?
I thought it was, in a way, because here’s what I think: I think we do a bad job in the media, particularly the punditry side of the media, covering the State of the Union. Because we treat the State of the Union as if it is a hermetically sealed message.
Yes. We’re isolationists about the State of the Union.
That every American citizen, or noncitizen, for that matter, will live inside and form impressions based on it. The number of Americans who will sit through an entire State of the Union — to say nothing of sitting through the longest State of the Union ever, since records have been kept, delivered by a president to Congress — is not nobody. It’s going to be in the millions of people.
So what the State of the Union ends up being, I think, is this moment when the president sends a single signal to the entire political system, and to more of the country than he can normally speak to, about how he understands this moment in his presidency and in the country, and what, if anything, he intends to do about it.
The signal Trump sent last night was that he’s living in a fantasy version of his own presidency, that he does not recognize any of the problems that Americans have with him, that he has no plan to do anything about it because he doesn’t think there is any problem to solve.
The idea that Republicans in Congress are cheering for this — they’re going to lose their job. There’s a very, very good chance, and I think it went up last night, that at the next State of the Union, Mike Johnson is not sitting behind him.
So to me, we have this tendency to get really caught up in the showmanship of the State of the Union. He had the men’s Olympic hockey team out. He kept bringing people out. He kept presenting these medals. That stuff is all going to be forgotten in 48 hours. The State of the Union is going to be forgotten in 48 hours.
What will last is the strategic positioning the president chooses about how to solve the country’s problems and how to solve his own problems.
The positioning he chose was to see if lying about them will work, but the problem with lying about them, the problem with treating this like a reality television show, is that most Americans do not tune into you, so you can’t just lie to them.
Well, it’s not just that. If you tell them eggs are down and maybe beef is coming down, but food prices are up 3 percent. People buy the food. They know.
He said rent is down.
Archival clip of Trump: The cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, automobiles, rent is lower today than when I took office by a lot.
I thought that was shocking. Rent is not down. Anybody who is in the rental market knows rent is not down.
He did cherry-pick some things that are down because there were supply chain disruptions during the pandemic on particular goods.
But inflation — it’s not crazy, but it’s around what it was in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, and prices for Americans have not come down. He has not done a lot to bring them down, either, but it’s a hard thing for any president to bring the price level down. But neither has he significantly tried nor has he succeeded.
Just telling people that you have when you haven’t is a dumb move.
Yuval Levin, the conservative policy scholar, was on the show a month or two back. He made a point that I think is very sharp about Trump: Trump governs retail, not wholesale.
He governs through these individual deals with countries, with companies — and not by doing things that change policy, for the most part, all across the country.
Now, immigration is a counterexample to this, and to some degree, the tariffs are a counterexample to this. But something you really saw last night was Trump bragging about a series of very individual, usually modest policies, some of which are not even really policies.
TrumpRx is the individual negotiations the Trump administration has been doing with drug manufacturers through tariff debates and negotiations. So you can get cheaper Wegovy through TrumpRx because, as part of the tariff negotiations, Trump is able to extract that.
It’s not a crazy move, but it’s not going to allow you to bring down prescription drug prices across the economy. You’d actually need to pass legislation and have Medicare do across-the-board bargaining for that.
The thing that’s happening around the TrumpRx move is that he’s extracting cheaper prices on individual drugs, and then those manufacturers are raising prices on the other drugs to make it up.
So it’s trying to win entirely with communication, though. There was a strategic point to the speech. But also, they were seeking to create memes, to create moments.
The thing they were clearly proudest of among all those stunts was his little spiel about how ——
Archival clip of Trump: If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.
And then he’s focused on: Oh, you guys are sitting, you guys are sitting, you guys are sitting.
Archival clip of Trump: Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.
You don’t think that will work?
No, I don’t think anybody cares. Most people aren’t watching it. Most people don’t care. People understand why Democrats don’t like Donald Trump. They understand why Donald Trump doesn’t like Democrats.
One of the things you always need to be doing in politics, particularly if you are unpopular — and the dynamics of social media have made this harder for both parties — is thinking about the person who doesn’t like you but could like you. Not the person who already likes you, not the person who already thinks you’re doing a great job.
The thing he’s not doing right now is giving those people anything.
There’s this deep way in which Donald Trump, to me, is the inverse of Joe Biden. Joe Biden could not solve a single problem through communication and basically didn’t try. He didn’t take credit for things. He was not really that capable, by the end, of giving good speeches.
Trump is trying to solve all of his problems through communication — not through governing — and what you see is that doesn’t work, either.
He’s doing all the things that people say Biden should have done. He’s naming everything after himself. He’s making sure everybody knows about it. But because most people just don’t pay that much attention to politics or to policy, in fact, that’s not doing anything for him.
People are mad about prices.
We should talk about immigration. They’re mad about immigration, and they’re mad about disorder that Donald Trump is causing.
Going piece by piece to this deal or that deal, to no tax on tips, to whatever, is not going to talk him out of it.
The immigration thing — there are so many things to talk about with this.
One thing that really struck me last night is he told many terrible stories about a commercial truck that badly injured a girl, who was then shown. And he talked about the murder in Charlotte, N.C., on a light rail train of a young Ukrainian refugee.
Archival clip of Trump: No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna’s face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life. She died instantly.
But he made an interesting and telling mistake.
Archival clip of Trump: She had escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America. He came in through open borders.
He’s saying open borders, an illegal alien did that. But that’s not true; the guy who killed her is from Charlotte.
What I thought was so revealing is that it showed again what’s going on in his mind. The default is just: I’m going to kick back to the thing that got me here.
It doesn’t matter that Renee Good was killed. It doesn’t matter that Alex Pretti was killed. It doesn’t matter that I had to, essentially, retreat from Minneapolis — and Los Angeles, actually — all those places — because I’m just going to go back to the original idea that these people kill people, they’re evil.
It shows two things. One is: You think about the process by which State of the Union addresses are normally vetted, the amount of interagency meetings and making sure the president doesn’t say anything that can be untrue.
The Trump White House, because it cares so little about the fact-checkers, has freed itself from that discipline and that rigor ——
[Laughs.] That’s like the understatement of the century.
But the fact that nobody stopped that from happening, nobody stopped him from getting something that substantially wrong, is telling, but it’s telling about a weakness and a vulnerability around him, which is that they are not doing things carefully.
The other thing I want to note on immigration is that immigration is no longer Donald Trump’s dominant issue. If you look at his net approval — so approval minus disapproval — at the beginning of his term a year ago, he had a net approval on immigration that is around +10, which is very, very strong for him.
That’s a big number, for those of you who don’t follow this stuff.
It has now flipped. It depends on the poll you look at, but -7, -10, -13 — so that’s a big loss on his strongest issue.
The economy has been even worse for him. It has gone down even further.
But the thing that I think he doesn’t quite understand about immigration is weirdly the same thing Democrats didn’t understand about crime.
Late in Biden’s presidency, crime had fallen quite a bit, violent crime in particular. And when people talk about the anger Americans feel about the crime issue, there’s a lot of pointing out: Well, if you’re following the actual crime data, we’re sort of at a violent crime low.
And it was true-ish. One thing that I had said, and that others had said, at that time was that the crime polling was picking up something very real that was not getting measured in the murder rate — which is a dislike of disorder.
It’s bigger than dislike, right? It’s a recoil.
A recoil from disorder. It’s picking up a reaction to disorder. There were tent cities in major American cities. There was fare jumping. There was a lot happening, particularly postpandemic, that had a feeling of: No one is in control.
There was very good research on this coming out at the end of Biden’s term, and immigration was part of this.
There had been a flooding, partially this was Greg Abbott busing people around. But there had been a flood of people coming into the country, and those people went all around the country, and you saw it on the New York subways, you see it around you, and things feel out of control, and people don’t like it.
What they want from their leaders is to seem to be in control of events. Donald Trump, in his immigration policy, has become the bringer of disorder. When ICE and the C.B.P. and the National Guard move into these cities, it brings disorder.
It leads to Americans being shot dead in the streets by their government. There’s no more fundamental form of disorder than that.
You go to D.C. when the National Guard is there, you go to Los Angeles when the National Guard is there — that doesn’t feel like safety and order. It feels like being occupied, and people don’t like it, and they react against it.
The Minnesota reaction was incredible and brave and heroic.
But one reason Trump is failing is not just because people think his immigration policy is cruel — though they do — but at its core, what they were asking for was: Things feel out of control, and we don’t want them to feel this way.
And Trump made things out of control in a different way. He did reduce border crossing, but then he brought this almost war into the interior of the country, and nobody wanted that. What they wanted was for their life to feel calm and safe, not for all of a sudden to have masked agents running through their streets and picking up ——
With military-grade weaponry and actually killing ——
Picking up the guy you buy pizza from. Picking up somebody whose kids go to school with your kids.
And then all of a sudden, you’re seeing Americans gunned down by federal agents.
So Trump is up there making this whole pitch about all of the blood being spilled by immigrants. I don’t think he understands that what he was channeling was anger at disorder, and that now he is the bringer of a kind of state-sanctioned disorder.
The police forces in these cities are freaking out about the federal presence in their own cities, which is — if you think about that for a second — just this amazing event. That part of it is very scary.
This is why I do think the State of the Union was revealing about Trump’s mental state. Take the whole hour and 45 minutes plus and extract out what he said. He said: The economy is great ——
Really great.
It has never been better.
Best economy ever.
Best economy ever. And he said the main problem America has is bloodthirsty, murderous, illegal immigrants roaming the streets, causing havoc at will ——
And Democrats who won’t stand.
And Democrats who won’t stand.
And the fact that neither of those things is true — like, it’s just not true — those are not the problems. It is not the structure of American life at this moment, it is not what people feel, it is not what people are reacting to — it puts him and the Republican Party in a tough place.
It’s interesting about immigration. I think it’s very much people freaking out about the deaths and the mayhem. For the longest time people were saying: You can’t run on democracy. Don’t talk about that. No one cares. But the thing is: People do care.
And by preparing the ground on that, when authoritarianism or a tendency toward authoritarian violence showed itself, people knew how to read it.
They’re like: Whoa, OK. This is where we are now.
People have been talking about this. I’ve been saying that they’re the boy who cried wolf, but they just shot this woman for nothing. They just shot this guy for nothing.
It was laid down on a bedrock of urgency that a lot of people thought would never be realized. I think that’s part of it.
But there’s another part of it too, which is: Why are they bothering with all this? And you’re getting at it a lot here. They’re solving a problem that only sort of exists.
During the campaigning, the problem was: They’re eating our pets. Like, what is the problem that’s being solved there?
Obviously there has to be a border, there has to be immigration. But no one’s really for open borders. That’s all just a canard.
And that’s why I was talking about that case in Charlotte, in part, because an earlier Trump obsession, which was to be incredibly racist about Black criminals, has been superseded to some degree — not completely — by his obsession with so-called illegal aliens.
I always just find it incredibly weird. Not inexplicable, because it comes from racism and certain highly ideological views he has about the world. But why is he always worried about murders committed only by a certain group of people?
What I worry about is murders — total number of murders: the chance that I get killed or somebody I love gets killed, or that, frankly, anybody gets killed by anybody.
And he’s right that murders are dropping. And that’s a thing to encourage and take credit for. And you could give police agencies more money to solve murders that are outstanding. There’s a lot you could do if you want to have an antimurder policy. But to just be laser-focused on murders by illegal immigrants is a little bit odd. Because most murders are not committed by illegal immigrants.
What you were just saying about independence — I sometimes think about the Trump that I think could have been not at 41 percent in the polls right now but at 48 or 51 percent.
You’re talking about approval ratings.
Yes. So the Trump who comes in last year, and the economy is already getting better and is kind of strong by then, and does not do tariffs — just does some of his popular policies, passes a bunch of tax cuts and just takes credit, as opposed to holding the economy back to some level and also freaking people out with a very chaotic and aggressive tariff regime.
The Trump who does what he said he was going to do — or at least what he sometimes said he was going to do — which was secure the southern border, which they’ve more or less done, and focus on violent criminals.
Right. The worst of the worst.
The worst of the worst. A Trump who did less and then had more room to brag about TrumpRx, where you can now get, you know, Wegovy.
Or to just focus on it.
Or to just focus on things. You know, you can talk about having pushed Hamas and the Netanyahu government to a deal in Gaza.
And he has chosen — I wrote a piece about this with you — he has chosen to create a huge number of problems for himself politically, when he could have done a lot less and really benefited from it. There’s a world in which he got to the waterline of his popular policies and his popular promises and then just stopped.
Sprinkled throughout his speech is something that I think is very dangerous about Trump for Democrats, which is he will happily take their issues away from him. He’ll negotiate down prescription drug prices using the government’s power, a longtime Democratic priority that Republicans foiled again and again and again. But Trump is just trying to take that from the Democrats.
I think Republicans more or less literally took it, right?
Yes.
Isn’t that Biden’s program that they’ve rejiggered?
Nah. What Trump is doing is a little bit different. But both things are happening. And immigration-wise, close the border — there’s a lot of political viability and value in that.
There’s a lot in there where Trump could have done the more Steve Bannon populist thing and have gained from it. But because Trump actually sincerely believes in a series of very dumb and cruel ideas, he has ended up creating a lot of crises for himself.
And that is before any have been created for him. He’s not facing, as he was at the end of his first term, a global pandemic. He’s not facing, as he might by the end of this term, a recession.
If things begin to go wrong, the kind of things that any president has trouble dealing with, he’s not working with a lot of good will or, frankly, even a lot of policy space. He has used a lot of money on these different moves to respond.
When we were talking at the beginning about reality, that’s part of what’s going on here, too. They so believe what they say — or they think it’s politically effective.
I don’t know whether he thinks he actually won the 2020 election. I’m still a little dubious about that. Maybe he does. I have no idea. I obviously can’t get into his brain — and I don’t want to be there.
But the reality problem is an enormous one because that then leads you to believe, as he said last night in Congress to Congress: The Democrats want to cheat.
Archival clip of Trump: They want to cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re going to stop it. We have to stop it, John.
The reason they want open borders is to bring illegal immigrants who are then going to vote for them. And that’s why we have to have the SAVE America Act.
It’s a whole worldview.
Archival clip of Trump: It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID. [Applause.]
It really struck me: Here’s the fringe at the center. Here’s the lunatic, paranoid, crazy material that we used to keep roped off, that the right, in certain phases, tried to keep roped off from itself. And here it is: The president of the United States actually arguing that Democrats want to bring illegal immigrants in order to vote for Democrats, and that’s why they won’t stand up.
I mean, it’s pretty mind-boggling when you actually put it all together. And this is how you get to — I don’t want to dwell on the pet eating, but that’s how you get to the pet eating. Vance even admitted that — he said: You’ve got to tell stories.
I think it’s been interesting to watch a lot of people on the right — for instance, Chris Rufo, the right-wing provocateur who was very much part of spreading the pet-eating slanders.
He was out on X the other day, as he has recently been, just being like: I don’t know what’s happening to our empirical standards here on the right. All of our people are getting radicalized, and they’re swimming in conspiracies and slop, and a successful movement cannot have this much online brain rot.
And there’s a lot of, I’d say, pointing and laughing. Because Rufo has been part of pushing the movement toward online brain rot ——
Or Ben Shapiro complaining about Candace Owens, who used to be on his show.
Who used to be under his Daily Wire umbrella, yes.
But there is a broad thing happening here, which is that the president is deep in right-wing brain rot. And the people around him who wanted to weaponize the brain rot — they wanted to use it to amp up their base to get certain things and win certain fights — can’t stop it.
They’ve set up a set of systems and a momentum and a culture on the right that they do not actually control. Then Elon Musk took over X and took away the moderators and let all the Nazis back in. And it turns out, if you let all the Nazis and the racists back in, that has a real audience on the right, too.
What is happening with the president at one level very high up is also happening down a lot lower. This is not a movement that is going to effectively come up with normal solutions for political problems. You always have a danger that it moves into straight repression. He uses the military and other things to try to win elections that he cannot win through votes.
But right now it seems to me there is a genuine possibility — it’s not huge — that Republicans will lose the Senate because Donald Trump will not endorse John Cornyn in Texas. And if he has not endorsed John Cornyn in Texas — one of the reasons Trump seems not to like Cornyn is that he did not buy into the 2020 lies.
But if he doesn’t endorse Cornyn — which he hasn’t, and voting is sort of beginning — Ken Paxton, who’s a much weaker nominee — absolutely scandal-plagued ——
Although emblematic of our era in so many ways.
Paxton might become the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas.
Texas is a red state, and Paxton might win anyway. But if Democrats nominate James Talarico — who seems to me to be the stronger candidate in that race, but who knows? — you could end up in a situation where I don’t think Jasmine Crockett or Talarico could beat Cornyn, but I think Paxton is beatable. And in a situation where you have a Democratic wave here and a very scandal-plagued Republican Senate candidate, that could end up being the decisive Senate race. Then people look back, and Trump could have interceded to protect himself and just chose not to.
And the reason I bring this up is that I think it’s really important to distinguish between somebody who has a cleareyed strategic picture of the situation in front of them and is acting cynically — lying, and using conspiracy theories to rile up the base — and somebody who actually doesn’t have a cleareyed picture of the situation in front of them and is acting impulsively and emotionally, or at least unstrategically in ways that can harm them.
And what we’re seeing right now is that Trump is the second thing, not the first. He’s not a brilliant manipulator. He is a deluded manipulator.
What’s interesting about the 2020 lies, whether or not you think that Trump believes them — or whether he didn’t, and then he does — what’s interesting about it is that the loyalty test is stronger if you know that in reality he lost the election, and you’re still willing to say, as so many people in Congress did: Yes, actually, we’re not going to certify those results — even though they know perfectly well that they were legit.
That’s actually the more powerful move — to get people to acknowledge a nonreality. This is why people are always making references to Eastern Europe, to the history of Latin America and even to Hitler and Mussolini and all the rest of it. Because making someone believe something they know is not true is a bigger power move than getting them to acknowledge something that’s true.
Watching last night, that was something I was thinking about, too. They’re trying to get people to accept a reality, obey a reality, acknowledge a reality that doesn’t exist. And sometimes that works, but it often doesn’t. It decays.
I think one thing that is interesting, and on some level a little bit inexplicable to me right now about how things are going for Trump and Congress, is that if you actually look at what Congress is doing quietly — and this is a Republican-dominated Congress at the House and Senate level — Trump is actually facing a fair amount of resistance.
They have agreed to, at the high level, just unfathomably, unqualified and corrupt cabinet appointees, but they have rejected, forced the withdrawal of, more sub-cabinet appointees than we have seen from any president in the modern era.
And if you look at spending, Trump did not get a lot of what he wanted. Russ Vought sent all these DOGE-inspired spending cuts. And the government is spending more this year than it did the year before. Republicans in Congress just rejected a lot of what Trump wanted to eviscerate.
So there is this dynamic that is happening between Trump and the Republican Party, which is that Trump only cares about a couple of big things. He cares that you flatter him. He cares that you agree with him on some of his big lies.
He cares about tariffs. He has some things that he really does track.
Doesn’t want to be impeached again.
Doesn’t want to be impeached again. But they are not in an aggressive way riding herd on Republicans in Congress to back their agenda all the way through. And at this point, they didn’t even seem to have a legislative agenda for 2026.
There’s a lot of drift in this presidency at this point, and more than I think one would have expected. There are a couple of things Trump really cares about — again, tariffs, immigration. But beneath that, they just passed the one-year mark in this term. They shouldn’t be this out of ideas, this out of movement.
Instead, Trump seems to be spending his time on foreign policy, which is not what people wanted from him. And a lot can go wrong depending on what he decides to do.
It’s always what people do in their second term. They get sick of trying to do things that are hard, which is legislative, and they just start winging it because they have more control over that.
That seems to be where Trump is.
Yes. The impeachment thing I also think is significant because he went — I forget whether it was before the Republican House, but maybe it was some Senate thing, where he’s talking to the members behind closed doors, but everything always leaks.
And he said to them: If you lose, they’re going to impeach me a third time.
If we think of Trump as a cunning political operator for a moment — and we’ve been sort of talking about him not being, but the dude got elected president twice completely unqualified. So I’m not going to give him political advice in one sense.
I think he recognizes that the third impeachment — first of all, just spectacular on its face — but it’s very dangerous for him because there will come a point, and we are seeing it, when they have to start to pretend they didn’t do all this. They weren’t participating in the whole thing. They weren’t gung-ho about immigration.
One thing I was thinking about a lot as I watched was: They are making such a big deal about what the Democrats are sitting for. They won’t stand up.
But I was like: Well, look what you’re standing for. You’re jumping up at the idea that your opponents are cheating at the elections. You’re jumping up at that concept. You are jumping up at the demonization of Somalis in Minnesota.
He said a million things, but he actually called them Somali pirates, because again, his brain just defaults to certain things at this point. And they’re leaping up and cheering like it’s the Roman Colosseum, not the U.S. Capitol.
At some point, they’re all going to have to pretend: Oh, you know, I wasn’t really doing that. I was just there for the tax cuts, and I was just there for the border. How you make that point most emphatically is if he gets to a weak enough moment and you start to see Republicans peel off.
And I know this sounds insane right now, but it’s not. I see that he fears it. That there could be, as there should have been, certainly the second time around, enough Republicans voting to actually convict him if he’s impeached a third time. I know I’m getting way out into the future here, but I actually think he’s afraid of that.
He might be afraid of it. I think it is very unlikely, not completely impossible. It’s hard for me to imagine what, at this point, would crack their support for him.
But between Trump getting impeached and convicted and where we are now is the more obvious thing that will happen if Democrats win the House and/or the Senate, which is a huge amount of investigations.
Right.
One thing that was very smart of Trump last night was to pick up the proposed insider stock trading ban from members of Congress.
Archival clip of Trump: Let’s also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information. [Applause.]
I’ve seen a lot of polling on this. That is about as popular a policy as exists, and Democrats did not implement it. Pelosi is very identified with this. You sometimes see these ads right now in the New York subway for an online stock-trading platform where you can just hit a button and have Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio on the theory that, well, she knows what’s going on, so maybe you should, too.
He made a joke about that.
Archival clip of Trump: They stood up for that. I can’t believe — I can’t believe it. Did Nancy Pelosi stand up — if she is here? Doubt it.
That’s smart politics for him. The thing behind it is people don’t like seismic levels of political corruption. Within his administration and his family are the most seismic levels of political corruption that we have seen in the modern era in American politics. Once Democrats have subpoena powers, things are going to start coming out.
About the tariffs — that was an undersold or underrecognized joy of the tariffs for him. It makes personal negotiations crucial. So the Swiss have to show up with this Rolex gold bar to get their tariff lowered that’s given to him.
If I were Donald Trump or the Trump family or a lot of key members of the administration, I would be pretty worried about Democrats getting that subpoena power. I’d be pretty upset that Trump is doing so little to stop it from happening.
So if you’re Hakeem Jeffries or you’re Chuck Schumer and you’re sitting there in the audience last night, I think you’re pretty happy with how that speech went. Because the thing you fear is Trump and the Republican Party getting serious about pivoting into a strategy, into policies, into messages, that could help moderate their losses in 2026. And you didn’t see any evidence of either Donald Trump doing that or of Donald Trump being willing to let the rest of the Republican Party say the things necessary for them to do that.
I hate to end on Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, but I think we need to stop there. So thank you very much, Ezra.
Thank you, Aaron.
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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy, Marlaine Glicksman, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck.
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