Ezra Klein

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 you tell him things he wants to hear, you flatter him.

I thought one of the both funny and dark refrains of the speech was,

was where he kept saying that, oh, it wasn't his idea to name the savings accounts Trump accounts.

It wasn't his idea to name the website TrumpRx.gov.

He didn't say this in the speech, but he said elsewhere, it wasn't his idea to put his name on the Trump-Kennedy Center.

People around him know one way that you curry favor with him is you name things after him and present it to him.

And he said, oh, what, me?

For 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.

It's hard enough to do that just as any president, but he is not going to be able to do it, and sure enough, he is not doing it.

I thought it was in a way, because here's what I think.

I think we do a bad job in the media, particularly the punditry side of the media covering the State of the Union, because we treat the State of the Union as if it is a...

hermetically sealed message.

That every American citizen or non-citizen for that matter, will live inside and form impressions based on.

The number of Americans who will sit through an entire State of the Union, to say nothing of sitting through the longest State of the Union delivered by a president to Congress, it's not nobody.

It's going to be in the millions of people.

But what the State of the Union ends up being, I think, is this moment when the president sends a single signal to the entire political system and to more of the country than he can normally speak to.