Imagine you’re President Donald Trump. Or maybe you’re one of Donald Trump’s political advisers or his kids, one of the ones who doesn’t want all those crypto and A.I. trades you’ve been making to start getting investigated by congressional Democrats. 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. Go back a year. Go back to February 2025. Immigration is your strongest issue. All those weeny 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 percent. That means 10 percent 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 percent. 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 percent. But then came the tariffs. Now your net approval on the economy is negative 17 percent. And it gets worse. On trade it is negative 23 percent. On inflation? Negative 30 percent. Negative 30 percent! 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 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, that 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. At the State of the Union, Donald Trump decisively chose door No. 3. 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. “Today, our border is secure. Our spirit is restored. Inflation is plummeting. Incomes are rising fast. The roaring economy, it is roaring like never before. And our enemies are scared. Our military and police are stacked. And America is respected again, perhaps like never before.” [Applause] I’m not going to go through a fact-check of the president here. 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? 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. “Thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for common sense.” 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 that is filled with people who like him. He throws himself parades. He has adopted the clichéd authoritarian habit of forcing people to sit through these record-length speeches. And yes, it 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 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 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. Because what Trump spent almost two hours saying at the State of the Union must have been music to Hakeem Jeffries’s ears. Trump said he has no answer to the problems that are dragging down his presidency. He said he doesn’t need an answer to the problems dragging down his presidency because there are no problems. Everything is going great. And who around Donald Trump will dare tell him otherwise?
