David E. Sanger

It's the one thing that the polls show anger Americans of all stripes.

What was really striking about this was if you compare his claims to the way people feel, what they tell pollsters, there was an element of unreality to this.

Very unfortunate ruling.

Well, I actually thought, Michael, that compared to what he said last week when he was making specific accusations against the individual justices who had ruled against him, he was pretty moderate.

And he basically made the argument, I'm going to reimpose all of those tariffs under different authorities, and he moved on.

You know, that's a theme throughout his presidency.

This is not a president who wakes up in the morning and thinks about bills he's going to go push through Congress.

This is a president who wakes up in the morning and thinks about what authorities he has or can claim to have so that he can do things by executive order.

Well, you know, Michael, if you think that the first part was sort of delivered by the good Donald Trump, the one who seems sort of jovial, the tone changed as soon as he got into this middle section.

He immediately goes into setting up this kind of rhetorical motif in which he attacks Democrats, Democratic cities, and he begins to run through his now familiar list of ills he thinks Democrats have brought to the United States.

So he blamed the Somalis in Minnesota for fraud.

He went after sanctuary cities.

He defined his immigration effort as an effort to get the worst of the worst out.

And we're getting them the hell out of here fast.

We don't want them.

skimming over right away others with no criminal record who have been deported and, of course, the shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis.

But he had a deeper goal here, which was to set up the Democrats, who, of course, were sitting on their hands while the Republicans were applauding each one of these elections.

He asked everyone to stand if they agree with him, knowing that he would get the image of Republicans who are standing and Democrats who remain sitting.

So if you ever wanted a moment where you could sort of capture the division between the Trump Republicans and the Democrats, President Trump was creating it right there for the cameras.

And then eventually the Democrats take the bait.