Trump’s Fantasy State of the Union

20:26Ezra Klein:Well, it shows two things.

20:27Aaron Retica:One is, you think about the process by which state of the unions are normally vetted. The amount of interagency 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... That's like the understatement. 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.

21:06Aaron Retica: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. That's a big number. Yeah. For those of you who don't follow this stuff. 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.

21:48Aaron Retica: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 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— It's bigger than dislike, right?

22:28Ezra Klein:It's a recoil.

22:30Aaron Retica:A recoil of disorder. But it was picking up a reaction to disorder. There were tense cities in, you know, major American cities. There was fair jumping out, 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 bussing 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.

23:02Aaron Retica: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. 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 D.C. when the National Guard is there. You go to Los Angeles when the National Guard is there, that doesn't feel like safety and order. It feels like being occupied and people don't like it and they react against it.

23:44Aaron Retica: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 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 the guy who you buy pizza from, picking up somebody whose kids go to school with your kids.

24:36Aaron Retica: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 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.

25:00Ezra Klein:even the police forces right in these cities or 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

25:18Aaron Retica:not and this is why i do think the state of the union was revealing about trump's mental state Take the whole hour 45 plus and extract out what he said. He said, the economy is great. Really great. It has never been better. Best economy ever. Best economy ever. And he said, the main problem America has is bloodthirsty, murderous, illegal immigrants roaming the streets, causing havoc at will.

25:49Ezra Klein:And Democrats who won't stand.

25:50Aaron Retica: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 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.

26:13Ezra Klein: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 out of 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.

26:50Ezra Klein:for nothing. They just shot this guy for nothing. And it was laid down on a bedrock 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, 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.

27:25Ezra Klein: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, not completely, but superseded to some degree by his obsession with so-called illegal aliens.

27:48Aaron Retica: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. 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.

28:24Aaron Retica: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 odd because most murders are not committed by illegal immigrants. What you were just saying about independence, I sometimes think about the Trump that I think could have been not at 41 % in the polls right now, but at 48 or 51%.

28:52Ezra Klein:Your approval ratings. Approval ratings, yeah.

28:54Aaron Retica: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 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.

29:29Aaron Retica: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 Mugovie. Or to just focus on it. Or to just focus on things. You know, you can talk about having pushed Hamas and the Netanyahu government to a deal in Gaza. and he has chosen i mean i read 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 his popular promises and then just stopped because sprinkled throughout his speech which is something that I think is very dangerous about Trump for Democrats, which is he will happily take their issues away from him.

30:16Aaron Retica: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? Yeah. Isn't that Biden's program that they've rejiggered? No, what Trump's doing is a little bit different. But both things are happening. Okay. 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 and have gained from it.

30:52Aaron Retica: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. 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.

31:31Ezra Klein: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 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. They want to cheat. They have cheated.

32:11Ezra Klein: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, Josh. 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 world view. It's very simple. All voters must show voter ID. 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 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?

33:06Ezra Klein:And this is how you get to, I don't want to dwell on the pet eating, but that's how you get to the pet eating. And Vance even admitted that, well, he said, you know, you got to tell stories.

33:17Aaron Retica: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 Rufo has been part of pushing the movement towards online brain rot.

33:57Aaron Retica:And I think he feels he stays like—

33:59Ezra Klein:Or Ben Shapiro complaining about Candace Owens, who used to be on his show.

34:02Aaron Retica:Who used to be under his Daily Wire umbrella, yes. But there is a broad thing happening here, which is that the president is deep in right-wing brain rot. And the people around him who wanted to weaponize the brain, 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 races back in, that has a real audience on the right too.

34:44Aaron Retica: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 the military and other things to try to win elections that he cannot win through votes. But right now, it seems to me there is a genuine possibility. It's not huge, but that Republicans will lose the Senate because Donald Trump will not endorse John Cornyn in Texas. And if he has not endorsed John Cornyn in Texas, and Cornyn, one of the reasons Trump seems to not like him is Cornyn did not buy in to the 2020 lies.

35:36Aaron Retica: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.

35:47Ezra Klein:Although emblematic of our era in so many ways.

35:49Aaron Retica: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 Tallarico, 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 Tallarico 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 will look back and it will have been Trump. Like Trump could have interceded to protect himself and just chose not to.

36:34Aaron Retica: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.

37:11Ezra Klein:he is a deluded manipulator. What's interesting about the 2020 lies, whether or not you think that Trump believes them or whether he didn't and then he does, what's interesting about it is that the loyalty test is stronger if you know that in reality he lost the election. And you're still willing to say, as 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 is not true, is a bigger power move than getting them to acknowledge something that's true.

38:03Ezra Klein: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?

38:19Aaron Retica:It decays. I think one thing that is interesting and on some level a little bit inexplicable to me right now about how things are going for Trump and Congress is that if you actually look at what Congress is doing quietly, and this is a Republican-dominated Congress at the House and Senate level, Trump is actually facing, 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 force of the withdrawal of more sub-cabinet appointees than we have seen from any president in the modern era.

39:00Aaron Retica:And if you look at spending, Trump just did not get a lot of what he wanted. I mean, you know, Russ Votes sent all these, you know, 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. He cares about tariffs. He has some things that he really does track.

39:33Aaron Retica:Doesn't want to be impeached again. Doesn't want to be impeached again. But they are not in an aggressive way riding herd on Republicans in Congress to back their agenda all the way through. And at this point, they didn't even seem to have a legislative agenda for 2026. There's a lot of drift in this presidency at this point, more than I think one would have expected. There are a couple 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.

40:16Aaron Retica:And a lot can go wrong, depending on what he decides to do with Iran.

40:18Ezra Klein: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 just start winging it because they have more control over that. That seems to be where Trump is. 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, we've been sort of talking about him not being, but the dude got elected president twice, completely unqualified.

40:55Ezra Klein:like shouldn't be the president he is so like i'm not going to give him political advice in one sense 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 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. I mean, 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.

41:30Ezra Klein: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 U.S. Capitol. So at some point, they're all going to have to pretend, oh, you know, I wasn't really doing that, right?

42:05Ezra Klein:I was just there for the tax cuts and I was just there for like, oh, 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 it, that there could be, as there should have been, certainly the second time around, enough Republicans voting to actually convict him if he's impeached a third time. I know I'm getting way out into the future here, but I actually think he's afraid of that.

42:35Aaron Retica:He might be afraid of it. I think it is very unlikely, not completely impossible, 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 more obvious thing that will happen if Democrats win the House and or the Senate, which is a huge amount of investigations.

43:00Ezra Klein:Right.

43:01Aaron Retica:And one thing that was very smart of Trump last night was to pick up the ban insider stock training from members of Congress.

43:10Ezra Klein:Let's also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.

43:22Aaron Retica:And that's 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, so looking at the returns of her. You sometimes see these ads right now on the New York subway for an online stock trading platform where you can just hit a button and have Nancy Pelosi's portfolio on the theory that, well, she knows what's going on, so maybe you should too. Right, he made a joke about that.

43:51Ezra Klein:They stood up for that, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Did Nancy Pelosi stand up if she's here? I doubt it.

44:04Aaron Retica: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. Yeah.

44:30Ezra Klein:And there was a... 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.

44:49Aaron Retica: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.

44:58Ezra Klein:Yeah, okay.

44:59Aaron Retica: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.

45:40Ezra Klein: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. Thank you, Aaron.

45:58Aaron Retica:This episode of The Azar Clown Show is produced by Claire Gordon and Marie Cassione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Amun Sahota and Pat McCusker Audience strategy by Christina Similewski and Shannon Busta The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser