Trump’s Fantasy State of the Union

President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, immigration and trade are deep in the red. But in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, he decided to tell the American people: You don’t know what you’re talking about. “Today our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy is roaring like never before,” he said. I’m not going to fact-check the president in this episode. But I do want to ask: Even if he can’t be honest with the American people, is he at least being honest with himself? My editor Aaron Retica joins me to discuss. Mentioned: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” by Miles Taylor “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?” with Yuval Levin on “The Ezra Klein Show” Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. 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 & 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  So imagine you're Donald Trump, or maybe you're one of Donald Trump's political advisers or his kids, one of the ones who doesn't want to lose the midterms and start getting your crypto and AI trades investigated by congressional Democrats. So you're there and you're planning out last night's State of the Union. 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 a year, go back to February 2025. Immigration is your strongest issue. All those weenie liberals looking at your approval rating can see it right there in Nate Silver's poll tracker. Your net approval on immigration is around 10%.

• 1:14Ezra Klein?

  That means 10% more of the country approves of the job you're doing than disapproves of it. Suck it liberals. Fast forward a year, your net approval on immigration is negative 13%. Immigration has gone from your strongest issue to a reason the country dislikes you. Or take the economy. In early February of 2025, you were doing pretty well, plus 7%. But then came the tariffs. Now your net approval on the economy is negative 17%. Negative 17%. And it gets worse. On trade, it is negative 23%. On inflation, negative 30%. Negative 30%. So now it is State of the Union time.

• 1:56Ezra Klein?

  You have this rare opportunity to address the entire political system, the entire country. So what do you do? Do you tell the American people you're working on it? That you know there's disruption and tumult, it's just going to take some time for all these policies to pay off? Do you tell the American people you hear them and you're going to change course? You've got a new plan? Or do you tell the American people that 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? Last night at the State of the Union, Donald Trump decisively chose door number three.

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  At over an hour and 45 minutes, this was the longest State of the Union in recorded history. He had a lot of time to make his case. And what Trump said, again and again, was that the American people don't know what they're talking about.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:15Ezra Klein?

  I'm not going to go through a fact check of the president here. Donald Trump is not a truthful man. People did not vote for him believing him a truthful man. They voted for him believing he could solve their problems. But what I have increasingly wondered over the past year isn't whether Trump is being truthful with us, but whether he's 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 is surrounded by yes men and sycophants. He presides over these cabinet meetings. You can watch them, where one agency head after another tells him how great he is doing, how unbelievably well his presidency is going.

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  He doesn't read lengthy briefing books. We know that. He doesn't preside over a normal policy process. He communicates on a social media site he owns, this filled with people who like him. He throws himself parades. He has adopted the cliched authoritarian habit of forcing people to sit through these 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 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.

• 4:44Ezra Klein?

  Everyone is afraid to tell them the bad news. The people around them 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 oppress 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's still on the air. Americans are thankfully unafraid to criticize their president, and Republicans are losing elections left and right.

• 5:28Ezra Klein?

  And in that world, it is a big political problem for this president and for the Republican Party, that Donald Trump is lecturing the American people rather than listening to them. Because what Trump spent almost two hours saying at the State of the Union last night must have been music to Hakeem Jeffries' ears. Because Donald Trump said he doesn't have an answer to the problems facing his presidency. He said he doesn't need an answer to the problems facing his presidency because there are no problems facing his presidency. Everything is going great. And who around Donald Trump will dare tell him otherwise? Joining me now for a bit of a turning of the tables

• 6:09Ezra Klein?

  is my great editor, Aaron Reddick, who is going to ask me some questions about the State of the Union and how to think about it.

• 6:24Ezra Klein?

  Aaron, welcome back to the show.

• 6:26Aaron Retica?

  Hi, Ezra.

• 6:27Ezra Klein?

  Where do you want to start?

• 6:28Aaron Retica?

  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.

• 6:49Aaron Retica?

  And it was absolutely incredible. Everybody was like, "Adam, boy, you're the best. That was incredible, amazing." And then there was a truly stellar moment when someone said, "That was a homerun served."

• 7:03Aaron Retica?

  It was a grand slam.

• 7:06Aaron Retica?

  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? Like, he's in one place and America's in another.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  I think he believes his own bullshit. And I think that is an important skeleton key at this point to understanding the Trump administration.

• 7:33Ezra Klein?

  You remember when The Times, Times Opinion, in fact, published in the first administration, the famous incognito, "We are the resistance inside the Trump administration"?

• 7:45Aaron Retica?

  Of course I remember.

• 7:46Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 7:48Ezra Klein?

  Like, that was an extreme version of something that was more broadly happening inside that administration, which is 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 kind of normal structure around him. That was built to somewhat restrain him.

• 8:19Aaron Retica?

  Can I interpret to 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 DHS, which I think is

• 8:28Ezra Klein?

  The Department of Homeland Security.

• 8:29Aaron Retica?

  Department of Homeland Security, which I think is very significant, actually, in terms of what you're talking about, right? The people who were there were, in some ways, the people who were the most skeptical.

• 8:37Ezra Klein?

  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? Been Paul Ryan, another senior Republican who did not owe his career to Donald Trump, who is 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

• 9:19Ezra Klein?

  was where he kept saying that, oh, it wasn't his idea to name

• 9:24Aaron Retica?

  The Trump Accounts.

• 9:25Ezra Klein?

  The savings accounts, Trump Accounts.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Brand new Trump Accounts. And I didn't name it.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I did not name that.

• 9:33Ezra Klein?

  It wasn't his idea to name the website TrumpRx.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  TrumpRx.gov, and I didn't name that one either, by the way.

• 9:43Ezra Klein?

  He didn't say this in the speech, but he said elsewhere, "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, "Oh, what about me? For me? You want to name it after me?" And when the world around you has bought into manipulating you that way.

• 10:09Ezra Klein?

  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, just as any president. But he is not going to be able to do it. And sure enough, he is not doing it.

• 10:29Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, it's even true of the speech writers, right? They can't come to him and say, 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, right? They can't present him with material that is at variance with his conception of the world. And so it makes actually their task very difficult. And it was, I mean, if we're talking about whether it was like boring or interesting, it was not super interesting, right?

• 11:09Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 11:27Aaron Retica?

  Yes, we're isolationists about the State of the Union, yes.

• 11:29Ezra Klein?

  That every American citizen, or non-citizen for that matter, will live inside and form impressions based on. 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 delivered by a president to Congress, it's not nobody, it's going to be in the millions of people. But 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

• 12:11Ezra Klein?

  country and what, if anything, he intends to do about it. And the signal he sent last night was that he is 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. And he sent that signal to the assembled members of like, the idea that Republicans in Congress are cheering for this, they're going to lose their jobs. There's a very, very good chance, and I think it went up last night, that at the next State

• 12:53Ezra Klein?

  of the Union, Mike Johnson is not sitting behind him. And so to me, that we have this tendency to get really caught up in the showmanship of the State of the Union. He had the 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. And 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 most Americans do not tune into you. And so you can't just lie to them.

• 13:37Aaron Retica?

  Well, it's not just that, because they also, if you tell them eggs are down, and maybe beef is coming down, but food prices are up 3%, right? People buy the food.

• 13:48Ezra Klein?

  He said rent is down.

• 13:49Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  The cost of chicken, butter, fruit, hotels, automobiles, rent is lower today than when I took office by a lot.

• 13:57Ezra Klein?

  I thought that was shocking. Rent is not down. Like, 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's 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 he has neither significantly tried, nor has he succeeded. And just telling people that you have, when you haven't, is a

• 14:37Ezra Klein?

  Dumb move. You know, Yuval Levin, the conservative policy scholar, I had him on the show a month or two back. And a point he makes that I think is very sharp about Trump is that Trump governs retail, not wholesale, that he governs through these individual deals with countries, with companies, not by doing things that change policy, for the most part, all across the country. Now, immigration is a counter example to this, and to some degree, the tariffs are a counter example to this. But 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. So Trump RX are individual

• 15:18Ezra Klein?

  negotiations the Trump administration has been doing with drug manufacturers through tariff debates and negotiations. So you can get cheaper Wegovy through Trump RX because as part of the tariff negotiations, Trump was 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. And the thing that's happening around the Trump RX 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.

• 15:54Aaron Retica?

  So it's trying to win entirely with communication, though, right? And 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-

• 16:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:24Aaron Retica?

  And then he's focused on, oh, you guys are sitting, you guys are sitting, you guys are sitting.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Isn't that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself not standing up. He should be ashamed of yourself.

• 16:38Aaron Retica?

  You don't think that will work?

• 16:40Ezra Klein?

  No, I don't think anybody cares. Most people aren't watching, and 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're 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. And the thing he's not doing right now is giving those people anything.

• 17:20Ezra Klein?

  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 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.

• 18:03Ezra Klein?

  And they're mad about disorder that now Donald Trump is causing. And going piece by piece to this deal or that deal, to no tax on tips, to whatever, is not going to talk them out of it.

• 18:53Aaron Retica?

  The immigration thing, there's 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.

• 19:10Aaron Retica?

  And he talked about the murder in Charlotte on a light rail train of a young Ukrainian refugee.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  No one will ever forget, there were people on that train. No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Irina's face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life. She died instantly.

• 19:34Aaron Retica?

  But he made an interesting and telling mistake.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  She had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal, set free to kill, and America came in through open borders.

• 19:46Aaron Retica?

  He's saying, you know, open borders, illegal alien did that. But that's not true, that the guy who killed her is from Charlotte. And what I thought was so revealing about that is that it showed again what's going on in his mind. Right? The default is just like, I'm gonna kick back to the thing that got me here. It doesn't matter that Renee Good was killed. It doesn't matter that Alex Preddy was killed. It doesn't matter that I had to essentially retreat from Minneapolis. And Los Angeles, actually, right? All those places. Because I'm just gonna go to the original thing of like, these people kill people, they're evil, et cetera, et cetera.

• 20:26Ezra Klein?

  Well, it shows two things. One is, you think about the process by which State of the Unions are normally vetted. The amount of inter-agency meeting 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. And so.

• 20:46Aaron Retica?

  That's like the understatement of this.

• 20:48Ezra Klein?

  And so the fact that nobody stopped him from getting something that substantial wrong is, as you say, telling, but it's telling about a kind of 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. So immigration has gone from Donald Trump's dominant issue. If you look at his net approval, so approval minus disapproval. At the beginning of his term, you know, a year ago, he has a net approval on immigration that is around plus 10, which is very, very strong for him.

• 21:22Aaron Retica?

  That's a big number, yeah, for those of you who don't follow this stuff.

• 21:26Ezra Klein?

  It's now flipped. It's now, you know, it depends on the poll you look at, but negative seven, negative 10, negative 13. So that's a big loss on his strongest issue. The economy has been even worse for him, it's 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. So late in Biden's presidency, crime has 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 that, well, if you're following the actual crime data, you know, we've, you

• 22:09Ezra Klein?

  know, we're sort of at a violent crime low, and it was true-ish. And one thing that I said and that others said at that time was that the crime polling is picking up something very real that is not getting measured in the murder rate, which is a dislike of disorder. There was practically in the post-pandemic period-

• 22:27Aaron Retica?

  It's bigger than dislike, right? It's a recoil.

• 22:29Ezra Klein?

  A recoil of disorder. But it's picking up a reaction to disorder. There were tent cities in, you know, major American cities. There was fare jumping at, right? There was a lot happening, particularly post-pandemic, that had a feeling of no one is in control. And there was very good research on this coming out at the end of Biden. And immigration was part of this. There had been a flooding, partially this was 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. You see it on the New York subways, you see it around you, and things feel out of control. And people don't like, what they want from their leaders is to seem to be in control of events.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump, in his immigration policy, has become the bringer of disorder. When ICE and the CBP 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. But you go to DC 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. I mean, the Minnesota reaction was incredible and brave and heroic. But one reason Trump is failing is not just because people think his immigration policy

• 23:53Ezra Klein?

  is cruel, though they do, but at its core, what they were asking for was things feel out of control. 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 to all of a sudden have masked agents running through their streets and picking up-

• 24:25Aaron Retica?

  With with military grade-

• 24:26Ezra Klein?

  With military grade weaponry-

• 24:28Aaron Retica?

  And actually killing you.

• 24:28Ezra Klein?

  Picking up the guy who 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 in some ways channeling was an anger disorder and now what he is the bringer of is a kind of state sanctioned disorder.

• 25:00Aaron Retica?

  Even the police forces, right, in these cities, and I shouldn't even say even, the police forces in these cities are freaking out about the federal presence in their own cities, which is just, if you think about that for a second, it's just this amazing event. That part of it is very scary. It's not-

• 25:18Ezra Klein?

  And this is why I do think the State of the Union was revealing about Trump's mental state. Like, take the whole hour forty-five plus and extract out what he said. He said, "The economy is great."

• 25:31Aaron Retica?

  Really?

• 25:31Ezra Klein?

  It has never been better.

• 25:32Aaron Retica?

  Best economy ever.

• 25:33Ezra Klein?

  Best economy ever. And he said, "The main problem America has is bloodthirsty, murderous, illegal immigrants roaming the streets, causing havoc at will."

• 25:49Aaron Retica?

  And Democrats who won't stand.

• 25:50Ezra Klein?

  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. That is not the, or the benefit. It's not the structure of American life at this moment. It's not what people feel. It's not what people are reacting to. It puts him and the Republican Party- In a tough place.

• 26:13Aaron Retica?

  You know, it's interesting about the immigration. I think it's very much people freaking out about the deaths and the mayhem. But it's also, 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, right? They're like, oh, whoa, okay, this is where we are now. People have been talking about this, and I've been saying that they're, you know, the boy who cried wolf, but they just shot this woman for nothing. They just shot this guy for nothing. And it was laid down on a bedrock

• 26:57Aaron Retica?

  of urgency that a lot of people thought would never be realized, right? And I think that's part of it. But there's another part of it, too, which is, why are they bothering all this? And you're getting at it a lot here. They're solving a problem that only sort of exists, right? And during the campaign, and the problem was, they're eating our pets? Like, what is the problem that's being solved there? And I'm not saying that he shouldn't be an immigrant. I mean, obviously, there has to be a border, there has to be immigration. But no one's really for open borders. Like, that's all just a canard, right? 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,

• 27:41Aaron Retica?

  not completely, but superseded to some degree by his obsession with so-called illegal aliens.

• 27:48Ezra Klein?

  I always just find it incredibly weird. Not inexplicable, because it comes from, I think, racism and certain highly ideological views he has about the world, but why he's always worried about murders committed only by a certain group of people as opposed to murder, right? 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, right? There's a lot you could do if you want to have like an anti-murder policy. But to just be laser focused on murders by illegal immigrants is just a little bit

• 28:33Ezra Klein?

  odd, because most murders are not committed by illegal immigrants.

• 28:39Ezra Klein?

  What you were just saying about independence, I sometimes think about the Trump that I think could have been not at 41% in the polls right now, but at 48 or 51%. Their approval ratings. Approval ratings, yeah. 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, 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

• 29:22Ezra Klein?

  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 Trump RX, where you can now get McGovey. Or to just focus on. Or to just focus on things. You know, he can talk about having pushed Hamas and the Netanyahu government to a deal in Gaza. And he has chosen, I mean, 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. I mean, there is a world in which he got to the waterline of his popular policies and

• 30:06Ezra Klein?

  his popular promises and then just stopped. Because sprinkled throughout a 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. He will. I think they more or less literally took it, right? 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, you know, immigration wise, like close the border, right? There's a lot of political viability and value in that. There's a lot in there where Trump could just do the more Bannonite populist thing

• 30:50Ezra Klein?

  and have gained from it. But because he actually sincerely believes in a series of very, very dumb and cruel ideas.

• 30:59Ezra Klein?

  He has ended up creating a lot of crises for himself, and that is before any have been created for him. You know, 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. And so like, 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 goodwill, or frankly, even a lot of policy space. He's used a lot of money on these different moves to respond.

• 31:31Aaron Retica?

  That's part of why, when we were talking at the beginning about reality, right? That's part of what's going on here, too, is that they're 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. 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 that, as he said last night in Congress, to Congress, right, the Democrats want to cheat.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:20Aaron Retica?

  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 Act. Like, it's a whole worldview.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  It's very simple. All voters must show voter ID.

• 32:35Aaron Retica?

  But it really struck me like, okay, here's the fringe at the center, right? Here's the lunatic, paranoid, crazy material that we used to keep roped off, that the right tried to keep, 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 just, it's pretty mind boggling when you actually put it all together, right? And this is how you get to I don't want to dwell on the pet eating, but like that's how you get to the pet eating and Vance even admitted that, well, he said, you know, you got to tell stories.

• 33:17Ezra Klein?

  I think it's been interesting to watch a lot of people on the right. Chris Ruffo, for instance, 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 been occasionally recently, 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 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 Ruffo has been part of pushing the movement towards online brain rot. And I think he feels he stays like-

• 33:59Aaron Retica?

  Or Ben Shapiro complaining about Candace Owens, who used to be on his show.

• 34:02Ezra Klein?

  Who used to be on his, 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 bright, right? They wanted to use it to amp up their base and get certain things and win certain fights. But they 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. And 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.

• 34:44Ezra Klein?

  And so there is, what is happening with the president at one level, very high up, is also happening down a lot lower. And this is not a movement that is going to effectively come up with like normal solutions for political problems. So you have always a danger that it moves into straight repression, right? That he uses a military and other things to try to win elections he cannot win through votes. But right now, it seems to me there is a genuine possibility. It's not huge, but that Republicans will lose the Senate because Donald Trump will not endorse John Cornyn in Texas.

• 35:26Ezra Klein?

  And if he has not endorsed John Cornyn in Texas, and Cornyn, one of the reasons Trump seems to not like him is Cornyn did not buy in to the 2020 lies.

• 35:37Ezra Klein?

  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 in every direction.

• 35:47Aaron Retica?

  Emblematic of our era in so many ways.

• 35:50Ezra Klein?

  Might become the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas. And Texas is, you know, a red state and Paxton might win anyway. But if Democrats nominate Talarico, it seems to me like they're stronger candidate in that race, but who knows? You could end up in a situation where I don't think Crockett or Talarico could beat Cornyn, but I think Paxton is beatable. And in a situation where you have a Democratic wave year and a very, very scandal plagued Republican Senate candidate, that could end up being the decisive Senate race. And then people look back and it will have been Trump, like Trump could have interceded to protect himself and just chose not to.

• 36:34Ezra Klein?

  And the reason I bring this up is that I think it's really important to distinguish between somebody who has a clear eyed 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 clear eyed 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 I think what we're seeing right now is Trump is the second thing, not the first. He's not a brilliant manipulator. He is a deluded manipulator.

• 37:15Aaron Retica?

  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 people in Congress did, that, yeah, actually, we're not going to certify those results, even though they know perfectly well that they were legit. Right? That's actually the more powerful move, right? To get people to acknowledge a non-reality, right? And this is why people are always making. References to Eastern Europe, to, you know, the history of Latin America and even to Hitler and Mussolini and all the rest of it, because making someone believe something they know

• 37:58Aaron Retica?

  is not true is a bigger power move than getting them to acknowledge something that's true. And watching last night, that was something I was thinking about, too, because like 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, right? It decays.

• 38:19Ezra Klein?

  I think one thing that is interesting and on some of 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, I would say, a fair amount of resistance. They have, I mean, 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,

• 39:02Ezra Klein?

  Trump just did not get a lot of what he wanted. I mean, you know, Russ Vought sent all these Doge-inspired spending cuts. And in fact, 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 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, cares about tariffs. He has some things that he really does track.

• 39:33Aaron Retica?

  Doesn't want to be impeached again.

• 39:34Ezra Klein?

  Doesn't want to be impeached again. But they are not, in an aggressive way, riding herd on Republicans in Congress to

• 39:45Ezra Klein?

  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, more than I think one would have expected. There are a couple of things Trump really cares about, again tariffs, immigration. But beneath that, I mean, this is, it just passed the year mark in this term. They shouldn't be this out of ideas, this out of movement. But 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.

• 40:18Aaron Retica?

  It's always what people do in their second terms, right? They get sick of trying to do things that are hard, which is legislative, and then just start winging it because they have more control over that.

• 40:26Ezra Klein?

  That seems to be where Trump is.

• 40:29Aaron Retica?

  Yeah. I mean, the impeachment thing also, I think, is significant because he went, I forget whether it was before the Republican House, but maybe it was some Senate thing where, you know, he's talking to the members behind closed doors, but everything always leaks. And he said to them, you know, if you lose, they're going to impeach me a third time. And 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, like shouldn't be the president he is, so like, I'm not going to give him political advice in one sentence, right? And I think he recognizes that the third impeachment, first of all, just spectacular on its face, but is very dangerous for him because there will come a point, and we are seeing it, and this is what just said made me think of it, there will come a point when

• 41:14Aaron Retica?

  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. And one thing I was thinking about a lot as I watched was they're 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, I mean, he said a million things, but he actually called them Somali pirates, right? Because again, his brain just defaults to certain things at this point. And they're leaping up and cheering like it's the Roman Coliseum, not the US Capitol.

• 41:59Aaron Retica?

  So at some point.

• 42:03Aaron Retica?

  They're all gonna have to pretend, oh, you know, I wasn't really doing that. Right. I was just there for the tax cuts and I was just there for like, oh, with the border. And right. And how do you make that point most emphatically is if he gets to a weak enough point, you start to see Republicans peel off. And I know this sounds insane right now, but it's not. And I see that he fears that, 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.

• 42:35Ezra Klein?

  He, he might be afraid of it. I think it is very unlikely, not completely impossible, but, but what would have to come out would, 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, I think, the, the more obvious thing that will happen if Democrats win the House and/or the Senate, which is a huge amount of investigations.

• 43:00Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 43:01Ezra Klein?

  And one thing that was very smart of Trump last night was to pick up the ban insider stock training from members of Congress.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Let's also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.

• 43:22Ezra Klein?

  And that's a very, I mean, I've seen a lot of polling on this. That is about as popular a policy as exists and Democrats did not implement it. And Pelosi is sort of very identified with this and people believe, uh, so looking at, at the returns of her, uh, you, you sometimes see these ads right now on the New York subway for a online stock trading platform where you can just like hit a button and have Nancy Pelosi's portfolio on the theory that, well, if she knows what's going on, so maybe you should too.

• 43:49Aaron Retica?

  Right. He made a joke about that.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  They stood up for that, I can't believe.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  I can't believe it. Did Nancy Pelosi stand up if she was here? Doubt it.

• 44:04Ezra Klein?

  That's smart politics for him, but the thing behind it is people don't like seismic levels of political corruption. And within his administration and his family are the most seismic levels of political corruption, I think, that we have seen in the modern era in American politics. And once Democrats have subpoena powers, things are going to start coming out.

• 44:30Aaron Retica?

  Yeah. And there was just about the tariffs. That was an undersold or under-recognized joy of the tariffs for him is that it makes personal negotiations crucial, right? So this Rolex has the Swiss have to show up with this Rolex gold bar to get their tariff lowered that's given to him.

• 44:49Ezra Klein?

  So I think if I were Donald Trump or the Trump family or a lot of key members of the administration, I'd be pretty worried about Democrats getting that subpoena power.

• 44:58Aaron Retica?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Ezra Klein?

  And 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.

• 45:40Aaron Retica?

  I hate maybe to end on Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, but I think we got to stop there. So thank you very much, Ezra.

• 45:47Ezra Klein?

  Thank you.

• 45:58Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Especulante is produced by Claire Gordon and Marie Cassion. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio 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, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cimuluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Spinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.