Ezra Klein

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.

about how he understands this moment in his presidency and in the country and what, if anything, he intends to do about it.

And the signal he sent last night was that he is living in a fantasy version of his own presidency, that he does not recognize any of the problems that Americans have with him, that he has no plan to do anything about it because he doesn't think there is any problem to solve.

And he sent that signal to the assembled members of, like, the idea that Republicans in Congress are cheering for this.

They're going to lose their jobs.

There's a very, very good chance, and I think it went up last night, that at the next State of the Union, Mike Johnson is not sitting behind him.

And so to me, we have this tendency to get really caught up in the showmanship of the State of the Union.

He had the hockey team out.

He kept bringing people out.

He kept presenting these medals.

That stuff is all going to be forgotten in 48 hours.

The State of the Union is going to be forgotten in 48 hours.

What will last is the strategic positioning.

the president chooses about how to solve the country's problems and how to solve his own problems.

And the positioning he chose was to see if lying about them will work.