Klein: What if Trump believes everything he’s telling us?

Published 1:30 am Friday, February 27, 2026

By Ezra Klein / The New York Times

Imagine you’re Donald Trump — or maybe you’re one of Donald Trump’s political advisers or kids or someone who doesn’t want to lose the midterms and have his crypto and AI trades investigated by congressional Democrats — and you’re planning out the State of the Union address.

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 to February 2025: Immigration is your strongest issue. All those weenie liberals looking at your approval ratings get it right there in Nate Silver’s poll tracker. Your net approval on immigration is around 10 percentage points. That means 10% more of the country approves of the job you’re doing than disapproves of it.

Fast-forward a year: Your net approval on immigration is minus 13.7 percentage points. Immigration has gone from your strongest issue to the reason the country dislikes you.

Or take the economy: In early February 2025, you were doing pretty well: plus 7 percentage points. But then came the tariffs. Now your net approval on the economy is minus 17.7 percentage points. And it gets worse: On trade, it is minus 23.1 percentage points. On inflation, it’s minus 30.8 percentage points.

So now it is State of the Union time. You have this rare opportunity to address the entire political system, the entire country. What do you do?

Do you tell the American people that you’re working on it, that you know there’s disruption and tumult, and it’s just going to take some time for all these policies to pay off? Do you tell the American people you hear them? That you’re going to change course? You’ve got a new plan?

Or do you tell the American people 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?

Tuesday night at the State of the Union, Trump decisively chose door No. 3. At more than one hour and 45 minutes, this was the longest State of the Union address in recorded history. Trump had a lot of time to make his case, and what he 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 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.

I’m not going to go through a fact-check of the president here. Trump is not a truthful man. People did not vote for him believing him to be a truthful man. They voted for him believing he could solve their problems.

What I have increasingly wondered over the last year isn’t whether Trump is being truthful with us but whether he is being truthful with himself; or whether the people around him are.

What does Trump know? What doesn’t he know? Because in his second term, he’s surrounded by yes men and sycophants. He presides over these Cabinet meetings where one agency head after another tells him how great he is doing, how unbelievably well his presidency is going.

Trump doesn’t read lengthy briefing books. We know that he doesn’t preside over normal policy processes.

Trump communicates on a social media site he owns and that is filled with people who like him. He throws himself parades. He has adopted the cliched authoritarian habit of forcing people to sit through his 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?

What if he believes everybody in that room — or at least the Republicans — like nodding and grinning and clapping for that long? What if he believes what is being said at his Cabinet meetings?

Because authoritarians always face the same problem: Everyone is afraid to tell them the bad news. The people around them can compete for their favor by flattering them and telling them good news; whether or not it’s true.

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.

So it is a big political problem for this president and for the Republican Party that Trump is lecturing the American people rather than listening to them. What Trump spent almost two hours saying with the State of the Union on Tuesday night must have been music to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s ears. Trump said he doesn’t have an answer to the problems facing his presidency; because there are no problems facing his presidency. Everything is going great.

And who around Trump will dare tell him otherwise?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2026.