In his speech, he seemed to be living in a reality that is not the one we’re actually living in. “This is the golden age of America.” What do you make of that disjunction, like he’s in one place in America is in another? I think he believes his own [expletive]. And I think that is an important skeleton key at this point to understanding the Trump administration. Do you remember when Times Opinion, in fact, published, in the first administration, the famous incognito “we are the resistance inside the Trump administration.” Of course I remember. Yes. 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 sycophant way to Trump himself. They were serving under him. They understood themselves as serving partially him, partially the country. And so there was some kind of normal structure around him that was built to somewhat restrain him. 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 D.H.S., which I think is — The Department of Homeland Security — Which I think is very significant, actually, in terms of what you’re talking about. The people who were there were, in some ways, the people who were the most skeptical. 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? Paul Ryan, another senior Republican who did not owe his career to Donald Trump, who was 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 tell him things he wants to hear. You flatter him. I thought one of both funny and dark refrains of the speech was where he kept saying that it wasn’t his idea to name the Trump savings accounts, Trump accounts, “Their children’s brand-new Trump accounts. And I didn’t name it. I didn’t name it.” Oh, it wasn’t his idea to name the website TrumpRx. “I didn’t name that one either, by the way.” Oh, what, me? Me? You want to name it after me. 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.
