Ezra Klein: Imagine you're President Donald Trump. Or maybe you're one of Donald Trump's political adviserss or his kids, one of the ones who doesn't want all those crypto and AI trades you've been making to start getting investigated by congressional Democrats. And so you're there and you're planning out the 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.

Ezra Klein: Go back a year. Go back to February 2025. Immigration is your strongest issue. All those weeny liberals looking at your approval rating, you can see it right there in Nate Silver's poll tracker. Your net approval on immigration is around 10%. That means 10% more of the country approves of the job you're doing than disapproves of it. Suck it, liberals.

Ezra Klein: 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 70%. And it gets worse. On trade, it is negative 23%. on inflation negative 30%. Negative 30%.

Ezra Klein: So now it is State of the Union time. 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 lion eyes and empty wallets and the videos of chaos in their streets?

Ezra Klein: At the State of the Union, Donald Trump decisively chose door number three. 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.

Donald Trump (Audio): 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.

Ezra 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've 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?

Ezra Klein: 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. 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 is filled with people who like him. He throws himself parades. He has adopted the clichéed 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?

Ezra Klein: What usually saves authoritarians is their control over the system, their power, their ability to repress elections, opposition parties, the media. If you have enough power, you can bend politics to fit your reality. But Trump isn't an authoritarian. Not yet. Not that kind. He's a wannabe authoritarian who doesn't have the power to engage in that kind of systematic repression. He just lost a major tariff case at the Supreme Court. Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air. Americans are thankfully unafraid to criticize their president. And Republicans are losing elections left and right. 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.

Ezra Klein: Joining me now to interrogate me about Trump's State of the Union and what, if anything, it means for American politics is my editor, Aaron Retica. Aaron, welcome back to the show.

Aaron Retica: Hi, Ezra. Where do you want to start?

Aaron 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 house or move through the capital and it was absolutely incredible. Everybody was like, "A boy, you're the best. That was incredible. Amazing." And then there was a truly stellar moment when someone said that was a home run, sir. Something like that. And then someone else or maybe the same person was like it was a grand slam. Whatever else that was, it wasn't a grand slam. In his speech, he seemed to be living in a reality that is not the one we're actually living in. What do you make of that disjunction? Like he's in one place and America is in another.

Ezra Klein: I think he believes his own and I think that is an important skeleton key at this point to understanding the Trump administration. 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.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. And it reflected 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 sycopant 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 ideas. And so there was some kind of normal structure around him that was built to somewhat restrain him.

Aaron Retica: Can I interrupt you for one second? You know what's so interesting about that? The guy who wrote that and of course he's out and about talking about it now was in DHS which I think is Department of Home 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.

Ezra 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 has not fully bought in on on Trump. Trump has fully taken over the Republican party. His administration is truly stacked with loyalists.

Ezra Klein: There is a complete submission all around him to the rules of winning his favor, which is to say, you tell him things he wants to hear. You flatter him. I thought one of the both funny and dark refrains of the speech was where he kept saying that, oh, it wasn't his idea to name the website Trump RX. It wasn't his idea to name the savings accounts Trump accounts. People around him know one way that you curry favor with him is you name things after him and present it to him. And when the world around you has bought into manipulating you that way and you have an ego like he already has and you don't have rigorous modes of thought or policy process, it is actually impossible that you will maintain a normal connection to reality.

Aaron Retica: Yeah. It's even true of the speech writers, right? They can't come and say, "Oh, do a Carter type speech where you acknowledge the pain people are suffering, where you talk about problems." He loves to talk about bloody difficulties, but they can't do that, right? they can't present him with material that is at variance with his conception of the world.

Ezra Klein: 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 I 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 of the Union Mike Johnson is not sitting behind him.

Ezra Klein: Immigration has gone from Donald Trump's dominant issue. 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 were tent cities in, you know, major American cities. There was fair jumping right there. And immigration was part of this. And things feel out of control and people don't like what they want from their leaders is just seem to be in control of events.

Ezra 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. 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 react against it. 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.

Aaron Retica: The immigration thing, he told many terrible stories about the murder in Charlotte of a young Ukrainian refugee. But he made an interesting and telling mistake. 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.

Ezra Klein: 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%. The Trump who comes in last year and does not do tariffs just does some of his popular policies passes a bunch of tax cuts and just takes credit. But because he actually sincerely believes in a series of very very dumb and cruel ideas, he has ended up creating a lot of crises for himself.

Ezra Klein: 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.

Ezra Klein: So if you're Hakee Jeff 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 Donald Trump doing that.

Aaron Retica: Fair enough. I hate maybe to end on Hakee Jeff and Chuck Schumer, but I think we got to stop there. So, thank you very much, Ezra.

Ezra Klein: Thank you, Aaron.