This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test

The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G. D. P. forecasts are predicting slower growth. And on Tuesday night Trump declared to Congress and the nation that things had never been better. Something was different about this speech. The level of baldfaced lying. The way Republicans cheered along. How uncomfortable and uncertain Democrats seemed. It was as if, watching it all, you could feel something rupturing. My editor, Aaron Retica, joins me to talk through Trump’s fifth address to Congress. This episode contains strong language. 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. 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 our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer 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.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:32Ezra Klein?

  So it is Wednesday morning, March 5th. Last night, President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term. You don't call the State of the Union when it is this early in a term, but that's more or less what it was. And I'd be good to just walk through some impressions of it with my revered editor, Aaron Reddick. Aaron, welcome to the show.

• 0:54Aaron Retica?

  Thanks. Hi. Yeah, let's plunge right into it. What did you make of the spectacle? What did you make of the speech? What were they trying to do? What was he trying to do? What was happening there?

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  I felt that the first 15 minutes of the speech were different than what came after, and in an alarming way.

• 1:15Aaron Retica?

  Okay.

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  I don't quite know how to describe this, but I felt like you could feel something rupturing. And I think I described it as you could feel the rules, the norms. You could feel that we had broken American politics already, and there was now nothing really governing action. And so I'd say that in a couple of different ways. One way had to do with Donald Trump and the Republicans. We will talk about the level of lying, Trump did in that speech, the genuinely bald-faced lying. The way that speech came on the day when markets were in chaos.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  America's momentum is back. Our spirit is back. Our pride is back. Our confidence is back. And the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before.

• 2:01Ezra Klein?

  And he's out there saying, "It is an amazing golden age. Everything is wonderful."

• 2:06Speaker 02

  America is back.

• 2:12Ezra Klein?

  And you have the Republican Party leaping to its feet, laughing at his every joke. J.D. Vance is radiating Dwight from the office energy up behind him, just chuckling at every dumb joke the boss makes. And then on the other side, you had the Democrats who clearly did not know how to act. They do not feel this moment is normal. They feel, I think accurately, that Donald Trump has seized powers the executive is not supposed to have, powers that are in many cases illegal. I think he's had 20-some injunctions, freezes, et cetera, from the courts already. And so they go to the speech. They had discussed not going at all, but they thought that would be breaking a structure, an institution, a norm of American democracy.

• 2:55Ezra Klein?

  Al Green, Representative Al Green, gets up, shaking his cane and yelling at Trump till he gets ejected very early on. Some of the Democrats are waving these stupid little things that look like they're at an auction, saying, "Save Medicaid," and "Elon Musk is a fraud." And others were just sitting there on their hands. They didn't know what to do because the rules don't work right now. They don't work on the right. They don't work on the left. There is a renegotiation happening, but not in the sense that the two parties are talking about it, about what kind of system are we in? What is okay to do within it? How do you act if you think the other side has breached those boundaries? But you don't want to burn the entire thing to the ground because you're not sure what

• 3:39Ezra Klein?

  will be left if you do that. So I thought that was the first 15 minutes. We can get into what happened after that as he went on, as you described it to me, a Castro-esque stemwinder. What did you make of it? You have more, well, historical perspective on this than I do.

• 3:55Aaron Retica?

  I mean, this is the perennial problem of Trump is like, how do we situate? Like, what is this thing, right? It's like, on the one hand, that speech is not unlike the one he made when he first came down the escalator in 2015, right? It's the same enemies, the same allies. That part of it is static. What really alarms me about all of this is that the lying is...

• 4:25Aaron Retica?

  Controlled in the sense that he knows what he's saying is not true. The social security part of it was a good example.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  We're also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the social security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on. Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million social security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.

• 4:57Aaron Retica?

  There are not. And of course, you're put into a ridiculous position when I have to say there are not millions of dead people getting social security, right?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them.

• 5:14Aaron Retica?

  But there aren't. And so why is he saying that? And he's saying it in part because he wants you to be ground down so far that you have to listen to that and take it. And a lot of it is actually about it masquerades as dominance over the Democrats. But it's really about dominance over his own party.

• 5:38Ezra Klein?

  Absolutely.

• 5:38Aaron Retica?

  Right. So what is he doing? Like, what's happening there?

• 5:42Ezra Klein?

  I found myself thinking about how the word lie is overly blunt for the gradations we need here. There's different ways to lie and there are different kinds of lies. You brought up the lie about social security fraudulent payments. This has been fact checked a lot. That's a kind of lie that I think has been a mainstay of Republican rhetoric about government for many decades, which is you take something that sounds weird. If you look at the coding in the social security files, you will see people at unusual levels of advanced age who appear to be active in the system.

• 6:26Ezra Klein?

  And that has to do, in a technical way, with the way the software was coded a long time ago, and it's hard to update. But these people aren't actually getting money. But it puts you into the position of pedantically explaining the structure of the underlying social security database, which nobody wants to hear about. But you think about what he was doing from the very beginning. So I have the speech in front of me and it's four paragraphs in, right? So it's, you know, he first says, Speaker Johnson, Vice President Vance, thanks for being here. Then he says, you know, I was here six weeks ago. I proclaimed the dawn of the golden age of America. I returned to the chamber tonight is the next paragraph. Our momentum is back. And then he says,

• 7:04Speaker 02

  The presidential election of November 5th was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades. We won all seven swing states, giving us an electoral college victory of 312 votes.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  We won the popular vote by big numbers and won counties in our country.

• 7:41Ezra Klein?

  So in 2020, Joe Biden won six out of seven swing states and he won the popular vote by 4.5 points to Trump's 1.5. So multiples more. Everybody knows that was not a mandate. That has not been seen in many decades. And then Trump goes on to talk about how all of a sudden, we finally have most Americans believing the country is headed in the right direction rather than the wrong one. You can go to Real Clear Politics right now. They have a polling average of this question and most Americans do not believe this in poll after poll after poll after poll. The point of these kinds of lies to me, which are so easy to check, is one to sort of overwhelm the system's faculties of truth.

• 8:25Ezra Klein?

  At a certain point, you give up, right? This is what it means, as Steve Bannon said, to flood the zone with bullshit. You can check a couple of lies. If all you're doing is checking every sentence of a two hour speech, you're going to bore your audience and yourself. These are more like what was happening when he made Sean Spicer go out in the first term and say the largest inauguration crowd ever. It is a way of cleaving reality into two and not, I think, actually into two separate realities.

• 8:54Ezra Klein?

  I think it is cleaving reality by loyalty. These lies are loyalty tests and they're ways of getting people who accept them, J.D. Vance with his chuckling right behind him, further and further and further into the con. Because once you've given so much of yourself up, once you've traded little shred of dignity after little shred of dignity, once you've accepted these cruelties, these outrages, things you would not have thought you would accept a couple of years before. At a certain point, you're in too deep. You've gone too far. You've cut yourself off from old sources of support, from old versions of your own internal ethic and your own internal self-esteem and self-conception. And now really, all you have as a Republican politician or a staffer is the success of

• 9:39Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump, right? You've thrown so much money into this that it really better work out. And that's what I think this lying is, that it's really not about Donald Trump trying to give you a sense of the world. He knows perfectly well that people can see what is happening to the stock market. They don't think on that particular day, we're in a new golden age where everything is going great. What he is doing is breaking the system into those who are loyal to him and those who are not. And then those who are not can be sort of purged, at least if they're on the Republican side, one by one by one by one.

• 10:14Aaron Retica?

  Right, they can be picked off. But of course, it's not just a rhetorical strategy, right? This flood the zone strategy is also how they're operating government itself. So getting back to reality, they have attacked, I mean, I can't even, again, it's like impossible to even say all the agencies that they've cut slash cut people. They're radically transforming the government. When we were first talking about this after the inauguration, it was clear they were going to do some of this, but I don't think very many people understood the full extent of what they were going to do and that the Republicans are now having to swallow, right? We keep having to wait, you know, well, one or two people will say something about Ukraine or one or two people will say something about Medicaid. By the way, speaking of Steve Bannon defending Medicaid, you know your movement is in some

• 10:59Aaron Retica?

  trouble when Steve Bannon is like the conscience of it, right? How does the rhetoric of the speech correspond to the reality they're trying to impose on the United States?

• 11:10Ezra Klein?

  I think this is the core question because it just doesn't. But it does tell you something about the contradictions that they have still not come anywhere near resolving. Because one thing about a speech like this, I happened to have a long day the other day and I was flipping through HBO Max, or I guess it's now called Max. I was like, what am I gonna watch? And The West Wing popped up. And so I was like, oh, that might be comfort food right now. Nice, like the mother bird who pre-chews a food and then gives it to you, right? For somebody into American politics. And the episode I happened to flip on was the one where they are dramatizing the making of the State of the Union. And they have this reporter.

• 11:53Aaron Retica?

  Seriously?

• 11:54Ezra Klein?

  Yes. And this was completely random, right? And I had not thought about this until this second, making this connection, but...

• 11:59Aaron Retica?

  What's great about this is like you came here to hear about politics and instead you're hearing about Ezra Klein's TV taste.

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  Well, you know, I only kept on for eight minutes or something because it felt so discordant to the moment. But the point I'm making about it is that as I'm trying to dramatize this, the reporter asking the unbelievably literal questions, when does this all begin? Like, what are the stakes? And the Rob Lowe character, so it begins six weeks ago and we get memos from everybody inside and outside of the government and we're trying to put it all together and make the budget work out. And that is what they did not do here, right? This was clearly not a memos from everybody, let's make our agenda add up system. So one thing that I would note is that the biggest problem that they are barreling towards is they cannot, at any level, make their economic promises net out. So what did he promise last night?

• 12:49Ezra Klein?

  He promised a huge tax cut. If I am reading the tea leaves of what he's saying, right, I would call it between four and six trillion dollars over 10 years. He's talking about no tax on tips, no tax on social security, right? It just keeps getting bigger. He's also promising a very large increase in defense spending, which, speaking of Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon does not like. But not just defense spending in a normal sense, he promised the construction of a golden dome.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  I'm asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland, all made in the USA.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  And Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology just wasn't there, not even close. But now we have the technology. It's incredible, actually. And other places, they have it. Israel has it. Other places have it. And the United States should have it, too.

• 13:46Ezra Klein?

  If you want to make a modern anti-projectile and drone shield that is going to stretch not over the sliver of landmass occupied by the state of Israel, but over the mass of land occupied by the United States of America. I have not personally costed that out, but I promise you it is not cheap to do. So that's a huge increase in cost. The only thing they said about what they might cut, they sort of had this litany of things that sounded fraudulent and sounded weird when you said them, like, "We're making transgender mice," kind of thing. A bunch of this was bullshit, right? Like, the social security section of that. Even if it isn't BS, it's just small-dollar amounts. It's $8 million here, $60 million there,

• 14:31Ezra Klein?

  a grant for $1.9 billion there. So there's no real money in it. You can see what the House Republicans are passing and the Senate Republicans in their budget reconciliation instructions. That includes instructions that, given where in the appropriation structure it is telling the Republicans to cut, is going to mean cutting hugely into Medicaid. But already, a lot of Republicans are saying we shouldn't do that. They don't have agreement on a bunch of dimensions of the tax bill. The only thing they are saying they are doing that could raise money is tariffs. But in order to raise a significant amount of money through tariffs, you'd have to do two things. One is that you would have to put on tariffs at a level we are not even talking about or considering right now. The ones we are considering are bad enough.

• 15:16Ezra Klein?

  But you would have to put on huge tariffs, and you would have to keep them on. You can't use them as a negotiating structure, because if you take the tariffs off, you don't get money from them. And so his promise that they're going to balance the budget, it's not, I think, going to happen. You can't make all this work at all. And they're going to do this. And I think this is really important in terms of things that are going to drain energy from Donald Trump at a time when the economy is starting to blink red. So the tariffs are roiling markets. Consumer sentiment is down. Mid rage, inflation, expectations are up. And if you just look at the survey data, companies are saying, we just don't know how to invest right now because there's so much uncertainty,

• 15:59Ezra Klein?

  uncertainty about tariffs, uncertainty about the economy, uncertainty about tax policy. So we're just not going to make any decisions at the moment because in a year, we'll know better what the situation is. But that means from here to the next year, things get bad. The GDP forecasting from the Atlanta Fed has already begun signaling a recession is coming, which I don't know, I don't know seriously to take that, but it's unusual. So I don't know, there was a lot of talk about all this, but when I try to compare it to the problem they're facing economically, which is that the tariffs are freaking everybody out and they can't make any of their agenda work out, they didn't resolve that at all. And that is one of the things a speech is supposed to do. It's the president explaining

• 16:43Ezra Klein?

  how he's going to make it all work. He did a lot of trolling of the Democrats. He didn't do any explaining of how it all work.

• 16:50Aaron Retica?

  If the model is Viktor Orban in Hungary, right, in his early stages, he was able to make that economy work and get a kind of popularity from that that has been able to sustain him over time, Erdogan in Turkey. Like, there's all kinds of examples of authoritarian or semi authoritarian rulers using that to deepen their rule. But I do want to talk about, you mentioned the attacks on Democrats again, like wokeness and the role it played.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It's gone. It's gone. And we feel so much better for it, don't we? Don't we feel better?

• 17:31Aaron Retica?

  Many Democrats have spent a lot of time, including on this show, talking about the excesses of all kinds of left stuff among the Democrats. Here's the problem, that's not really what they see. They see a black general and they're like, DEI, you're gone. They see a woman admiral, they're like, DEI, you're gone. So what is the attack on wokeness and how it fits into the speech? And why is he even talking about it?

• 18:02Ezra Klein?

  Well, he's talking about it, one, I think they do care about it. And two, I think it's good politics for them. Because they didn't talk about it in terms, you're talking about it here.

• 18:13Aaron Retica?

  True.

• 18:13Ezra Klein?

  They had a young woman up in the gallery who I guess had been playing volleyball. And there was someone born male on the other team who had spiked the ball and injured her, right? So they're still very much on the trans kids and sports, which is in wokeness, like their best wedge issue, but already one the Democrats have largely abandoned. I've thought about this a fair amount. As you know, my position is that it would be fighting the last war in a stupid way for Democrats to make wokeness or turning against wokeness like the center. Donald Trump and his administration are going to engage in such unbridled cruelty to trans

• 18:55Ezra Klein?

  children, to all kinds of people on the margins of society, that I think the politics of this are going to change. We're not going to call it wokeness next time, we're going to call it decency. But I am not for some huge reversal of the ethic on this. I don't know, though, that I totally agree with the thing you just said. Not in the sense that I don't think Trump, people always say Trump wants to bring back traditional hierarchies.

• 19:23Ezra Klein?

  And it's true in a way, but it's also it's a much older traditional hierarchy than I think the one they mean. This is maybe the thing that I've had trouble articulating about it. Donald Trump doesn't want the America of the 1950s. His chief of staff is a woman. His secretary of homeland security is a woman. His attorney general is a woman. He's not against women admirals. What he cares about is loyalty. The hierarchy he wants is the hierarchy of the clan with the chief, the big man chief at the top. And what matters is the tribute you pay to the chief. And I actually don't really think Donald Trump cares if you're paying that tribute. I think he's perfectly happy to have you pay that

• 20:05Ezra Klein?

  tribute if you are white, if you are black, if you are a woman, if you are male. I am not saying he doesn't have retrograde views on all kinds of things. I'm not saying he's not a racist, because I think at a core level, he is. I thought it was incredibly shitty when he had this little crack about Lesotho. Who even knows where that is? Nobody knows where that is.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Eight million dollars to promote LGBTQI plus in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.

• 20:34Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the guy just isn't a good person. And I'm not saying amongst some of the other people around him, like Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa and seems to view the way South Africa changed and the end of apartheid and the role of Afrikaners in modern South African life is some sort of terrible mistake you need to keep from happening in America. So I'm not saying inside his movement, there isn't a lot of that. But what Trump wants, he had this whole section of the speech where he talks about merit. And we're going to get the best people. And it's actually worth playing it.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender. Very important.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  You should be hired based on merit. And the Supreme Court, in a brave and very powerful decision, has allowed us to do so. Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 21:40Ezra Klein?

  Think about that section of the speech, and then think about who he has named to his cabinet. RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard. This is not a cabinet built on merit. This is a cabinet built on loyalty and transaction to the chief. The hierarchy of this entire thing is about your relationship to Donald Trump. Cash Patel, of every person you could find in the country, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino are your most meritorious picks to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nobody buys that. They're your loyalists. That is the hierarchy he wants. It is just a hierarchy with him on top.

• 22:25Ezra Klein?

  I think he's quite flexible about who's on bottom, so long as they are bringing him enough gifts.

• 22:30Aaron Retica?

  I want to push back on that a little bit, because to me, the Trump obsession with a hierarchy and gold and class, that way of looking at the world, right? What they want is a world where people know their place and don't step out of it. But the obsession with purity, right, which we even know he has at the level of germs, when you have a person talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, as he famously did during the campaign, when you have this hierarchy mixed with the purity, very bad things can come from that. So let me put it this way, right? You have, going back to this idea of the split screen, right?

• 23:14Aaron Retica?

  You have real America, fake America, real Americans, fake Americans, real men, fake men, real women, fake women, real news, fake news, all those things, right? So you're circling on a much smaller world, and that was evident in the speech at the end, the paroation at the end, right? They go on about, you know, American energy, and the only mention of, you know, Native America, the people who are here, was his jibe about Elizabeth Warren and Pocahontas.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Do you want to keep it going for another five years? Yeah, you would say Pocahontas says yes.

• 23:51Aaron Retica?

  So I do think that there's a certain idea of America that is retrograde in its deepest sense that they're trying to restore, that's not accepting of the expansion of rights that began in the 60s and the 70s.

• 24:06Ezra Klein?

  Well, I'm not here to argue that they are accepting of the expansion of rights, and so I know where that expansion of the moral circle has gone. I've been obsessed on this show with this idea of what are the rules of this system, of this presidency, of this regime that are being expressed. That was sort of my first audio essay, starting with the inauguration. I think Democrats want to create a simplified version of this that they are more comfortable with, but that keeps fouling them up. It would be easier for them if Donald Trump's view was just white people good and everybody else bad.

• 24:50Ezra Klein?

  And that was sort of the view Democrats had of him in 2017. And then in 2020 and in 2024, his coalition became much more multiracial. And that's been a real problem for Democrats, even knowing how to talk about it, because they want to say the thing they were saying about him in 2017, and yet they're losing the support of multiracial voters as they say that more and more loudly. Or another example, Donald Trump's hatred, apparent hatred, certainly his distaste of Mexican and Latin American immigrants seem to fit into this. And his tendency to bully Mexico seemed to fit into this, and maybe even China, too.

• 25:31Ezra Klein?

  But, okay, he actually hates Canada, clearly, exactly as much, or maybe more, than Mexico. And it's not because Canada does not have enough white people for Donald Trump's taste, it's because Canada is disloyal. It's because Canada is a different regime. Trump has much more affinity, as best I can tell, for Xi than anybody who leads a government in Europe, aside from Viktor Orban. And I do think the rules expressed in this presidency, they're not more complex than we want to go back to the racial and gender hierarchies of the 1950s, but they are not actually that. They are rules about loyalty and ideological affinity.

• 26:14Ezra Klein?

  And they are rules about tribute. And what he has created is a way that you can be inside of his coalition. I think it'd be very hard to be trans and be inside of his coalition, but I don't think it's very hard to be Hispanic and be inside of his coalition. Many people are doing it, right? He is trying to save Eric Adams in New York. Eric Adams is a black Democrat, but as long as Eric Adams will pledge loyalty to Donald Trump, he can be put into Donald Trump's pocket and become an ally rather than an enemy. It is not that it is not an incredibly retrograde hierarchy, but it is more of a royal court, which I think is worse than it is 1950s or 1970s America.

• 26:58Ezra Klein?

  Now, there are people around him, you know, the Bronze Age pervert world of Republican or conservative or MAGA policy thinking. There are all kinds of racists who attach themselves to Donald Trump, white supremacists, et cetera. It's a coalition that stretches at this point, and a lot is being pasted on to him. But his rules, I think, have to do with loyalty.

• 27:47Aaron Retica?

  Dominance was a central theme of the speech. It's been a central theme since they came back into power in January. Could we talk a little bit about that part of it, right? So there's dominance over the people within your clan, but we're also now talking about, as he said in the inaugural speech, expanding the territory of the United States. And he brought it up again last night. We're going to retake the Panama Canal. There was a bizarre section about Greenland.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  And I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we're working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we're going to get it. One way or the other, we're going to get it.

• 28:52Aaron Retica?

  So how do they use this rhetoric and make it reality? They're doing it in some ways. Even the ridiculous contrition about the Gulf of America and the Gulf of Mexico ended up having real world consequences for the Associated Press. Because they wouldn't toe the line. And now they're out.

• 29:12Ezra Klein?

  I think that Donald Trump and the people around him believe. I think the simplest way to put this is they believe the culture of American politics has become weak, probably feminized, soft, restrained. I think the soaring denouement of the speech at the end really got at this. What did Trump ultimately say he is going to try to do here? He said.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  And we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic, and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this earth.

• 29:53Ezra Klein?

  You did not hear George W. Bush say that the intention of his democracy promotion around the world was that America would be the most dominant nation the world has ever seen. Nor was that the vision of Ronald Reagan, at least not in the way it was spoken about. They think we gave up the expansionist, muscular, violent frontier spirit that once made this country great. I do believe this is a way the meaning of Donald Trump has changed from his first term to a second. I do think in his first term, make America great.

• 30:35Ezra Klein?

  If you had to pick a year, you might say 59, 1959, right? When were we great? 1959, 1983, right? I could see something like that. I think now it's something like the late 1800s. I mean, you have a more studied historical perspective than I. When you listen to this, what do you think is the era in his head? When was, I think they believe there was a moment when the American spirit was great.

• 31:03Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a cross between the Andrew Jackson that he supposedly idolized in the first administration and as everyone's been saying, including him, and he mentioned him again last night, William McKinley.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  And likewise, I renamed for a great president, William McKinley, Mount McKinley again.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Beautiful Alaska, I love Alaska.

• 31:32Aaron Retica?

  Who, could he hear all this? Would be surprised to find himself as the center of the movement of anything. But what is the fusion between those two things, right? It's domination over the environment, which we haven't talked about, but that's a huge part of what they want to, right? We're going to drill a baby drill, we're going to have gas, we're going to cut all the timber, right? And that's part of that frontier spirit that you're talking about. We're just going to cut the trees down. You have, in Jackson's case, the Ouer case of the president defying the Supreme Court. And Jackson, of course, he didn't fully not do what the Supreme Court said, but he basically did ignore them and hence the Trail of Tears. So I think it's some kind of mixture of the Jacksonian democracy, right?

• 32:17Aaron Retica?

  And he always makes his little gestures toward that. And this McKinley idea that you protect America with tariffs, which then allows you to build up your dominance. There was a lot of chatter about the return of manufacturing to the United States. And those two things, I do think it's a 19th century model for sure.

• 32:37Ezra Klein?

  I think what's interesting about it is it's a 19th century model in what is nevertheless a 21st century world.

• 32:45Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 32:45Ezra Klein?

  One of the more substantive parts of the speech was about Taiwan Semiconductor's investments in America.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  And just yesterday, Taiwan Semiconductor, the biggest in the world, most powerful in the world. Has a tremendous amount, 97% of the market, announced a $165 billion investment to build the most powerful chips on earth, right here in the USA.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And we're not giving them any money. Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing. We give hundreds of billions of dollars, and it doesn't mean a thing. They take our money and they don't spend it. All that meant to them, we're giving them no money. All that was important to them was they didn't want to pay the tariffs. So they came and they're building, and many other companies are coming. We don't have to give them money. We just want to protect our businesses and our people. And they will come because they won't have to pay tariffs if they build in America. So it's very amazing. You should get rid of the CHIPS Act. And whatever's left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt, or any other reason you want to.

• 34:00Ezra Klein?

  So I think a couple of things are interesting here. The CHIPS Act was a very, very bipartisan bill. And the major thing it does is it puts money into pulling in groups like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation to build highly advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities in America. And they've been working on this for years. They're working on it not only because of American subsidies, but also because they are afraid if China annexes Taiwan, that they're not going to have any production facilities anymore, and that'll be the end of that. But Trump's view, that we don't have to give them money, we just want to give them tariffs. They will just come here because of the tariffs, because they want that access to our market.

• 34:43Ezra Klein?

  I think it's worth thinking about why that would or would not work. The thing is, if you put tariffs on everything, the supply chains for advanced semiconductors, they're maybe the most complex supply chains on earth. And there's things like these lithograph machines that are only made by this one Dutch company. But there's a million things. They are incredibly intricate, and they're sourced from all over the world. Semiconductors are not a marvel of one machine. They are marvel of global supply chains and global talent.

• 35:15Ezra Klein?

  If locating in America means that every single intermediate or basic good you have to source from outside America is 10 to 15 to 25 to maybe 50% more expensive because it is getting tariffed, sometimes multiple times, I've done a lot of writing on this, we've had shows on this. If you do tariffs, you make it much more expensive to produce semiconductors in America than in Canada, than in the UK, than in South Korea. We lost the semiconductor industry because it became much more expensive to produce semiconductors in America than elsewhere. So those are the reasons you're subsidizing.

• 35:59Ezra Klein?

  You're trying to build a new industry or an industry that is not new, but one that we've lost. The reason you would do subsidies and not just tariffs, aside from the fact that tariffs are a tax your own people are paying, is that you want to make this the best place there is to build very advanced things. And building very advanced things in the 21st century requires working with global supply chains. It is not a thing that you can change, and it's definitely not a thing, even if you can change it, that you can change in one or two, even three or four years. They have a theory. And then there is this world that is just a different world than McKinley or Jackson had. And that was what was so striking to me about the day on which his speech happened.

• 36:41Ezra Klein?

  This was a day on which the world was acting back on America. Right, reality was imposing itself. Reality was imposing itself. You could see it in the markets. You could see it in things that different firms were saying about what they were or weren't going to do. You could see it in other countries beginning to add reciprocal tariffs onto us. And we're about to get this collision between this very old school mercantilist philosophy, that whatever you think about it in the 19th century, the 19th century did not have the economic structure of 2025. So now they're applying that philosophy to this era. And I guess just hoping they could dominate the world into abiding by

• 37:24Ezra Klein?

  the way they would like to look at it. But I don't think it has a structure, no matter what you want it to have.

• 37:33Aaron Retica?

  Speaking of reality not having the structure that you wanted to have, I do want to talk for a minute about the one Democrat he apparently likes, and that's Robert Kennedy Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It's all connected to this like pro-system, anti-system idea, right? I mean, you, in defending semiconductors, right? Again, you have to explain, there's a long chain of explanation to show what supply chains are. And then Kennedy, he is in some ways the perfect embodiment of this whole thing, because it's the rejection of expertise on the one hand, and the rejection of government and destruction and all this.

• 38:14Aaron Retica?

  So do you think he can bring in like everyone who's against the system? So even these moms who are against vaccines? And is there a way for him to make that a coherent way of dominating America and dominating the world?

• 38:28Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but let me say two things about this, because I think Kennedy does and does not represent that. And this goes back to our conversation about wokeness and hierarchies. What Kennedy fundamentally represents is not Donald Trump's embrace or rejection of any particular system of theories about public health. RFK Jr. bent the knee to Donald Trump, endorsed him, brought in voters of value to Donald Trump, and now he gets payback. He has been given a duke's lance. And Donald Trump doesn't really care what he does with them. But I don't think you can look across the appointments and say Donald Trump has adopted this Maha view of health. What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hate more than anything in the world?

• 39:13Ezra Klein?

  Possibly not vaccines, it's seed oils. That dude hates seed oils. Who is the chief of staff at the Department of Ag under Donald Trump? A former seed oil lobbyist. Trump doesn't care, doesn't know, doesn't care. He supported Operation Warp Speed when he was president because it seemed like the thing to do. Then the politics shifted and the people who were paying him fealty were anti-vaccines. So he agreed to that. And now RFK Jr. is going to solve autism despite the fact that the guy is clinging to endless amounts of completely discredited research on autism. Now, that, it is true, I think, that there's an overall... Ethos, an anti-system, but more, I would say it's like a counter-revolutionary ethos.

• 39:57Ezra Klein?

  And what they are going to do is try to build their own system. They don't just hate the system, they want to own the thing. And they don't want to decentralize power, they want to centralize power, but under them. They don't want it to be the case that American policy is not tilted towards the rich, they just want to be controlling the tax cuts. So I always, I bristle a little bit, not when you say it, because I've said it a million times. I do think for a lot of people, this split feels like pro-system, anti-system. But this is just a different set of elites in the system.

• 40:27Aaron Retica?

  Absolutely.

• 40:28Ezra Klein?

  I was talking about this with Martin Gury, that he has a sort of revolt of the public there. I was like, no, this is a revolt of elites. You cannot tell me that Marc Andreessen, the founder of the web browser, and then the head of A16Z, one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, and one of the biggest names in tech forever, and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has built multiple companies on the back of federal subsidies, that these people are not part of the system. They are part of the system, they just want to take it for themselves. They don't like how much power went to people they did not control and they did not like. Now, I do think RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, the Maha thing, has been significant for the Trump coalition, expanding it, changing it, reshaping it.

• 41:10Ezra Klein?

  The thing we're about to find out, as again, Trump's policies, his administration comes into contact with reality and things like potentially bird flu, is he might-

• 41:20Aaron Retica?

  And the measles outbreak in Texas.

• 41:21Ezra Klein?

  And the measles outbreak, he might, in two years, in four years, make a lot of people yearn for the system, realize that there were things that were working, that you relied on.

• 41:34Aaron Retica?

  We could have a whole show about this, but falling outs among elites and the manipulation of populist sentiment, that is in some ways the whole story, right? Always. Whether it's any aspect of American history, like, that's a big one, right? But we're gonna have a gigantic experiment, which, you know, huge swaths of the government are- Wrecked, and we're going to slowly find out which of those things matter the most, right? Or maybe not slowly, maybe quickly. But it isn't just that people will be like, okay, that system was actually better than I thought it was. It's also got to be some sort of democratic renewal, and I do not mean the Democratic Party here. Whatever

• 42:16Aaron Retica?

  one says about how they're pushing back, it's not doing enough. The people who have to push back, they have to come from civil society. They're going to have to come from, if I can use this word, newspapers. They're going to have to come from churches, unions, all that kind of stuff. Even if you don't want to be part of the resistance in some sense, the Trump administration is making it so that you don't really have a choice.

• 42:41Ezra Klein?

  You may not be interested in politics, but politics unfortunately is going to be interested in you.

• 42:45Aaron Retica?

  Exactly.

• 42:47Ezra Klein?

  I have had, I think, everybody in my life who is not a Trump voter, come to me and complain that the Democrats don't have a message. Why don't they have a message? Donald Trump is just lobbing softballs at them. Where's their message? And one thing I feel like I keep saying on this is, it's not that they don't have a message. If you are actually listening to what Brian Schatz, and Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar, and I could sort of go down, Cory Booker, are saying, Chris Murphy, one of them is saying actually probably the exact thing you wish Democrats were saying. What Democrats don't have is attention. Nobody cares what they're saying. They cannot generate

• 43:31Ezra Klein?

  attention. Like, you saw it last night. They don't get to go up to the podium. I mean, they had Alyssa Slotkin delivering a perfectly fine response at the end, but they don't get to give the State of the Union variant at the same time as Donald Trump does. They don't have, they can hold up their little signs. They don't get to give an answer. It's not a debate. There is no traction right now for the opposition. There might be soon, if in Congress, Republicans can't pass the bills they want to pass. There might be soon because we are barreling towards what might be a government shutdown, though I kind of expect Republicans are going to pass a continuing resolution and delay that for a bit. But until Trump needs something from congressional Democrats, people are not going to pay very much attention to congressional Democrats because what they want from congressional Democrats is not a message.

• 44:16Ezra Klein?

  They want them to make this stop. That is what they actually want, is what liberals actually are saying. They want Democrats to do something that organizes society and makes a stop. And elected Democrats turn on the power to do that. They could shut down the Senate, but then the Republicans could just vote to change the rules and that would be the end of even that Democratic power in the Senate. Look, Donald Trump is not popular. He is less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his presidency by a lot. He won the popular vote by less than 2024 than Hillary Clinton won it in 2016. He doesn't need to be popular because he's won and he's not running for reelection, probably, given unless they're able to change the Constitution, which I doubt despite

• 44:59Ezra Klein?

  some mutterings to the contrary. This is not a political juggernaut. The problem is there is no leverage on them aside from in the courts. There's nothing they need at the moment. Donald Trump could have come in and tried to get bipartisan support on big spending cuts on government reform. It was all possible to do. He didn't do it. That little riff he gave last night about how Democrats would never cheer for him.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  And once again, I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud. Nothing I can do. I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded. And these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements. They won't do it, no matter what.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Five, five times I've been up here. It's very sad and it just shouldn't be this way.

• 46:15Ezra Klein?

  It came two sentences after he said that Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of the United States. He doesn't want them to cheer for him. He doesn't want to work with them. Ro Khanna wanted to work with Doge. A number of congressional Democrats said they would work with Doge. They never got the call because Doge does not want to work with them. Right now, the Democratic opposition, elected opposition, doesn't have leverage. And if there's anything that matters in the Trump era, it's leverage. And so, as you say, it's going to be civil society and it's also going to be the world acting back upon Trump. People feeling effects, people being upset, not just about the price of eggs, but about measles outbreaks, about what's happened to their 401k, about the

• 46:57Ezra Klein?

  economy potentially falling into recession, about the sense of cruelty. And at some point, Republicans in Congress are going to start looking forward to an election and begin realizing they're going to get annihilated if they don't begin to create some distance, right? The fact that Republicans in the House are telling each other to stop doing town halls is very telling.

• 47:17Aaron Retica?

  Just amazing.

• 47:18Ezra Klein?

  Just amazing. So, I wish I had like a good answer to this. I don't think there's a answer to this right now that is satisfying. I mean, it would be good if more people were out in the streets, I think. But aside from that, there is not a power center in American life that is built around liberal values and that can stop what this is. It is going to be the collision between what this is and reality itself that matters.

• 47:49Aaron Retica?

  Okay, well, that seems like a good place for us to wrap it up. Ezra, thanks a lot for coming out.

• 47:57Ezra Klein?

  Aaron, always a pleasure, even in dark times.

• 48:19Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Isaac Jones with Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samulski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.